Meet the woman freeing Mauritania's slaves

Born free

Even if slavery is hard for the Mauritanian government to quantify and punish, it isn't invisible. It is everywhere you look, if you know what you are looking for. It is there in the darker-skinned woman who sits outside a tent beside a stove while a lighter-skinned family sits inside, fanning themselves. It is in everything you hear, if you know what to listen for. The young girl, no older than 10, who hangs laundry on a roof all morning long, and then goes back inside, only to be heard screaming a few moments later as though she is being beaten.

 

In the late afternoon, I am driven from the offices of SOS Esclaves to a tent on the outskirts of Nouakchott. There, I meet a woman who has escaped slavery with her eight children - some of whom were fathered by her master, all of whom are the product of rape.

 

One of the woman's children, a sickly girl who looks to be around the six or seven years of one of my own children, collapses in a fit of coughing. All eight of the children gather to sit on the tent's raffia-matted floor. Unlike my girls, they are perfectly still and perfectly quiet. I ask if I can take a photograph and they oblige.

 

I close my eyes and hear the wind gathering in the sand; I open my eyes and wonder, since there is obviously no plumbing and no outhouse, how they are bathing and where they go to the toilet.

 

Lam had arranged for an English-speaking student from the University of Nouakchott to accompany me on the visit, and the happy, sweeping man has come along too. He starts speaking to me in Hassaniya Arabic, and the student begins translating. It turns out that the happy sweeper is the escaped woman's brother. He shares their story.

 

After his own escape, he began searching for her, he says, but the local government in her region claimed it had no record of her existence. Various emissaries from SOS Esclaves, including Boubacar Messaoud himself, travelled north in search of the woman, but no one could find her in the vast network of dunes and scarps that make up the northern part of the country.

 

Rural Mauritanians tend to be nomadic - and given the vast area of desert that the search had to cover, no one would have been surprised if it had been abandoned. But the woman's brother persisted. When the man's sister was eventually found, she was eight months pregnant.

 

She delivered her baby just after escaping, in a city between the site of her rescue and Nouakchott. This baby, who is sleeping so profoundly as we speak, is the first in her family born outside of slavery.

 

I ask if I can hold her, and as I do, I breathe deeply of her sweetness. As a black American, I'm not that many generations removed from slavery myself. To fight my gathering tears, I focus on the tiny gold earrings in her tiny, delicate ears, and I feel something for which there are no words in the English language. I feel what every slave in every place in all of history felt when he or she saw their first child born free.

 

After a time, it is overwhelming. The tide of my emotions takes such a physical form that I feel I might wake this dreaming baby. I hand her back to her mother, and I return to taking notes in my small Moleskine notebook.

Later, as I leave the SOS offices, I ask Lam how I can help. "The most important outside aid," she tells me, "is advocacy for significant changes in policy direction".

 

Write to your own state department, I think to myself. Write to your senator.

"The work of activists and human rights defenders in Mauritania is a difficult job because one must do it at all times. We who defend human rights are investing a lot but faced with many obstacles on the ground. But it remains very meaningful work, and there are always changes. There are no fewer slaves now, but there is all the time a slave who becomes aware of his situation and who dreams of another life with freedom and dignity," she continues.

All the fight in the world  

The sun sinks as I tell Lam goodbye, and go on to spend one of the most beautiful evenings of my life at the grand home of Messaoud, who is holding an iftar dinner in the courtyard of his residence. We are covered by a large version of one of the tents that are so customary here in Mauritania. It is cool white on its canvas underside, held up by steel columns that make it as expansive as a sail.

 

Messaoud and his wife offer course after course of delicious food: succulent vegetables, restorative bissap, chicken that falls off its bone. The guest list for the evening is pure kindness: my translator, his friend, a young female student from Mali, and others who work to communicate with me in French. After a day without food, I feel my body singing at what has been served, but I feel my soul singing too: for what has been served is grace.

I get on a plane the following day and fly back over that sea of high dunes, but the moment I remember as a departure is my descent from Messaoud's SUV, the moment I waved him salaams and told him, over the traditional Mauritanian music he has playing in the tape deck, that I wish SOS Esclaves all the fight in the world.

 

I walk through the packed sand of the road and the gate of my hotel thinking about the work of Salimata Lam, and how she uses her kindness to assist slaves in their transition from a life in black and white to a life in technicolour.

 

I leave Mauritania so much more peacefully than I arrived, because now I have seen that there is so very much power in that infinity of sand.