LIKE millions of others, I was shocked by recent reports of a Benin slave
ship full of children. In a world where moral absolutes are scarce, this looked
like one. Surely no one could believe this was anything other than wrong?
By chance, I’ve been in Mauritania, a West African country where slavery was
only abolished in 1980. And where, say human rights groups, it secretly
persists.
One of the nicest people I met there was a man, Ely, whose family once owned
slaves, and who badly wanted me to understand how tough it is being a slave
owner. And yes, he did use the present tense.
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He didn’t convert me to the virtues of slavery. Far from it. But his country
did give me a sharp lesson in the dangers of making easy assumptions about
race.
Ely was a tall, athletic government official. We shared a car ride through
the desert in search of fishermen to interview. He was chaperoning me because,
upset by persistent stories about slavery, the government is wary of foreign
journalists. But Ely didn’t fight shy. He laughed as he explained that the son
of one of his family’s slaves is now a senior aide to the prime minister. “So
the former slave is my boss.”
Better that than slaves who stay put. “You cannot throw your ex-slaves out
into the desert,” he opined. “You have to clothe and feed and house them. It’s
quite expensive. They get old. Some couldn’t survive on their own.”
He explained the role that race plays in his country. It is run by Moors,
followers of Islam. But there are white Moors—comprising Arabs and
Berbers—and black Moors. Most former slaves are black Moors. And “even
blacks had slaves”, he added.
There is no stigma in being an ex-slave. Those considered to be the lowest in
Mauritania are blacks from the south of the country. They were never slaves, but
they suffer from something worse: not being Moors. A decade ago, hundreds of
southern blacks were killed in a pogrom, and many more of them fled to
neighbouring Senegal. It’s all over now, Ely insists. “They can come back if
they wish.”
Mauritania is still largely run by a caste of Moorish Koranic scholars called
marabout, who hold enormous sway across Islamic West Africa. Many run large
estates, often worked by young boys lured from their homes by promises of
schooling.
Shades of slavery. Yet some marabout set up as international prophets,
apparently targeting black Americans to invest in their desert fiefdoms. A
perversion of the notion of racial brotherhood if ever there was one, and
another bizarre lesson for a white English liberal.
There were other confusions. I visited a remote fishing people called the
Imraguen. One reference book called them “the smallest black ethnic group, still
held in Arab bondage”. But it turned out Imraguen just means fishermen. Some
were former slaves. But some were high-born white Moors.
I never did find out why rich Moors went fishing. But they don’t talk about
a lot of things there, especially if it touches on the time—just
yesterday, really—when many were slaves, and some were slave owners. And
maybe still are.