voice from the field

In May, Boubacar Messaoud, president of SOS Esclaves received the 2009 Anti-Slavery International award on behalf of his organisation. Here he explains the difficulties he and his organisation face in combating slavery in Mauritania, a country where 600,000 people one fifth of the population remain enslaved.

“Paradise is found at the feet of the master”. I was taught this phrase as a child in Mauritania by my Marabout (Koranic teacher) and it had particular significance to me because I was born a slave.
 
To be a slave in Mauritania means to be ‘owned’ by your master. Slaves are usually denied an education, forbidden from owning land or inheriting property. Slaves even have to ask their master’s permission to get married. All your possessions belong to the master, who even has the power to give away your children if he sees fit.
 
Slavery has existed in my home country for hundreds of years. Slaves today are the descendants of black Africans captured during raids by the Moors, an Arab-Berber people, who give their name to Mauritania and still rule the country today.
 
Over the centuries, the slaves and their descendants forgot their African traditions and began to speak Arabic, the language of their masters. They developed into a distinct slave caste, the ‘Haratine’ and continue to be born into a life of slavery.
 
The Haratine now make up around 40 per cent of the population. Black Africans and Moors make up the rest of the population in equal measure. Yet, slavery in Mauritania is more than just about colour and while the Haratine may be black they are now culturally Arabic. Indeed we are also referred to as Black Moors.
 
Slaves in Mauritania are not shackled by chains but are controlled by a mixture of economic dependency and indoctrination through false teachings of Islam.
 
All slaves are told that to be a good Muslim they must dutifully serve their master. Another Marabout told me once that he had a dream where he had met the spirit of a dead slave in heaven. The spirit was half on fire and half frozen and told the Marabout that this was his eternal punishment for respecting God more than his master.
 
I know that Islam does not condone slavery and it is impossible to be devout and to enslave others. Yet the ‘Good Muslim’ argument retains a powerful controlling effect.
 
Slavery has become completely normal in Mauritania. Slaves only know their masters and are resigned to their situation. Their masters believe it is their God given right to own slaves, though of course they understand the economic benefits from profiting from the labour of their slaves.
 
Slavery would have been my fate too but I was lucky. When I was only seven years old, the French head teacher at my local school took pity on me when he saw me crying outside the school gates and shamed my master into letting me attend his classes.
 
Through scholarships I was able to progress to university, even study abroad and train as an architect. Yet despite my successes in the eyes of most people I remained a slave.
 
In 1995 I co-founded SOS Esclaves to try and help end slavery once and for all. After many years trying to help slaves during a climate of official denial that the problem even existed, and including another spell in prison, we finally achieved success when the first democratically elected government passed a law to criminalise slavery in 2007.
 
However, the military coup of last August has ended the short spell of progress. The issue of slavery finds itself again suppressed.

Only this April, at a peaceful I was targeted by the police and beaten unconscious. The doctor who treated me said I was lucky to be alive.

Family and friends tell me that now I am 64 I should retire, but what else can I do? I fight slavery to honour my mother and my aunts and all those who went before me.

There is nothing that the masters can offer us now that can replace our dignity and freedom. It is time everyone in Mauritania was finally free.