Sa´id agrees that the employment situation of former slaves is dire, and he tells Bakhïta that he thinks the government should take responsibility for them and give every manumitted slave a plot of land from royal estates and the necessary machinery and tools. After all, he says, the government used them to cultivate a lot of land, year after year, and also conscripted many soldiers out of the Sudan. Sa´id says he has even heard that the Ottoman sultan offered such a gesture to the Sudanese, from whose agricultural effort the empire profited.

Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Coloni…, loc. 683