mauritania

a moonless, starless sky

ordinary WOmen and men fighting extremism in africa

A COLLECTION of ESSAYS by ALEXIS OKEOWO

Alexis Okeowo was born in Alabama to Nigerian parents. By her own admission, Okeowo’s African heritage was not a hugely influential part of her identity, “My parents had both ended up as college students in Alabama, where I grew up. We had all the comforts of Nigerian food, art, and music in my childhood home, but I didn’t have a great interest in Africa.” With no intention of making Africa the subject-matter of her work, after graduating from Princeton, Okeowo took a ten-month internship at a newspaper in Uganda. Ever since then, the journalist has “returned to the fascinating, unpredictable, and maddening continent again and again to report stories.”

Reading Okeowo’s nonfiction is a clear departure from what I set out to achieve in this reading challenge. Although Okeowo is of African descent, she was born, raised, and educated in the US, and is essentially an African-American woman. However, having struggled to find a Mauritanian book written by a woman writer, Okeowo’s articles about Mauritania in A MOONLESS, STARLESS SKY, seemed like a good compromise. This is a uniquely Mauritanian issue, told through the lived experience of Mauritanians, and reported on by Okeowo, a black, female journalist.

The Mauritanian story about modern-day slavery that persists to this day, is told across two chapters. In Mauritania: Not Restrained by Chains, we are introduced immediately to Haby Mint Rabah, a woman born into slavery and owned by the same family who own her mother and her grandmother. The year is 2014. “Her parents were slaves for different masters, nomadic families who belonged to the same clan.” Haby was raised by her grandmother, a time she remembered with fondness, but after her grandmother died when Haby was only eight years old, Haby was taken on by her grandmother’s owners as their slave. “Haby came to think of her grandmother’s burial site, in a lonesome corner of the desert, as the place where her childhood ended.” We follow Haby’s story into adulthood, when her brother Bilal, who—“had left his masters at nineteen after they beat him so badly he finally ran away.”—begins to visit her in the desert to try to persuade Haby to leave with him. Having tried to escape twice and been caught, bought back, and severely beaten each time, Haby is understandably terrified to leave again. Apart from the fear, the psychological hold the owners have over their slaves is extremely hard for a slave to break. “The slave is chained to a mentality that outside of their masters they are nothing.” Further to this, in Mauritania, slave ownership is aligned with Islam. “They were not restrained by chains, but they could not go to secular schools, or religious schools, or study Islam in any kind of meaningful, independent way.” And because most slave owners perceived Islam as endorsing slavery and taught that interpretation to their slaves, “questioning slavery was tantamount to questioning Islam.”

Through Haby’s successful escape from her owners, we are introduced to Biram Dah Abeid, an activist who has spent his entire life fighting the institutionalized slavery that exists in Mauritania to this day. Biram argues that slavery is tied up not only in economic ownership, but also—as with so many problematic systems that subjugate one person to another—in race. Okeowo writes:

“Over the course of centuries, Berbers from North Africa and Arabs came to inhabit what is now Mauritania. They took black African slaves, creating an entrenched racial hierarchy. Over time, the bloodlines of the masters and the slaves mixed and they came to share a language—Arabic or an Arabic dialect—and cultural practices: As the masters imposed their traditions, the slaves lost their own. As a result, and disturbingly, slave owners often referred to their slaves as family. In modern Mauritania, people speak of the mingled Arab-Berbers as White Moors and the slaves as Haratin. White Moors, a minority, hold most of the country's wealth and political power. Haratin, who have dark skin, are a permanent underclass, even after they are freed. Somewhere between these two castes are Afro-Mauritanians, ethnic groups also found in Senegal that have never been enslaved. People endured slave-like conditions in nearby countries, but slavery in Mauritania was unusually severe and persistent. Because of those extreme conditions, the antislavery movement in Mauritania had become among the most radical activist movements in Africa.”

A definite departure from the fiction I have enjoyed from countries throughout this amazing continent, Okeowo’s essays taught me something I have never known about a country I have never given too much thought to. Fascinating and horrifying to think that although Mauritania officially abolished slavery in 1981, (making it the last country in the world to do so,) slavery still continues there to this day, with the knowledge and tacit approval of the institutions of power who protect the practice through their inaction.