Slavery is not consigned to the history
books
By Clare Rudebeck
Nov. 18 — For 50 years of her life, Assibit Wanagoda was
a slave. Her life consisted of collecting water, milking camels, herding
goats, and moving her mistress’s tent to keep her in the shade.
She was regularly beaten and abused by her masters but even so, the
night of June 28 was particularly difficult. As a storm swept across
the southern Niger, her owner forced her to act as a pole for his tent.
While his family slept, she stood outside, lashed by violent wind and
rain for nine hours.
At dawn, having reached breaking point, Assibit decided to take her
chance and escape. She had heard rumors from other slaves of someone
who could help her: Ilguilas Weila. She walked 20 miles to the nearest
village from where she was taken to the office of Weila’s organization,
Timidria. Once there, Assibit was clothed, fed and washed. Weila then
organized for her to be set up as an independent woman for the first
time in her life.
Ilguilas Weila is the best hope not only for Assibit but for all of
the estimated 870,000 slaves living in Niger today. And his work has
now been recognized internationally. Today, he is in London to receive
an award from the British human-rights charity, Anti-Slavery International.
Sitting in an anonymous hotel room, Weila does not look a likely savior.
The middle-aged 21st-century abolitionist, is dressed in a beige mac,
peers over his glasses and speaks in cut-glass French. Working in the
former French colony of Niger, bordered by Nigeria to the south and
Algeria to the north, Weila founded Timidria in 1991 with 11 other young
Nigerians. Before then, slaves had nowhere to run to. To date, the organization
has secured the freedom of 210 slaves.
This trickle of emancipated people is about to become a flood: last
year, Timidria secured a change in the law that criminalized slavery
in Niger. Since May, 5 2003 anyone owning a slave has risked a prison
term of up to 30 years. In Niger, one of the world’s poorest nations
where two-thirds of the land is desert, it takes time for the letter
of the law to imprint itself. However, already one nomadic chief in
the Tillaberi region of central Niger has heard about the new law and,
eager to avoid arrest, contacted Timidria to arrange to hand over the
7,000 slaves within his encampment. It is the first mass emancipation,
and it is due to happen this month.
“Although my family are not from the slave class, when I was growing
up we were treated as such,” says Weila, 47, who was born in the
Tahoua region of northern Niger. “We could only receive an education
or marry with the consent of the village chief.” Through a quirk
of fate though, Weila was handed the chance to escape. “My village
chief was hostile to education,” he explains. “He saw it as
a Western imposition and a threat to our way of life. So when he was
obliged by law to send his son to school, he wanted a way out and ordered
that a boy from his encampment should instead. I was the boy chosen
to go.”
It might have been his passport to another way of life, but it wasn’t
an easy time and the prejudice he faced then was one of the reasons
he later started Timidria. “On one occasion, I was walking home
from school with children from the slave-owning class. I could hear
people saying, ‘Who is that boy?’ ‘Who does he belong
to?’” he remembers. “These people had assumed that I
was a slave. And the idea that I was nothing -- that I was identified
by who I was owned by --- marked me.”
Timidria estimates that the number of Nigerians living in slavery is
at least 870,000 or seven percent of the population of 12 million --
a figure that is accepted by the country’s government. Some slaves
eat, sleep, work, marry and have children only as and when their master
decides. Wanagoda, who was married to another slave, has four children,
two of whom are the result of rape by her owner. “I was my mistress’s
slave -- that was my identity,” she says. “We were never paid,
I was only given one tenth of the camel milk I milked.”
The scale of the problem only became clear last year when Timidria carried
out extensive research, supported by Anti-Slavery International. Its
researchers interviewed 11,000 people, most of whom were slaves who,
like Wanagoda, lived with constant violence. Islamana, 70, from Gadabeji,
central Niger, told a researcher: “My two daughters are treated
like goats. The master invites men to sleep with them.” Ahmed Assalam,
33, told how he was once beaten so badly that his legs were broken and
that his wife had been tortured and raped.
Timidria’s ability to help escaped slaves is limited by lack of
funds. It relies heavily on volunteers to carry out its work. When an
escaped slave arrives at one of Timidria’s 636 local offices, they
rarely have anything other than the clothes they stand in. Timidria
must provide them with a way of surviving independently, otherwise they
will have no choice but to go back to their master.
When Assibit Wanagoda walked to freedom in June, she took nothing with
her. “When she arrived, she was practically naked, wearing just
rags,” remembers Weila. “She had no shoes. Her hair was wild
and disheveled.” The village women living near Timidria’s
office gave her clothes and shoes. She was taken into one of their houses,
fed and washed. For the next few weeks, she lived with former slave
women, while money was sent from Timidria’s head office to support
her. She now milks the goats Timidria provided her with whenever she
pleases. But while this hands-on approach, reliant on the generosity
of ordinary people, works on a small scale, Weila is worried about how
they will cope with large-scale liberations such as the one planned
for this month.
Timidria’s goal of freeing all of Niger’s slaves amounts to
a social revolution. Slavery has been part of the fabric of Nigerian
society since the 19th century, when people were openly traded or kidnapped
in raids. During French rule from 1890 to 1960 slave-trading was suppressed,
but the practice of owning slaves didn’t end, and after independence
the new ruling elite included many from the slave-owning class who were
happy to turn a blind eye to maintain the status quo. People were born
and died slaves. “Many Nigerians consider slavery normal,”
says Weila. “They think that slaves are a different type of human
being, that it is their God-given place.”
Timidria’s success depends on its ability to overturn these entrenched
beliefs and overcome hostility from the slave-owning class. In addition,
the slaves need to be educated to the fact that they now have a legal
right to live freely, and to receive compensation from their former
masters. But in a country twice the size of France, none of this is
an easy task. “The 210 people we have helped to escape so far are
lucky,” says Weila, “Because they had heard about Timidria.
The majority don’t know that liberty is a possibility.”
Slaves are usually kept away from towns and villages by masters who
want to keep them in ignorance. They are also subject to attacks on
their identity, designed to make them psychologically dependent on their
master. Boulboulou was born into slavery in the Tahoua region of northern
Niger in 1980. When she was two she was taken away from her mother --
standard practice among slave owners. At 16, after being forced to marry,
she had a baby daughter who was also taken away at two years old. “Slaves
often don’t have a sense of self,” says Weila. “By severing
the link with their parents, the owner reinforces the slave’s status
as a non-person with no history or ties. When Assibit Wanagoda was asked
if she was happy to be free, she didn’t understand the question.
She had to be taught how [to] be a person.”
Boulboulou later escaped, spurred by the desire to be reunited with
her daughter. She, too, was helped by Timidria, which managed to negotiate
the return of her daughter. “Since my escape I feel happy and have
support from my family,” says Boulboulou, now married to a man
of her choice. “My daughter goes to school in Tahoua. I am free
and content.”
But few slaves have her sense of self-will. “Probably the most
important reason why slaves do not leave is down to religion: they’ve
usually been told that their chance to enter paradise is linked to their
master,” says Weila. It’s Weila’s mission to convince
slaves that they can live independently, without fear of reprisals in
this life or the next. But he is all too aware of the hundreds of thousands
of slaves who he cannot yet help. Liberating all of Niger’s slaves
is impossible without support from both the Nigerian government and
abroad. “As a result of the research with Anti-Slavery International,
we know where thousands of slaves are. We know what they are called.
We know how many children they have,” says Weila. “When we
interviewed them, we promised that we would come and help them. But
we just don’t have the resources.”
Earlier this year on a tour of the country, Weila stopped in a village
to speak to a slave woman. “At the end of the conversation, she
understood all about my work, and asked why she wasn’t leaving
with me. And I cried because I couldn’t take her. I had nowhere
to take her to.”
Source: Independent (UK)
