Slavery--Unfinished Business

Barrack Obama looks back for inspiration to Abraham Lincoln. Fair enough: the Great Emancipator and our first black president. So why doesn’t Obama take up the issue that so bedeviled Mr. Lincoln’s presidency—the issue of human slavery. After all, the Associated Press reports, there are still approximately 10,000 human slaves working in bondage in the United States.
The AP goes on to say that the State Department reports that children from 33 of Africa’s 53 countries were sent out to work as slaves just last year. Slaves from ten or more African countries were sent to work in either Europe or the US. Nobody knows exactly how many.
The United Nations, Interpol and American intelligence sources are unable to come up with a figure for exactly how large it might be. The slave dealing is done very secretively. A poor father approaches a wealthy member of his society and offers them the services of a daughter he can no longer afford to feed.
At nine or ten, the girl becomes a house slave. She may work for up to twenty hours a day, seven days a week. Her family may even be paid a pittance for her services. But she has no freedom, no education; she sometimes may not even use the same spoons her masters eat with.
She wears old castoffs, is often made to sleep in the garage with the family vehicles; the families do not even call her by name. She is simply the servant, the girl, or “stupid”. If, like a nine-year-old she makes a blunder, she will likely be beaten.
When the enslaving family moves to a western nation like the United States, she is simply brought along to do the vacuuming, washing, dish washing and cleaning in the new home. Now she will not be able to see or communicate with her real family—which stays back in Africa.
This African slave trade goes back thousands of years. The ancient Greeks had black slaves—and copied down the stories the slaves told their children. The called them Black Fables—or Aesop’s Fables. In the Eighth Century, Muslim slavers sailed down the East Coast of Africa and began the slave trade that Europeans bought into for labor in the Americas.
The French invaded North Africa to stop piracy; the British occupied the Sudan and East Africa to stop the slave trade once and for all. By 1900 they had defeated the Mahdi’s forces and his slaver allies and ended the last vestiges of African slavery—so they thought.
It didn’t stay stopped. Britain was finally forced out of its East African colonies by 1960, and slavery immediately resumed. There was an insatiable thirst among the wealthy in the Arab world for house slaves. An African Muslim parent could often pay for the family’s pilgrimage to Mecca by leaving a child behind as a slave.
Africa and the Middle East aren’t the only places where slavery is still practiced. Young girls are routinely sold as sex slaves for the tourist trade in places like Bangkok. Young children regularly work making soccer balls and other goods for the West in conditions that can only be described as slavery throughout eastern Asia.
The United Nations tried to create a legal code requiring decent treatment for slaves in the 1950s. No one seemed able to come up with a solution that pleased both master and slave. By 1956, the UN gave up on the job—and did all but nothing more about the problem.
It’s an invisible problem—when a house slave was rescued (and sent to school and given a decent home in California) the neighbors professed not to have suspected a thing. The owners simply said the girl was one of their own children doing chores. When someone realized that this girl was living in the garage, without lights or plumbing, someone called the authorities—but this was after years.
In Germany, France, the Netherlands and Britain—as well as Maryland, California and Michigan, Africans have been arrested for smuggling in slaves, all in recent years. I recall a New York case of a Saudi Princess who had a domestic slave with her about ten years ago.
Obama can’t invade Thailand to stop the sex trade, he cannot send troops into Africa or patrol the borders of France and Germany—but he can put out the word on American borders. For starters, when a wealthy African or Middle Eastern family enters the country, COUNT.
If they say they have four children and five are present, pull everybody into a separate room and start asking probing questions. These slaves are smuggled into the US in panel trucks. They come in with the families that own them. If one of the children is dressed differently or has calluses the others don’t, or seems unwilling to meet anyone’s eyes—check into it.
With the coming of “the second Lincoln”, it might be a ripe moment in American history to end slavery (at least in this nation) for good.
[Bits and pieces of this blog were taken from an AP report sent to AOL News, 12/29/08]