EA WorldView – Home – Mauritania Feature: A Country Shackled by Slavery? Mark

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 Aheimeds.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 slaveowners son, whose name was also Boubacar, said I should be called Boubacar abd [the black slave], so people didnt 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.

via EA WorldView – Home – Mauritania Feature: A Country Shackled by Slavery? Mark.