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It takes about two months to cross the Sahara Desert by camel from top to bottom, and there is no other way to go than by camel or airplane—no railroads, no auto roads, no roads of any kind. On the southern edge of the desert is a place called Timbuktu. When people want to describe a very long distance they often say, “from Kalamazoo to Timbuktu.” Kalamazoo is in Michigan in the United States and Timbuktu is in Africa. Timbuktu is the starting point for caravans going north across the Sahara to the countries along the Mediterraneanand it is the ending point for caravans coming from those countries.
The Sahara has no rain, but south of the Sahara is a part of Africa called the Sudan, which has plenty of rain. The Sudan means “the land of the Black People.”
When-I-was-a-boy we used to say that God made white people in the day and black people at night. Some say black people are simply white people tanned by the sun, which is so hot where they live that the tan never wears off.
The Sudan has one great river called the Niger. Like the Nile, that other great river in Africa beginning with an “N,” the Niger fertilizes the land through which it runs. The Niger empties into the great Gulf of Guinea, a name which even intelligent people sometimes mix with Guiana in South America. Along the edge of the Gulf of Guinea are little countries, all of which except one belong to countries in Europe.
This one country, at the corner of the Gulf of Guinea, is called Liberia. It is like a tiny United States; in fact, it was copied after the United States, but the president and all the people are colored, and the wayit came to be so is this:
When our country was first started, the white men wanted some one to do farming and other work for them. So pirates captured black people from the shores of Africa, brought them to the United States, and sold them asslaves, just as the pirates on the Mediterranean captured white people from ships on the sea and made slavesof them.
