Dear Nahncee,

Here’s a link to an NPR article from summer of 2001 describing the continuing widespread practice of slavery in Mauritania.

Despite the government’s having officially outlawed slavery in 1980, the elite of the country seem to have continued, imposing bonded servitude on the children of parents who grew up as slaves in their households. Although the ownership of slaves is seen among the powerful of various races, it historically was practiced by the Islamic Berbers and Moors, who purchased blacks supplied by other black africans. Since then, the masters seem to have perpetuated increasingly submissive slaves by repeatedly impregnating the females, so that over the centuries many generations have been raised up knowing only forced servitude.

More recently, the conflict between Sudanese Islamic tribes and black african christians has produced a steady trickle of stories and documented instances of black Christian women and children being sold as slaves after capture in raids by the Janjaweed Muslims on Christian villages & camps. The two countries most conspicuously shown to tolerate and protect the slave trade and ownership are Mauritania and Sudan.

Islam is supposed to forbid to the faithful the enslavement of other Muslims. Enslavement of infidels is supposed to be end when the enslaved convert to Islam. But in Mauritania and Sudan, the practice is less stringent, so that typically Arab-Berber masters own typically black slaves, regardless of the slave’s faith.

An article by Samuel Cotton also from 2001, gives some background.
But the author seems determined to avoid acknowledging the historical fact that it was black africans who sold other black africans to the slave-traders in the fortified slave-holds along Africa’s coast. Kofi Annan’s West African ancestors grew rich trafficking in ivory and humans for centuries, creating the wealthy aristocracy that persisted long enough to send Kofi to study at Harvard as his entrée into the corrupt United Nations bureaucracy.

I don’t doubt that there were wonderful cities, great kings, sprawling empires throughout Africa’s magnificent lands and reverberating through the African millennia.

Still…

It really is breathtaking to consider the sort of mind that can claim in one breath that Africa is the source of nobility, advanced culture, and shrewd self-government, then turn around and assert that tens of millions of blacks were enslaved by raiding parties of a handful of White Europeans roaming through the interior over the course of a few centuries.