Free the Mauritanians Under the Bondage of Slavery
3 min readBy Apioth Mayom Apioth
Slavery’s last fortification in Africa is Mauritania. According to a November 11, 2013, New York Times’ article by Adam Nossiter entitled ‘Mauritania Confronts Long Legacy of Slavery,’ close to 140,000 or 4% of the total population is in chattel slavery: meaning it is passed down from one generation to the next. Centuries after the slavery was abolished in the Americas and Europe, Mauritania is still holding a dirty secret, right in our backyard.
Two days ago, I had a heated conversation with a Berber man, and not much to my surprise, he refused to accept the very existence of slavery in Mauritania. Apparently, he is one of the masterminds working behind closed doors to keep the system of slavery tightly concealed from the outside world. News reports are cropping up everywhere and yet the Mauritanian government is perpetually remaining reluctant to bring those who are responsible for this practice forward. When the victims of this practice try to speak up they are threatened with deprivation of food, even death.
Great social revolutionaries like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X helped bring about social change in the face of the mighty Americans,and yet the Africans who are properly equipped with tools of social change are allowing evil to continue to prey on their people right before our very own eyes. We are not talking about slavery in far-flung places like India, we are talking about enslavement in Mauritania, a desert sprawling country up north of Senegal. This incident will go down in history as the greatest failure of our generation because after a wrestler has beaten his opponent, he doesn’t bother looking too deep into his scratch after the competition. He always rises above that scratch and say that is nothing compared to what I went through.
Black people went through thick and thin fighting institutionalized racism in the racialized Americas, Europe and colonial Africa. And just when we were about to reach the promised land, we started faltering and failed miserably to look beyond our borders and strike down our mud-headed neighbors who won’t allow others to be the masters of their own destinies. When you take away the dignity and self-respect of others, you make your life less worthy to live. The following Bantu’s saying tops them all: “A human is human because of other humans.” Our lives become worthwhile because of the shared intricacies we each contribute to our immediate societies.
In Colonial Africa, Europeans disregarded African’s sculpture as meaningless. In the later period, Pablo Picasso began incorporating African’s artwork into his masterpieces; a quintessential period that would skyrocketed him into the worldwide icon. The world would have probably never come face to face with the genre of the art that Picasso created, had it not been because of Benin’s sculptures. No matter how different we look, our diversity has a greater role to play in overcoming the multifaceted challenges humanity has been facing since the first day we started inhabiting our planet earth. Imagine, if the Asian people were the only human race inhabiting the earth, our world would be blanketed with the same monotonous thinking from here and there. Every human race has a fair share of its hidden treasures to contribute to the global audience.
References:
Nossiter, A. (2013, November 11). Mauritania Confronts Long Legacy of Slavery. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com
About Post Author
