Slavery still shackles Mauritania, 31 years after its abolition
Rigid caste system and ruling elite have enabled a centuries-old practice to
continue into the 21st century
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Monica Mark in Nouakchott
The Guardian, Tuesday 14 August 2012 16.03 BST
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Poverty in Nouakchott, Mauritania
A shanty town hut in Nouakchott, Mauritania. Activists estimate many of
Mauritania's 3.5 million population are willing chattels. Photograph: Georges
Gobet/AFP/Getty Images
Mbarka Mint Aheimed first met her father on the day he forced her into slavery.
The man who dragged her from her mother when she was aged five needed "a
drudge" in his wife's mansion. Since Aheimed was the result of him raping her
mother one of his slaves she was a natural choice, he told her.
"Because my mother was her husband's slave, his wife saw us all as personal
property. It was completely normal for her to do what she wanted with us,"
Aheimed would later tell anti-slave activists in Mauritania. Living in a tiny
hut that opened to the fierce heat of the orange dune-swept deserts, she worked
from dawn to dusk. For 15 years, she never had a day off. "The family lived in
a mansion but I was the only person who lifted a finger to work," she said.
Once she was old enough to start covering her head but forced, against
tradition, to leave her arms bare to carry out heavy lifting one of the
slaveowner's sons drove her miles into the desert and raped her. Later he would
only take her far enough to collect firewood for making tea on their return.
Aheimed's story isn't uncommon. In 1981 Mauritania became the last country to
abolish slavery, although it was only criminalised in 2007. Officials
repeatedly denied it existed and refused to talk to the Guardian about slavery.
But activists and former slaves spoke of a centuries-old practice, a relic of
the trans-Sahara slave trade when Arabic-speaking Moors raided African
villages, flourishing in remote outposts of this vast desert country.
A rigid caste system that favours "noble-borns", and zealous efforts to brand
the country an Arab republic, concentrates power and wealth among
overwhelmingly lighter-skinned Moors, leaving slave-descended darker-skinned
Moors and black Africans on the edges of society. Up to 800,000 people in a
nation of 3.5 million remain chattels, according to activists who routinely
document cases like Aheimed's.
But slavery is often harder to pin down. With almost half the population living
on less than $2 a day, many slaveowners work alongside their slaves.
Boubacar Messaoud grew up in a grey area between slavery and freedom, paid a
token salary in return for farming. "One day when we were about seven, the
slaveowner's son, whose name was also Boubacar, said I should be called
Boubacar abd [the black slave], so people didn't confuse us. That was when I
understood."
And many do not identify themselves as slaves. "When people talk of slavery,
they talk of chains, prisons, and threats. That was the slavery of those who
had known liberty the Africans who jumped into the sea rather than be
enslaved in America," said Messaoud, who founded the abolitionist organisation
SOS Slaves. "Today we have the slavery American plantation owners dreamed of.
Slaves believe their condition is necessary to get to paradise."
Thirteen years after slavery was abolished, SOS Slaves began holding secret
meetings beneath rugs to muffle voices, in moonlight on the flat rooftop of a
building in Nouakchott. Messaoud and his co-founder, a "noble" who had chosen a
slave as a seventh birthday gift, were harassed and imprisoned. Even today,
state agents lurking outside the building trail visitors afterwards.
Family members initially voiced opposition, too. "My mother believed she was
protecting me when she reminded me that I was a slave that I shouldn't forget
my place," Messaoud said.
Statistics paint a bleak and complicated picture. A judge told the Guardian
Mauritania is unlikely to improve on its record of one successful prosecution
anytime soon: "[Recently] three runaway children overheard me saying we had to
imprison their master. They immediately started crying in horror. They suddenly
changed their story, they said he always treated them well, fed them, sheltered
them. They wanted to go back with him."
Some former slaves like Malaka, 28, tended his owner's goats unsupervised for
weeks at a time in the desert. "I didn't want to leave because I was scared to
leave my family behind. And I was scared because I had heard about money, but I
had never seen it in my life," he said.
Escape is no guarantee of freedom. When Ahmeid went to her local magistrate,
her mother testified against her. Her uncle beat her savagely. After weeks
shuttling between sympathisers, she found herself crouching in a two-storey
building in Nouakchott late one evening as truckloads of policemen stormed an
anti-slavery organisation where she had been sheltering. The group's leader,
Birame Ould Abeid, and three others were jailed after publicly burning
religious texts that have been used to justify slavery, and calling for black
Moors and black Africans to unite.
With black Moors used as foot-soldiers in state crackdowns that target black
populations, mutual suspicion between the two populations is unlikely to fade
soon. But the routine arrests and beatings of abolitionists show how a ruling
elite, having woven slavery into the heart of political power in Mauritania,
are fearful of it unravelling, Nouakchott-based campaigner Toure Balla said.
"There are places where one family has 5,000 slaves that is 5,000 guaranteed
votes," said Balla, who attends a growing swell of weekly protests.
Abolitionists say Mauritania is only the tip of the iceberg: "Slavery exists in
all the countries of the Sahara desert. But it's only when the slave lifts
their head to speak that the crime is discovered," said Messaoud.
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