Mbarka Mint Essatim (front right, standing), with her husband and children at their home on the outskirts of Nouakchott, Mauritania. Essatim was saved from slavery by her husband, who worked as her former owner's driver. Erin Conway-Smith GlobalPost ~
NOAUKCHOTT, Mauritania — Mbarka Mint Essatim wondered why the other girls didn’t have to scrub the dishes or sweep the floors clean of Sahara sand.
At family meals, she waited until the others were finished, and then ate the leftovers alone. If she was slow with the washing up, they beat her. She slept on a mat outside the house, and didn’t go to school.
This was the only life Essatim knew. The family, part of Mauritania’s Arab-Berber minority known as “White Moors," would tell people that she was their child. But as Essatim grew older, her "uncle" began touching her inappropriately.
“I was very confused,” she remembers, her eyes stuck in a thousand-yard stare. “I didn’t understand what I meant to him.”
One day, the man’s driver struck up a conversation with her. “He asked me, ‘What is your relationship with these Moors?’" Essatim recalls. "I said, this is the only family I know. And then he understood that I was a slave.”
In Mauritania, a vast, desert country straddling sub-Saharan Africa and the continent’s Arab north, anywhere from 4 to 20 percent of the population are slaves. There are few reliable statistics, so the exact figures are unclear. But even the lowest estimate makes Mauritania the country with the highest percentage of slaves in the world.
More from GlobalPost: Fishing for trouble in Mauritania
While slaves here aren’t physically chained, many remain imprisoned by deep psychological bonds, as well as crippling poverty. Some consider it a sacred duty to serve their masters, tending to the livestock or doing the housework with no pay. Others, like Essatim, grow up knowing nothing else. Anti-slavery activists say that freeing their minds is one of the toughest challenges.
Boubacar Messaoud, who has been fighting the problem for decades with his group SOS Slaves, compares slavery in Mauritania to feudalism, with slaves like serfs toiling their master's land.
Others describe it as a caste system. Today's slaves, such as Essatim, are descendants of darker-skinned ancestors enslaved centuries ago by the lighter-skinned White Moors.
“Slavery has existed for centuries,” Messaoud says. “People say they are slaves by the will of God.”
The extent of the problem is denied by Mauritania’s government, and even by many Mauritanians. “People don’t recognize slavery,” he says. “Even the slaves deny the existence of their own slavery.”
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Replies
Reason for slavery is greed.Slavery is oppression of the weak and vulnerable. Victims of slavery can do little to help themselves.Its those that are free and do nothing to stop these practice. The guilty is the people that sit by and let it happen. Where are the news articles condemning the leaders of government s for allowing this to continue. The shame is on free people. Free the minds of those that run the world and world systems.
We have to start by freeing our own minds. We can't expect governments to act if we ourselves are unwilling to act.
Enslaved people do a lot to free themselves, and I agree that it is the responsibility of free people to help free the others. But this is unlikely to happen while our minds are still enslaved.
People in Africa, uin the United States and the Caribbean, and throughout the Americas, freed themselves. Check out my blog post: African People's Self-Liberation. See also: my blog post on the Haitian Revolution. Unfortunately, some of the links are no longer live.
Harriet Tubman said, "I freed a thousand people, I could have freed a thousand more if only they had known they were slaves".
This is the same problem we have in our communities. People who don't realise they are still enslaved. Our minds were enslaved for hundreds of years, and we are still living with the consequences of this.