Where 100,000 live as slaves

Press, 31 January 1984, Page 19

Where 100,000 live as slaves

The last bastion of traditional slavery in Africa has opened its doors to a team of United Nations investigators. The Islamic state of Mauritania, a million square kilometres of mostly sand, has allowed the mission in after repeated condemnations of the survival of slavery had been made to the United Nations’ Commission on Human Rights. The military government’s spirit of co-operation did not extend to the media. Journalists who applied to cover the visit were not granted visas.

Slavery was officially abolished in 1960 when Mauritania, an empty and inhospitable chunk of the Sahara on the West African coast, gained independence from France. A second decree declaring that all Mauritanians were equal before the law was made in 1980.

However, a visit by representatives of the 145-year-old Anti-Slav-ery Society in the same year established that despite the pious declarations, the practice had never been dismantled.

The London-based society’s report to the United Nations’ working group on slavery resulted in the Mauritania Government extending an invitation to its members to come and have another look.

Dr Mark Bossuyt, a United Nations expert on slavery, set off to the ramshackle Mauritanian capital of Nouakchott on the Atlan-

tic coast accompanied by the society’s director, Peter Davies. The society’s latest estimates calculate there are at least 100,000 full slaves in the country, plus another 300,000 who are part or freed slaves. Most were born into bondage and the practice of selling children still goes on. Slaves are employed as servants in towns and labourers in the country. Their only pay is board

and lodging. The masters’ control over full slaves extends to the right to choose marriage partners. One of the problems is that the practice is rooted in the region’s history. The dominant, elite, white Moors who controlled the region until the French colonised it in 1900, use an idiosyncratic interpretation of Koranic law to justify holding defeated tribes and their successors in bondage. A crucial obstacle to emancipa-

tion is that Mauritania, which relies on iron-ore, fishing, and a little agriculture for its income, is short of resources to bring it about, even if it really wanted to.

Class rather than wealth divides the castes and some masters are little better off than their slaves. In a dignified address to the United Nations Sub-commission on Prevention and Protection of Minorities in 1981, the Government’s representative, Mohammed Quid Khnafer, said: “Speeches and fine principles enunciated in an air-conditioned hall have little effect on slavery. The grinding poverty which is known by under-developed countries like ours makes all talk about human liberty completely derisory.” There are also powerful political reasons for the Mauritanian Government’s reluctance to see the practice disappear. The Moorish ruling caste has been facing a mounting challenge to its authority from the black Africans who farm the country’s most fertile region along the banks of the Senegal River in the south. A census conducted in 1977 is believed to reveal (the results were suppressed) that the blacks and slave community are outstripping the Moors in numbers. An alliance between the two groups could spell the end of Moorish domination.— Copyright — London Observer