Nicholas Said

Nicholas Said (about 1836 – 1882) was a Kanuri traveller, translator, soldier and author, born Mohammed Ali ben Said in Kukawa in the Bornu Empire, the son of the celebrated general Barca Gana. Enslaved as a boy and carried across the Sahara, he served Ottoman masters and then a Russian prince, was baptised a Christian at Riga in 1855, emigrated to the United States, fought as a sergeant in the 55th Massachusetts Infantry in the Civil War, and wrote an autobiography of his life on five continents. ^{1 2}

He was born in Kukawa (Kouka), near Lake Chad, to Barca Gana — a general of gigantic strength who served King Muhammad al-Amin al-Kanemi and whose feats against the Sokoto Caliphate the traveller Dixon Denham witnessed — and to Dalia, a Mandara woman, who raised him. As a boy of about twelve he saw the German researcher Heinrich Barth arrive in Kukawa with a caravan from Fezzan, and ran from him, having heard that white men were cannibals. Captured by Tuaregs — the French article dates the capture to 1851 — he was sold to a Kanembu merchant of Katsina, carried across the Sahara to Murzuq and then to Tripoli, and travelled with one of his masters to Mecca on pilgrimage before being sold on, several times, among Ottoman aristocrats, including the vizier Mustafa Reshid Pasha. ^{1 2}

The Russian ambassador at Constantinople, Prince Alexander Menshikov, bought him in order to free him, and in Russia, where slavery had been abolished, he was free on arrival. He learned Russian in the household of Prince Nikolai Trubetskoy, and there, on 31 October 1855, he was baptised at Riga, changed his name from Mohammed Ali to Nicholas, and became an Orthodox Christian. The English article, following his autobiography, likewise records his conversion from Islam to Christianity in Riga. He went on to learn English, German, Italian and French, and by the time of his memoirs could report familiarity or fluency in Kanuri, Mandara, Arabic, Turkish, Russian, German, Italian and French, with some Armenian. ^{1 2}

He reached the United States in 1860 and in 1863 enlisted in the 55th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry — the French article also names the 54th — rising to sergeant in the Union Army, in which he served until 1865. Unlike most African Americans in that army, neither he nor any ancestor of his had been enslaved in the United States: he had immigrated voluntarily and volunteered to fight. Near the end of the war he asked to be attached to the Hospital Department so that he could study medicine. A photograph of him in his uniform survives. ^{1 2}

An account of 1867 has him married to an American woman; he settled at St. Stephens, Alabama, where he wrote his memoirs — an autobiography that decried the aggression of Usman dan Fodio against his Bornu homeland and told of his pilgrimage, his travels and his conversion. Because he was living in the Reconstruction-era South, he did not disclose his Union service in them. His later life is unclear; one account has him dying in Brownsville, Tennessee, in 1882, and the French article marks both the year and the place as uncertain. ^{1 2}

Said's life crosses two faiths, and the museum records the itinerary rather than flattening it. He was born and raised a Muslim in Bornu and performed the pilgrimage to Mecca as a young enslaved man. Two independent articles then record the same turning point from different sources: baptised at Riga in 1855, he took a Christian name and lived thereafter as an Orthodox Christian — in Russia, in America and in his own autobiography, which presents the conversion in his own words. His recorded affiliation is therefore Christian, on the documented evidence of his baptism and his later life, with his Muslim birth and upbringing preserved here. ^{1 2}