How slavery is flourishing in modern Africa

So great is our obsession with the slavery which took place centuries ago, that it is easy to forget that in Africa today the practice is still popular and widespread

The topic of slavery and the slave trade is appears all over the place these days and a day does not past without some new villainy of our white ancestors being discovered and brought to light. One aspect of slavery though is quite deliberately hidden and we avoid talking of it from a sense of delicacy. This is the undeniable fact that the continent where slavery now flourishes as never before is also the one where it has always been a very popular activity as far back as we can look. Nobody wishes to be reminded about slavery in Africa. That wicked white people took black slaves away from Africa is fine to talk about, but few want to be told that those slaves were sold to the white men by black African slave traders and that the ownership and sale of slaves in Africa was a vital part of the transatlantic trade. Even more unacceptable, is any mention of the fact that slavery is still to be found in Africa.

It is often claimed that there are now more slaves in the world than at any other time in human history. Estimated numbers exceed 46 million people enslaved in various ways. There is a slight problem with this idea, widely believed though it may be. This is that although there are indeed still slaves in the world, very few of them fall into the same category as chattel slaves, which is what most of us mean when we talk of slavery. Chattel slaves are mere possessions, owned by another human as though they were tables and chairs or dogs and cats. Many of the supposed slaves in the world today are rather victims of what is described as ‘Modern Slavery’. This does not mean, as one might be forgiven for supposing, chattel slaves in the modern world. It means instead people in a variety of categories which entail working under compulsion or unpleasant and degrading circumstances, which is a different matter entirely. In short, the problem is one of semantics. Before looking at what ‘modern slavery’ entails, one or two examples might enable readers to judge for themselves whether or not what this term encompasses is the same as, or even comparable with, the usual meaning of the word ‘slavery’.

     Imagine for a moment a boy begging on a street corner in London. He is from an Eastern European country. At the end of the day, a man collects him, takes a cut of the money which he has collected and then delivers him to the relatives with whom he is living. This is without doubt an undesirable and exploitative situation, but are we really justified in using the same world for this state of affairs as that which we applied to the women seized in Somalia in the nineteenth century sold to a harem of the Ottoman Empire? What of a young Vietnamese woman smuggled into Britain and provided with rough accommodation in a house divided up like a dormitory. She is sent to work in a nail bar and ends up working long hours, being paid less than the minimum wage. This too is described as ‘modern slavery’ but cannot in all honesty be compared with the slaves captured in Africa and transported to the plantations of the Caribbean.

     Modern slavery, which is without doubt a most awful business includes forced marriages, prostitution, begging, prison labour, conscription, forced labour and child labour. Clearly, these are none of them pleasant things, but most of us would draw a distinction between a young woman pressurised by a her family into an arranged marriage with an older man and the fate of a slave on a plantation in Georgia before the American Civil War. For this reason, we shall limit our examination of slavery in present-day Africa to the traditional notion of slavery, which is to say slavery by purchase or descent. Both types of slavery are still flourishing in Africa.

    Slavery by descent was of course the rule in many cultures. A baby born to a slave inherits automatically his or her mother’s status. The position is precisely similar to that of domestic animals. If I own a horse and the animal gives birth to a foal, then as a matter of course, the foal is also my possession. Although this is a distasteful subject to consider, slavery by descent is still going strong in some African countries; most notably Mauritania.

     Mauretania was at one time a French colonial possession. Although the French tried to stamp out slavery there, this was not possible, so attached were the people to the practice. It was simple enough to make an announcement and even to threaten terrible penalties for those who kept slaves or engaged in the trading of them, but enforcing such edicts was another matter entirely. This was particularly so in a large territory like Mauretania, which covers some 800 thousand square miles; roughly five times the area of Great Britain. The slavery which lingers on to this day in Mauritania is a legacy of the North African slave trade, in which Arabs and Berbers carried black African slaves from their homes and took them to the Barbary states which fringed the Mediterranean. It is for this reason still based today on ethnic and religious grounds.

     There are two main ethnic groups in Mauretania; namely the Berbers and those of mixed Berber and Arab descent, who constitute about 30 per cent of the population, and the indigenous, black Africans. The Berbers refer to themselves as white and tend to regard themselves as an elite. Historically, they owned slaves belonging to the Haritine ethnic group, who today make up about 40 per cent of the people in the country. It is members of this group who are still held as slaves by many Berber families.

    Mauretania was the last country in the world to outlaw slavery, which was done by presidential decree in 1981. This move was welcomed, but there was a catch. Although slavery had definitely been forbidden, no laws relating to criminal prosecution were passed. This meant that those holding slaves, as they had done for centuries, faced no legal sanctions. So it was that for the half-century after its supposed abolition, slavery continues in Mauretania much as it has for the last thousand years or so. Just to be clear, this is chattel slavery, the Haritine slaves are born into slavery and are the possessions of their owners. Women can be raped by the men who own them and their babies then became slaves in turn. It is impossible to say how many slaves there are in the country, because it is in nobody’s particular interest to find out. A rough estimate is that two per cent of the population of Mauretania, perhaps 90,000 people, are still chattel slaves. Many more are held in bondage of one kind or another.

     In Mauretania we are able to see the remnants of the old Arab and Berber slave trade, dating back to the time when caravans of black Africans were marched north across the desert to the territories on the Mediterranean coast. In another part of Africa though, there is an even older type of slavery, one where one group of black Africans have enslaved another. Thousands of years ago, the Bantus left their homeland in West Africa and spread out, colonising the entire continent. As they did so, between four and a half and two thousand years ago, they took over the rain forest in which dwelt the pygmies.

     The Bantu were both workers in iron and also agriculturalists. This meant that as they occupied an area, they chopped down trees, ploughed the land and planted crops. Because they had no means of fertilising fields once a crop had been grown and so extracted the nutrients from the soil, their practice was simply to move on to a new area and hack down more forest to create another stretch of arable land. The pygmies, by contrast, were hunter-gatherers. They roamed a large part of the rain forest, catching what animals they were able and also collecting roots and berries. The destruction of their habitat was catastrophic for them. The result of this clash of cultures was grimly inevitable. The pygmies were deprived of their land and many were enslaved, a situation which exists to this day.

     In the Republic of the Congo, which was once the heartland of the pygmies’ territory, Bantu now make up between 90 and 98 per cent of the population. The few remaining pygmies are, according to one Congolese source, ‘treated like pets’. This is simply another way of indicating that the pygmies are subject to chattel slavery; that they are regarded as being owned by another person. This is ‘slavery by descent’, just like that practiced in Mauretania. Bantu families own families of pygmies who have served their own families for generations. They are expected to work for their owners but are not paid wages. Instead, they are provided with cigarettes or second-hand clothing. The Bantu describe this arrangement as a ‘time-honoured tradition’ and there is no reason to suppose that they are cruel to their pygmies, nor do they mistreat them at all. They are even regarded with some affection, but this does not alter the essential nature of the relationship between the two parties. Slavery may exist even without any ill-treatment, even if the slaves are housed well and have enough to eat.  Which means of course that even without the use of chains and beating, the condition of the pygmies in the Congo and the Haritine in Mauretania amounts without any doubt at all to slavery.

     Nor are these two countries the only ones in Africa where slavery is still to be found. There is a very longstanding tradition in North Africa of the trade in black African slaves; one which dates back thousands of years. Regrettably, this has made a return in recent years, since the overthrow of the Libyan dictator Muammar Ghaddafi.

     The so-called ‘Arab Spring’ saw the fall of governments in Tunisia and Egypt. It resulted to in the overthrow of the Colonel Ghaddafi; for over 40 years the undisputed ruler of Libya. The nation then descended into chaos from which it has not wholly recovered. In the disorder of the civil war which followed Ghaddafi’s overthrow and murder, Libya became the favoured staging post for those from sub-Saharan Africa seeking to reach Europe. This was a profitable business for the warlords and people-smugglers who were able to exploit the desperation of migrants who had crossed the Sahara Desert. Many were indeed transported across the Mediterranean in small boast, but others, those without sufficient money to pay the extortionate fares being charged, found themselves penniless and alone in a foreign country where they did not speak the language. Their helplessness was exploited by unscrupulous Libyans and some found themselves being auctioned off in slave markets and sold to farmers as labourers.

     When film emerged of young men from Niger being sold off to the highest bidder for farm workers, the Chair of the African Union, President Alpha Conde of Guinea, expressed his outrage and demanded that the world took action to halt such outrageous spectacles. The young men had often made their way through the desert, only to find that the prices being charged for a passage to Europe were far beyond their means. Having taken charge of them, some of the people-smugglers then tries to extort money from their families by sending messages back to their home countries. If this failed, then they would auction the hapless individuals off for what they could get; usually no more than £300 or so. The migrants themselves were hungry, with no money to pay for accommodation or even to buy food. So it was that the area around Tripoli, which had once played such a pivotal role in slavery in the days of the Barbary corsairs, once more fell easily into the practice of trading in slaves again.

     The year following the revelations from Libya, the Global Slavery Index published figures in which they claimed that a total of 9.2 million Africans were living in servitude against their will. This figure included many women in forced marriages which, as we remarked above, is slightly different from slavery and certainly may not be considered as being in the same class as chattel slavery. Nevertheless, even removing such people from the figures still leaves us with millions of slaves in present-day Africa.

    Just as slavery has returned almost as a matter of course to Libya, where it was once so widespread and popular, so to with Eritrea. Eritrea was until 1991 a province of Ethiopia and was at one time a staging post for the transportation of slaves from sub-Saharan Africa to the Arab world. Slavery now, under the rule of the man who has ruled the country since independence, Isaias Afwerki, appears to have made a comeback. Under the guise of conscription, men are forced to leave their homes and work for the state for indefinite periods of time. A committee of the United Nations has accused Afwerki of systematic human rights abuses which they say might amount to crimes against humanity. Under such circumstances, compulsory work for the government, undertaken against the threat of violence, may well be said to amount to slavery.

     Of course, the leader of Eritrea denies that the actions of his troops amounts to slavery and it must be said that this is something of a grey area. After all, many countries do still hare conscription and once called up into the army, young recruits, whether in Africa, Asia or Europe, may well eb expected to undertake physically demanding and dirty jobs.

     If, as seems only too likely, slavery does still linger on in some oher corners of Africa, then the reason is simple. The more remote and out of the way that an area is, the more likely that activities might be undertaken in that place which would attract unfavourable attention were they to be near areas with a greater density of population and perhaps a good mobile signal. In China, concentration camps for some Muslims are established far from towns and this means that they are not the object of prying eyes. The same almost certainly applies when it comes to slavery in Africa. Every year though, the planet shrinks metaphorically and more and more attention may be paid to what were once inaccessible locations. In a world where every inch of the planet is relentless scanned b y satellites and in which the average person can summon up a photograph of anywhere he pleases by simply looking at Google Earth on a mobile telephone, it is becoming impossible to conceal anything in the long run. This lack of secrecy and ability to watch what is happening anywhere is only likely to increase in the future and it must surely eb a matter of time before there is no longer any hiding place for slave caravans or markets where  slaves are auctioned off.

Why this awful business is ignored by those in the West by those who are constantly bemoaning the excesses of the transatlantic slave trade and the historic mistreatment of black Africans is a curious point and one which only psychologist could perhaps properly explain. The simplest, and most likely reason, is that looking at slavery in Africa would entail condemning the actions of some black people. For those accustomed to laying the blame for all the evils which have befallen Africa on white colonialism, would be step too far. Far better to turn a blind eye to the suffering of real people in the preset day and focus instead upon things which happened in past centuries.