Pyramids by the Nile. Egypt? No, Sudan.

Abdrahman smiled at me. “Come,” he said, and hurried off behind a mud-and-stick shed. There, regally posed, with a golden coat, stood Abrusa.

Abdrahman lowered the camel to his knees and pointed to me. “You ride,” he said, waving a wooden switch in my face. With little choice I threw a leg over the great beast — and remembering Lawrence of Arabia — wrapped my left knee around the saddle horn and hooked my instep behind my other knee. Abdrahman snapped his switch, and Abrusa lurched to his feet. Suddenly we were tearing across the desert.

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500 Years Later

Britain's First Afro-Brit Community

Walk out of Aldgate Tube and stroll around Whitechapel Road in east London today, and you'll experience the heady sights, smells and sounds of the temples, mosques and curry houses of Brick Lane - so typical of modern multicultural Britain.

Most of us tend to think that black people came to Britain after the war - Caribbeans on the Empire Windrush in 1948, Bangladeshis after the 1971 war and Ugandan Asians after Idi Amin's expulsion in 1972.

But, back in Shakespeare's day, you could have met people from west Africa and even Bengal in the same London streets.



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