Selim Aga was eight years old when he was abducted from the Nuba Mountains of Sudan and sold into slavery and auctioned 2000 miles away in Egypt to the highest bidder. Born around 1827 Selim was killed in a war in Liberia in 1875. How then did this slave come to be lecturing to fashionable audiences in London and publishing in the Geographical Magazine? James McCarthy has pieced together the life of this remarkable man using Selim's own narrative and those of others such as Sir Richard Burton.