One Man's Personal Mission To End Slavery in Mauritania

In March 2007, Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdellahi was elected president of Mauritania after negotiating with a bloc of freed slaves and pledging to enforce new legislation criminalizing slavery. Parliament endorsed the bill, which became law in August 2007.

Messaoud welcomed the president's "courageous act" but urged the world to encourage him to go further.

"The new law, which is good, is just one tool for overturning an age-old social order," said Romana Cacchioli, Africa program coordinator for Anti-Slavery International. "We need affirmative action to help lift this sector of society out of the dust. They must have access to land, to microcredit, so we must invest in reversing their exclusion. We must give them the confidence to speak up against their human rights violation."

The Open Society Justice Initiative, a program working for legal reforms in the region, said in a memo that the new law failed to spell out how to stop sexual exploitation of female slaves, had not provided a mechanism to help slaves file civil actions and lacked a timetable for implementing additional measures included in it. Messaoud emphasized that programs should be funded to teach freed slaves the skills they need to work in public institutions, such as the police force.

Under the still-prevalent tradition, children inherit the status of their mothers and are passed on by masters as part of dowries or shared with other family members.

"The girls can join a new household at the age of 5," Messaoud said. "They become the bride's servant and confidante. They rise at dawn to make tea and leave after everyone has had breakfast to work in the fields. They collect firewood and return to prepare the evening meal, then clean up after everyone has gone to sleep."

Messaoud's two aunts died in the homes they served. His mother and uncle managed lands and saw their owners only when they came to collect their share of crops, he said.

Women work the fields with their babies strapped to their backs. Many girls and women flee sexual abuse by their male masters, who by tradition can "claim" their virginity.

Women who escape to the city often cannot find work, and some resort to prostitution. Others return to their masters and ask for forgiveness "with heads bowed," Messaoud said.

Slaves freed by their proprietors still suffer discrimination long after their days of bondage. Though most slaves are black, owners are black or white, Messaoud said, emphasizing that slavery persists because of tradition and a socialized mind-set, not race.

No regulations prohibit slaves from going to school, voting or running for office, but few do, pinned down by work and the economic and political domination of the class that owns them.

Messaoud, who has been jailed three times for his activism, said slavery also persists in Niger, Senegal, Mali and other sub-Saharan African countries.

He has always owned up to his roots with people he has met, "to gauge what side of the fence they were on."

"I learned from an early age never to hide it," he said of his background. "Mauritanian ambassadors in Mali and Moscow, where I studied, would threaten me, accusing me of tarnishing my country's image."

But, he added, "I am convinced that a society that does not look at itself in the face is condemned."