Granny's story

25 August 2011 Last updated at 00:32 GMT Sandra Rowoldt Shell University of Cape Town Bisho Jarsa, trained as a domestic servant, went on to become a teacher

When Neville Alexander used to visit his maternal grandmother Bisho Jarsa as a boy, he never suspected the extraordinary story of how she had come from Ethiopia to the South African city of Port Elizabeth.

Bisho was one of a group of Ethiopian slaves freed by a British warship in 1888 off the coast of Yemen, then taken round the African coast and placed in the care of missionaries in South Africa.

"We were overawed in her presence and by the way she would mumble to herself in this language none of us understood," recalls Mr Alexander, now 74.

This was Ethiopia's Oromo language, Bisho's mother tongue, which she reverted to as she grew older.

Mr Alexander, who was a political prisoner in the 1960s, sharing Robben Island with Nelson Mandela, is today one of South Africa's most eminent educationists.

He remembers his younger siblings asking their mother, Dimbiti: "What's Ma talking about... what's the matter with her? What's she saying?"

Their mother would respond: "Don't worry about Ma... she's just talking to God."

When he was in his late teens, his mother told him about his Ethiopian origins but Mr Alexander thinks even she may not have known all the details, which he only discovered when he was in his fifties.

He found out that the freed Ethiopians had all been interviewed on their arrival in South Africa.

The story began on 16 September 1888, when Commander Charles E Gissing, aboard the British gunship HMS Osprey, intercepted three dhows carrying Ethiopians to the slave markets in the Arabian port of Jeddah.

Sold for maize

Commander Gissing's mission was part of British attempts to end the slave trade - a trade that London had supported until 1807, when it was abolished across the British Empire.

On their arrival in Yemen, the children were looked after by local families and missionaries

All the 204 slaves freed by Commander Gissing were from the Oromo ethnic group and most were children.

The Oromo, despite being the most populous of all Ethiopian groups, had long been dominated by the country's Amhara and Tigrayan elites and were regularly used as slaves.

Emperor Menelik II, who has been described as Ethiopia's "greatest slave entrepreneur", taxed the trade to pay for guns and ammunition as he battled for control of the whole country, which he ruled from 1889 to 1913.

Bisho Jarsa was among the 183 children found on the dhows.

She had been orphaned with her two brothers, as a result of the drought and disease that swept through Ethiopia in 1887, and left in the care of one of her father's slaves.

But the continuing threat of starvation resulted in Bisho being sold to slave merchants for a small quantity of maize.

After a journey of six weeks, she reached the Red Sea, where she was put on board one of the Jeddah-bound dhows intercepted by HMS Osprey.

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The missionaries recorded detailed histories of the former slaves, educated them and baptised them into the Christian faith”

End Quote Her first memory of the British was the sound of automatic gunfire blasting into the sails and rigging of the slave dhow while she huddled below deck with the other Oromo children.

They all fully expected to be eaten as this is what the Arab slave traders had told them would happen if they were captured by the British.

But Commander Gissing took the Oromo to Aden, where the British authorities had to decide what to do with the former slaves.

The Muslim children were adopted by local families. The remaining children were placed in the care of a mission of the Free Church of Scotland - but the harsh climate took its toll and by the end of the year 11 had died.

The missionaries sought an alternative home for them, eventually settling on another of the Church's missions, the Lovedale Institution in South Africa's Eastern Cape - on the other side of the continent.

Bisho and the rest of the children reached Lovedale on 21 August 1890.

The missionaries recorded detailed histories of the former slaves, educated them and baptised them into the Christian faith.

Mandela fascinated Continue reading the main story

Her real liberation was not the British warship but the education she later received in South Africa”

End Quote Neville Alexander Life was tough here too, however, and by 1903, at least another 18 of the children had died.

In that year, the Lovedale authorities asked the survivors whether they would like to return to Ethiopia.

Some opted to do so, but it was only after a protracted process, involving the intervention of German advisers to Emperor Menelik, that 17 former slaves sailed back to Ethiopia in 1909.

The rest had by this time married or found careers and opted to stay in South Africa.

Bisho was trained for domestic service, but she must have shown signs of special talent, because she was one of only two of the Oromo girls who went on to train as a teacher.

In 1902 she left Lovedale and found a position at a school in Cradock, then in 1911 she married Frederick Scheepers, a minister in the church.

Frederick and Bisho Jarsa had a daughter, Dimbiti. Dimbiti married David Alexander, a carpenter, and one of their children, born on 22 October 1936, was Neville Alexander.

By the 1950s and 60s he was a well-known political activist, who helped found the short-lived National Liberation Front.

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If you know these people - the freed slaves who decided to return home in 1909 - please use the form below to let us know:

Aguchello Chabani Agude Bulcha Amanu Figgo Baki Malaka Berille Boko Grant Dinkitu Boensa Fayesse Gemo Fayissa Umbe Galgal Dikko Galgalli Shangalla Gamaches Garba Gutama Tarafo Hawe Sukute Liban Bultum Nagaro Chali Nuro Chabse Rufo Gangilla Tolassa WayessaHe was arrested and from 1964 until 1974 was jailed in the bleak prison on Robben Island.

His fellow prisoners, Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, were fascinated by his part-Ethiopian origins but at the time, he was not aware that his grandmother had been captured as a slave and so they could not draw any comparisons with their own fight against oppression.

So what did he feel when he found out how is grandmother had ended up in South Africa?

"It reinforced my sense of being an African in a fundamental way," he told the BBC.

Under apartheid, his family was classified as Coloured, or mixed-race, rather than African.

"We always struggled against this nomenclature," he said.

He also noted that it explained why he had often been mistaken for an Ethiopian during his travels.

The strongest parallel he can draw between his life and that of his grandmother is the role of schooling.

"Her real liberation was not the British warship but the education she later received in South Africa," he said.

"Equally, while on Robben Island, we turned it into a university and ensured that all the prisoners learned to read and write, to prepare them for their future lives."

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Story of our rooms

12 April 2011 Last updated at 02:04 GMT By Megan Lane BBC News Magazine How many rooms in your home? This has been a census question in the UK since 1871. But what does the number and type of rooms say about how houses have evolved over the centuries?

In medieval times, many Europeans cooked, ate, slept and socialised in one big room. By the start of the 21st Century, the average British home had 5.34 rooms, according to 2001 Census figures. Whether this has gone up or down will become clear when 2011's UK census forms are analysed.

Centuries ago, there was no such thing as a kitchen, a living room or a bedroom for anyone but the rich. There was a central hearth for warmth and to cook food, with straw-filled pallets laid on the floor for sleeping.

Over time, walls went up to divide the home into specialised areas - new rooms evolved, partly down to technology, but also to our changing attitudes to privacy, cleanliness and class.

Today, down the walls come again. Central heating and extractor fans mean we no longer need walls to keep heat in and cooking smells out.

And one room is heading for extinction, or at least being indistinguishable, says Lucy Worsley, curator of Historic Royal Palaces - the living room.

"We've passed the peak of the proliferation and specialisation of rooms which happened in the Victorian age: billiard rooms, morning rooms, parlours, studies. It was a use of space that's no longer affordable.

"The trend now is like a return to medieval living. I live in an open-plan flat with one central space. I use it for cooking, for eating, for watching TV - the modern equivalent of storytelling by the fire - and guests sleep on my sofa."

Aristocrats had living rooms in the Tudor period. Middling people started to get them in the 17th Century, and in the 18th Century everybody aspired to having a room purely for best. The concept of taste had arrived.

Tours of stately houses took off, and architects such as Robert Adam put out lavish catalogues of clocks and ceiling roses for the mass market.

"The living room only developed in its own right when people have the cash to splash, the leisure time to invest in a space for sitting around," says Worsley. "It's like a stage where you perform your life for the benefit of your visitors."

Even in Victorian workers' cottages, the inhabitants added decorative touches like fringing, net curtains and ceramic knick-knacks to the one room in which they cooked, ate, worked and socialised.

"You see an awful lot of keeping up with the Joneses in living rooms, whether through soft furnishings in the 1600s, new means of heating and lighting - gas and electricity - for 19th Century trendsetters, or the gadgets of today."

A room once shared with children and servants

Once communal, today the bedroom is a private retreat.

"In medieval times, your main concerns were to be warm and safe, so it was delightful to be in with other people. Since then we've seen a trend toward privacy, which started with the rise of reading," says Worsley.

"In Tudor houses we get funny little rooms called closets off the bedrooms, for praying, reading and finding solitude.

"The closet died out in English houses, but it went across the Atlantic with the Pilgrim Fathers. Today, American houses still have closets - private rooms for storing valuables. Carrie, in Sex and the City, kept her shoes in her closet, with her hopes, her dreams. That's a very Tudor thing to do."

For cooking, for eating, for socialising

Once purely functional, the kitchen has been changed into a social space.

In medieval times, it was the central hearth, the heart of the home.

"Then, in the 17th Century, you get this new concept of disgust," says Worsley.

"Once there was a slight surplus of food available, people began to turn their noses up at certain foods and certain smells."

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Early censuses didn't count people: they counted hearths, as the cooking fire was the central point of a home”

End Quote Lucy Worsley So kitchens were moved away from living areas, to keep the smell of cooking away from the noses of diners.

Grand Georgian houses had the space to shift the kitchen into a separate wing. In Victorian cities, space was at a premium and kitchens were pushed down into dingy basements.

"It's in the 20th Century that it returns to being a family space. The invention of the extractor fan is very important, it allows the kitchen and dining room to be one with clean air," says Worsley.

"And the 1980s sees the rise of the foodie - someone who loves food and cooking, and who finds the smell of bread baking, or chicken roasting, a big part of being at home.

"For others, the kitchen is meaningless - it's a place for eating the takeaway you ordered online. It has become another place to show off."

Bathing is now more for meditation than hygiene

The youngest room in the house, it has only become a separate room in the past 100 years.

"People didn't used to think that going to the loo was a private matter. Samuel Pepys, in 17th Century London, had a 'closed stool' - a velvet-covered seat that stood over your chamber pot - that he was very proud of. He kept his in his drawing room," says Worsley.

At Hampton Court, built in Tudor times, there is a communal toilet called "the great house of easement", where 14 people could relieve themselves at the same time.

"It's not the technology that set the pace - the flushing toilet was invented in Elizabethan times, but it didn't really catch on for centuries," says Worsley.

In part this was because of the cheapness of labour - why plumb in water when a servant could take away your full chamber pot?

Our attitudes to cleanliness changed over time too. Once it was feared that bathing allowed germs to enter the skin; and the Victorians frowned on baths as rather degenerate.

Cleanliness became glamorous

"It really only became positive to wallow in a bath in the 1920s thanks to Hollywood, when people saw film stars drinking cocktails and talking on the telephone in a bubble bath," says Worsley.

And that set the tone for aspirational bathrooms ever since.

"Today the bathroom has the quality of the closet. People meditate in the bath. It's the one room in the house with a lock on the door. The one room you can be undisturbed by the rest of the family, and have a solitary moment."

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Short story prize goes to Doerr

8 April 2011 Last updated at 21:34 GMT Doerr recently won The Story Prize in the USA, for Memory Wall US writer Anthony Doerr has been named the winner of this year's Short Story Award for The Deep, scooping the £30,000 prize.

Judge Melvyn Bragg called the story, which is set in Detroit in the early 20th century, "an outstanding work of fiction".

The writer beat five other authors to the title, including Man Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel.

The winner was announced at an awards dinner in Oxford.

"I've read this story many times and still find it profoundly moving," Bragg said.

Roshi Fernando, Yiyun Li, Will Cohu, Gerard Woodward and Mantel will all receive £500 for making the shortlist.

This is the second time in as many months that Doerr has been awarded a prize for fiction.

He recently won The Story Prize in the USA, for Memory Wall, his second collection of short stories.

The Sunday Times Short Story Award was launched last year to honour the success of short-fiction writers.

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'Lucy' story put on firm footing

10 February 2011 Last updated at 19:00 GMT By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News The fossil is about 3.2 million years old New fossil evidence seems to confirm that a key ancestor of ours could walk upright consistently - one of the major advances in human evolution.

The evidence comes in the form of a 3.2 million-year-old bone that was found at Hadar, Ethiopia.

Its shape indicates the diminutive, human-like species Australopithecus afarensis had arches in its feet.

Arched feet, the discovery team tells the journal Science, are critical for walking the way modern humans do.

"[The bone] gives a glimpse of foot anatomy and function," explained William Kimbel, director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, US.

"It is the fourth metatarsal bone, which resides on the outside of the middle part of your foot, and which helps support the well-developed arches of the foot that we see in the soles of modern human feet.

"The bone that was recovered from the Hadar site has all the hallmarks of the form and function of the modern human foot," he told the BBC.

Arch types

Palaeo-scientists knew A. afarensis spent some of its time standing tall; that much has been clear since 1974 when they first examined a skeleton of the species, famously dubbed "Lucy", also found near the village of Hadar in the Ethiopian rift valley.

The area around Hadar continues to reveal remarkable information about human evolution

But the absence of important foot bones in all of the specimens uncovered to date has made it difficult for researchers to understand precisely how much time Lucy and her kin spent on their feet, as opposed to moving through the branches of trees.

Human feet are very different from those of other primates. They have two arches, longitudinal and transverse.

These arches comprise the mid-foot bones, and are supported by muscles in the soles of the feet.

This construction enables the feet to perform two critical functions in walking. One is to act as a rigid lever that can propel the body forwards; the other is to act as a shock absorber as the feet touch the ground at the end of a stride.

In our modern ape cousins, the feet are more flexible, and sport highly mobile large toes that are important for gripping branches as the animals traverse the tree tops.

Professor Kimbel and colleagues tell Science journal that the feet of A. afarensis' say a lot about the way it lived.

The position of the fourth metatarsal in a human foot

It would have been able to move across the landscape much more easily and much more quickly, potentially opening up broader and more abundant supplies of food, they say.

"Lucy's spine has the double curve that our own spine does," Professor Kimbel said.

"Her hips functioned much as human hips do in providing balance to the body with each step, which in a biped of course means that you're actually standing on only one leg at a time during striding.

"The knees likewise in Lucy's species are drawn underneath the body such that the thighbone, or femur, angles inwards to the knees from the hip-joints - as in humans.

"And now we can say that the foot, too, joins these other anatomical regions in pointing towards a fundamentally human-like form of locomotion in this ancient human ancestor."

A. afarensis is thought to have existed between about 2.9 million and 3.7 million years ago, and the Hadar area has yielded hundreds of fossil specimens from the species.

Long road

Commenting on the latest research, Professor Chris Stringer, a palaeoanthropologist at London's Natural History Museum, said scientists were gradually filling in the detail of this creature's position in the human origins story.

An artist's impression of what Lucy might have looked like

"Bipedalism in Lucy is established, but there has been an issue about how much like our own that bipedalism was," he told BBC News.

"Was it a more waddling gait or something more developed?

"And certainly there's evidence in the upper body that the Australopithecines still seemed to have climbing adaptations - so, the hand bones are still quite strongly curved and their arms suggest they're still spending time in the trees.

"If you are on the ground all the time, you need to find shelter at night and you are in a position to move out into open countryside, which has implications for new resources - scavenging and meat-eating, for example.

"If the Australopithecines were on that road, they were only at the very, very beginning of it."

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

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