If indeed Africans were to visit a small village in one of our wild and unvisited regions, and should take up their abode there for a few days, for what might seem to the people if not an inadequate, at all events a mysterious, reason, the probability is that they would have too much rather than too little of the company of the natives.
-Visit to the Great Oasis of the Libyan Desert, G.A. Hoskins, 1837
Hoskins was dismayed during his visit to Dush at the bottom end of Egypt’s Kharga Oasis, site of a village and the southermost Saharan Roman fort, that the inhabitants displayed little interest in his presence, saying that on the contrary, if an African had visited some remote English shire, its farmers would undoubtedly have invited him in for a cup of tea.
But it all changed suddenly in his next chapter, with the subtitle “Quarrel with the Natives”, a ”slight affair which might have ended seriously” he called it, with guns drawn and a hasty departure by camel, over the price of a chicken, a matter of tuppence. When my cousin and I went to Dush we found it a forlorn place, the ruined fort on a hill looking across the sand to Sudan and no sign of a village. I remember thinking at the time, If this had been the post of some Roman legionnaire, then God have pity on him.