Slavery Report: Mauritania
A young Mauritanian black slave girl washing her Arab masters’ hands, photographed in 1992 for Newsweek. (Mark Peters / Sipa Press via Newsweek)
History and Background
Historically, Mauritania has been one of the oldest and purest remaining instances of chattel slavery in the world. Muslim Arabs first conquered western North Africa in the eighth century, colonizing a sparsely populated area inhabited by black Africans and Berber nomads. As Arab power grew, it pushed Berber tribes southwards from the oases, thus forcing the black population even further south into the more arid regions. After several failed uprisings against Arab rule, the Berbers relented and finally decided to Arabize and adopt Islam in 1644. Most black tribes, however, having been forced down to the Senegal River, only accepted Islam nearly a thousand years after the Arab conquest. Blacks who remained in the northern territories were forced into slavery. Over the generations, Arabo-Berber slavery expanded south and engulfed more of the black population.
This history has created a cruel caste system in which the lighter-skinned Arabs and Arabized Berbers (beydanes) rule over the black former slaves who have been forcibly Arabized over time (haratin); those free blacks in the south who refuse Arabization, calling themselves “Negro-Africans”; and the black chattel slave class (abidin) at the bottom. Though the country is entirely Muslim, and Islam theoretically forbids the enslavement of one Muslim by another, the severity of Arab racism even supersedes adherence to the Shari‘ah.
French colonial officials attempted to abolish slavery within the territory in both 1901 and 1905. All such legislation proved worthless in Mauritania’s 400,000-square-mile, arid, indifferent vastness. After independence from France in 1960, five similar proclamations in 1961, 1980, 1981, 2007, and 2015 have, until quite recently, proved equally pointless.
No slave markets exist in Mauritania. All chattel slaves are born in masters’ households from the master raping black slave women, or ordering necessary episodes of sexual activity (“breeding”) between couples of slaves. In the absence of open markets, slaves are inherited like furniture, change hands quietly in individual sales, are traded as substitutes for money in the settling of gambling debts, are given as wedding gifts, or can even be rented.
Number of Slaves
In 1993, a U.S. State Department report estimated that between 30,000 and 90,000 blacks were enslaved out of a population of 2 million. Three decades later, in 2023, with the population at 4.6 million, the Global Slavery Index estimated a new total of 149,000.
All the State Department’s 2022 human rights report admitted regarding numbers is that “hereditary slavery and slavery-like conditions affected a small but not insignificant portion of the rural and urban population,” and the 2023 report made no estimates whatsoever.
Latest Developments
Unlike other African nations in which slavery exists, Mauritania is blessed with its own well-organized abolitionist community. Several abolitionist organizations continue to operate, including the Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist (IRA), which lobbies the government to enforce its bans on slavery, and SOS Esclaves (“SOS Slaves”) which shelters and takes testimony from runaway slaves.
Only some progress towards enforcement of anti-slavery laws or loosening of Arab repression has been demonstrated recently. The most positive example is the GSI’s 2023 estimate of 149,000 slaves, demonstrating a significant reduction from CNN’s 2011 estimate of between 340,000 and 680,000 — if the latter estimate was accurate.
What is beyond doubt is the major political difficulties abolitionists face.
On August 7, 2018, Biram Dah Abeid, an anti-slavery activist with the IRA, was arrested and later imprisoned for running for parliament. Abeid is not alone among his fellow anti-slavery and human rights activists’ troubles. A 2018 Economist article reports that
the government denies slavery or racial discrimination still exist. Under pressure, it has set up four slavery courts, but these have convicted only five people since 2015 for slaving offences. None of them served more than two years. The government is far more energetic in suppressing anti-slavery protesters, arresting more of them than actual slavers. There have been at least 168 arrests of human-rights campaigners from July 2014 to July 2018, says Amnesty International, a human-rights organisation. Two leading anti-slavery activists, Moussa Biram and Abdallahi Matallah, have been tortured and kept in prison for two years.
After his release from prison on January 1, 2019, Abeid formally called for the E.U. to cut funding to Mauritania. He also courageously ran for president in the 2019 elections, pledging to enforce the country’s anti-slavery laws fully, though he lost handily to the long-time Arab president, Mohamed Ould Ghazouani. Abeid later announced that he contested the results.
More recently, significant violence, including on the part of Arab police officers, against abolitionists has only increased, as the State Department’s 2023 report documents:
Some human rights groups faced challenges or restrictions in conducting their work, particularly those investigating cases of slavery and slavery-related practices. For example, authorities sometimes denied NGOs access to prosecutors’ offices or to alleged victims while investigating possible slavery or slavery-related cases. On October 29, the NGO Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement organized a sit-in in front of the court of Aioun in Hodh El Gharbi to denounce court proceedings opened on land tenure related to hereditary slavery.…
On February 9, local media reported the killing of well-known human rights activist Soufi Ould Cheine while in detention at Nouakchott’s Dar Naim 2 police station. On February 12, the public prosecutor announced autopsy results confirming that Cheine, a member of the Haratine community that was historically exploited in slavery, sustained fractured cervical vertebrae and indicia of strangulation, noting these injuries were likely the result of police brutality. Authorities arrested and formally charged the police commissaire and seven other officers present at the police station the night of the killing. Three other individuals were placed under judicial supervision. On September 14, the Nouakchott Criminal Court referred the 11 individuals to trial, which had not been scheduled at year’s end.
Racist violence against free blacks in general seems to have escalated also:
On May 28, police arrested Oumar Diop in Nouakchott alleging that Diop, a member of the minority sub-Saharan Peul community, was engaged in a physical altercation with two other persons before he was arrested. Several hours after the arrest, police informed Diop’s relative he had died from health complications while in police custody. Following news of Diop’s death, protests in several cities decried police brutality and discrimination against the country’s Black population. The prosecutor’s office requested an independent autopsy by a forensic expert based in Morocco, who concluded Diop died of a heart attack with acute damage to the central nervous system related to use of cocaine and alcohol. Following the autopsy, prosecutors closed the case with no charges filed. Diop’s family contested the autopsy results and claimed police killed Diop.
On May 30, police shot and killed Mohamed Lemine Ould Samba, a member of the Haratine community, while he was participating in a protest following the death of Oumar Diop. According to police, Samba attempted to forcefully enter a police station and an officer shot him in response. On June 2, a prosecutor instructed municipal services to bury Samba without the consent of his family. Samba’s family stated they would continue to seek justice despite government pressure to accept financial compensation from the state to close the case. Authorities did not conduct an official investigation into Samba’s death.
One unsettling development complementing the freeing of some slaves from chattel bondage is the rise of more “modern” forms of slavery. As Hassan Ould Moctar wrote in World Politics Review in 2023,
“Hereditary slavery,” by which an enslaved person’s offspring were also enslaved, was historically practiced in the country’s rural areas. With a majority of Mauritania’s population today living in cities, this particular form of slavery is in a process of secular decline, one accelerated thanks to the actions of anti-slavery activists. At the same time, however, distinct forms of “modern slavery” are emerging in these same urban centers, whose vast informal economies can facilitate wage theft and human-trafficking.
While it seems that some masters have freed their slaves, enforcement of anti-slavery laws is still not at an acceptable level. As recent reports indicate, the human trafficking in Sub-Saharan blacks which plagues Algeria and Libya (see Algeria and Libya reports) appears to be occurring in Mauritania as well. In late 2022, the Nigerian Immigration Service arrested a Muslim cleric for trafficking 21 Nigerian children to Mauritania and Senegal using fake passports. “From what he told us,” a Nigerian government official told a press delegation,
we suspected the cleric was trafficking the children out of Nigeria. What is disturbing is that the victims are minors, particularly the two girls that are among the 19 boys.
Though the cleric, [Husseini] Sulieman [Idris], claimed he was moving the children to Mauritania with the consent of their parents… we don’t believe him. We know the children are being trafficked.
The cleric proudly volunteered that “This is not the first time” he had done this, and “I had moved some of them to Mauritania, Morocco and Senegal in the past to,” as he said, “seek Islamic knowledge.”
Experiences of the Slaves
Due to the closed and suspicious nature of Mauritanian society, relatively little comprehensive or groundbreaking information concerning slaves’ suffering has been obtained between the 1990s and more recent years.
A June 29, 1990, Human Rights Watch / Africa report on Mauritanian slavery details the horrific tortures masters inflict upon “uppity” slaves. In the “camel treatment,”
The slave’s legs are tied to the sides of a camel who has deliberately been denied water for up to two weeks. The camel is then taken to drink and as the camel’s stomach expands, the slave’s legs, thighs and groin, are slowly dislocated.
In the “insect treatment,”
Tiny insects are stuffed into the ears of the victims and small stones are used to ensure that the insects remain inside the ear. A headscarf is then tied around the head. The victim’s hands and feet are also tied up to prevent movement. The scarf and stones are removed after several days, by which time the victim’s mind is destroyed.
Such horrendous forms of punishment are inflicted if a slave is accused of
disobeying the master’s orders, attempting to escape or even the mere suspicion of wanting to escape, being in contact with free blacks, inciting other slaves to escape and sexual relations with [any members of] the master’s family. The punishment is intended both to punish the individual, but also to serve as an example to others.
p. 15
The mangled hands of Jebada Mint Maouloud, a discarded Mauritanian slave woman whose angry master hung her for days by her hands at the age of 7 for allowing a goat under her supervision to be eaten, photographed in 1996 by journalist Sam Cotton on his fact-finding mission to Mauritania. (Sam Cotton / Harlem River Press)
In a special human rights investigation conducted between December 23, 1995, and January 17, 1996, journalist Sam Cotton interviewed anti-slavery activists, runaway slaves, former slaves, and even current slaves. In his 1998 book, Silent Terror: A Journey into Contemporary African Slavery, in which he published his findings, Cotton describes how Arab anti-black racism is engrained so deeply in Mauritanian society that it is not obvious in public:
The racism to be found in Mauritania is not readily apparent to most visitors because the Mauritanian Arab interacts with blacks far differently than does the white man of the American South or the Boer of South Africa. …Mauritania has no overtly racially discriminatory laws. Blacks and whites are not forced to attend separate schools or live in separate neighborhoods.…
The problem is that Mauritania’s Arabs sincerely believe that blacks are inferior and are born to be slaves. They believe that a black man, woman, or child’s place in life is to serve an Arab master, and it does not matter to them whether that black [person] is a Christian or a fellow Muslim. The Arabs don’t believe that they have to make any laws to stop interracial marriage [for instance] because they think it’s a disgrace for an Arab to marry a black person, anyway. Historically, the autocratic Beydane-run government has never really bothered to create any [such] laws, except for cosmetic reasons. Arab cultural attitudes and beliefs that support slavery and deny equal access to black Africans are the real law.
pp. 99 – 100
In the November 1996 issue of Vibe, a refugee named El Hadj Demba Ba explained to American journalist Jesse Washington how slavery alters the psychology of black Mauritanians:
When you become friendly with freed Haratines, they treat you just like their superior. They come to your house and want to do the dirty jobs. You have to remind them: “You sleep with me [in the house], you eat with me, whatever we do, we do it together.” But some of them refuse it, and you end up hating them. I talked to those who are in the deepness of slavery, [and] I tell them, “You can work for your own self and be free, like me.” They say, “I don’t think I can make it without my master. My master gives me food, the clothes I am wearing. What else can I do? I’ve never been to school. I don’t own any property. Where am I going to live if I run away?
p. 102
A light-skinned Arab with his black slave, photographed in 1996 by journalist Sam Cotton on his fact-finding mission to Mauritania. (Sam Cotton / Harlem River Press)
In 2011, CNN’s John D. Sutter and Edythe McNamee conducted an investigation in Mauritania under the pretext of studying “the science of locust swarms.” They interviewed an escaped slave woman named Moulkheir Mint Yarba:
Moulkheir Mint Yarba returned from a day of tending her master’s goats out on the Sahara Desert to find something unimaginable: Her baby girl, barely old enough to crawl, had been left outdoors to die.
The usually stoic mother — whose jet-black eyes and cardboard hands carry decades of sadness — wept when she saw her child’s lifeless face, eyes open and covered in ants, resting in the orange sands of the Mauritanian desert. The master who raped Moulkheir to produce the child wanted to punish his slave. He told her she would work faster without the child on her back.
Trying to pull herself together, Moulkheir asked if she could take a break to give her daughter a proper burial. Her master’s reply: Get back to work.
“Her soul is a dog’s soul,” she recalls him saying.
Later that day, at the cemetery, “We dug a shallow grave and buried her in her clothes, without washing her or giving her burial rites.”
“I only had my tears to console me,” she would later tell anti-slavery activists, according to a written testimony. “I cried a lot for my daughter and for the situation I was in. Instead of understanding, they ordered me to shut up. Otherwise, they would make things worse for me — so bad that I wouldn’t be able to endure it.”
CNN also confirmed the existence of ragged slave-only villages, to which masters banish their semi-discarded slaves:
It’s impossible, from the road, to know for sure which of these men and women are enslaved and which are paid for their work. Many exist somewhere on the continuum between slavery and freedom. Some are beaten; some aren’t. Some are held captive under the threat of violence. Others are… chained by more complicated methods, tricked into believing that their darker skin makes them less worthy, that it’s their place to serve light-skinned masters. Some have escaped and live in fear they’ll be found and returned to the families that own them; some return voluntarily, unable to survive without assistance.…
In a strange twist, some masters who no longer need a slave’s help send the servants away to slave-only villages in the countryside. They check on them only occasionally or employ informants who make sure the slaves tend to the land and don’t leave it.
Like Cotton more than 13 years earlier, Sutter remarked on how slavery “permeates every aspect of Mauritanian life”:
from the dark-skinned boys who serve mint-flavored tea at restaurants to the clothes people wear. A man wearing a powder-blue garment that billows at the arms and has fancy gold embroidery on the chest is almost certainly free and comes from the traditional slave-owning class of White Moors, who are lighter-skinned Arabs. A woman in a loud tie-dye print that covers her hair, but not her arms, is likely a slave. Her arms are exposed, against custom, so she can work.
Political Developments
In recent years, the Mauritanian government routinely expelled and denied entry or re-entry to human rights groups and investigators. According to the State Department’s 2017 report, on April 28, 2016, the government expelled two French human rights researchers from the country, not allowing them to return. On August 21, it denied entry to a foreign anti-slavery organization, and, on November 20, a “major” (but unspecified) human rights organization was denied entry into the country, despite a long history of being allowed to enter and then return.
France, Spain, and the United Kingdom have led efforts to increase E.U. funding for the G5 Sahel group, of which Mauritania is a member, by £85 million ($108 million) a year, a subsidy intended to stem migration to Europe. In 2017, a budget of €423 million (nearly $480 million) was set aside, to which the increase was added. The U.S. State Department should urge the E.U. to deny Mauritania this subsidy until it can demonstrate that it will universally enforce its 2007 criminalization of slavery.
In an act now all too typical of that body, on October 17, 2019, Mauritania — along with both slave-holding Arab Sudan and Maduro’s Venezuela — was elected to the United Nations’ Human Rights Council.
In 2018, the Trump administration announced that it was terminating Mauritania’s “preferential trade partner” status in response to the country’s “insufficient progress toward combating… the scourge of hereditary slavery.” In 2023, however, the Biden administration reinstated Mauritania’s trade status as of January 1, 2024.
For its part, the Mauritanian government has formed its own human rights commission, the “Commissariat for Human Rights, Humanitarian Action, and Relations with Civil Society” (CDHAHRSC), which, the State Department’s 2023 report says, “signed a partnership protocol with several civil society organizations active in the fields of human rights and the fight against slavery and human trafficking, including SOS-Esclaves, Sahel Foundation, and 11 other organizations.” The State Department concluded that the “CDHAHRSC was considered effective, and although funded by the government, independent.”