The other day I was using one of those absurdly named search
engines available on my computer (this time it was Google) and I typed in "Slavery today". I was amazed to be rewarded, if that is the word, with about a thousand web sites, including a French Journal, and several books. About 950
sites remain still unexplored by your columnist, but you may be interested in the item from La Societe Contre L'Esclavage.The Society estimates that there are 8 000 girl-slaves in West Africa, in the same circumstances as
they were in the pre-colonial era. They are in villages just half a day's journey from the same coast from which very reluctant slaves used to be shipped to the West Indies and the Americas.
They show a photograph of a rather
pretty little blackish girl, dressed in nothing very much, and quote her as saying "My name is Mary Kudiewu. I am seven. I am a slave. I became a slave when I was five."
These girls fill the roles, often combined, of agricultural
slave, domestic slave, temple slave and sex slave. As agricultural slaves, bought from their mothers, they work in the fields, from dawn to dusk, sometimes stimulated by beatings. As sex slaves, they may begin their careers at the
age of eight, with the same primitive encouragements by whip or cane..
The temples, in which they carry out unspecified (but presumably religious) duties, are not described in detail, except to mention voodoo priests. However my
Shorter Oxford describes voodoo as being practised in the West Indies (especially Haiti) and the southern USA. It is, as we know, derived from African religions. Perhaps the Society's theology needs to be updated.
Since 1996 the
Society has achieved the emancipation of over five hundred of these slaves by buying them from their masters, who executed deeds which manumitted them. The former masters also undertook not to acquire any more slaves. Would you
attach a strong belief to such promises?
But since the Society is by no means overburdened with money, you will be glad to hear that they refused to pay exorbitant prices .
They bought a total of 436 slave girls from
the Dada Shrine in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana and from the Adzoli Shrine in the Volta Region, then 34 girls in the village of Dophor in Volta, and 54 slave girls in Fievia, also in Volta. These latter were bought from their
master, Mr.Kaklanua, for an average of about 33 US dollars each. A bargain?
Other sources tell me that the temple slaves attend not so much to the needs of God as to all the various needs of the priests, and that when they
get too old for these purposes they are sent back to their families who are required to replace them by younger models.
Whatever might have been the attitude of my ancestors in the matter of slavery, I intend to send to the
Society a subscription of 100 US dollars to make my own position clear. To send it, that is, as soon as I can discover the postal address of the Society, useful information which they might well have included on their Web Site.
Other information I have recently acquired is that Ghanaian girls are often good-looking, hard-working, intelligent and frequently blessed with a valuable sense of humour.
I do hope that some of my readers will wish to join me in
this modest bit of do-gooding. After all, the Society is now burdened with 524 young girls who need feeding, housing, dressing, training and employment. Might it be possible that, lacking these advantages, some girls might
voluntarily return to their masters for the sake of regular meals?
The Society combines with other groups to try to help today's slaves in Mauritania, Sudan, Pakistan and Thailand. If we Bajans are truly against slavery should we
not help these organisations? Of course it would involve pulling our own pockets instead of moaning for money from other people, a practice, anyway, most undignified and unlikely to succeed.
What about that vocal Bajan
group whose energies are dedicated to a virulent hatred of the English, curiously enough the same nation which voluntarily freed its slaves before any other country? Might our loud-mouths possibly help to free some modern slaves in
that great, ancestral, but still slave-trading African continent? Silly question.
Dare I hope that the Excellently Noble Mr. Commissiong, the next Prime Minister but three, will join me in this Anti-Slavery effort?
P.S. The
address: American Anti-Slavery Group, 198 Trem ont St., # 421, BOSTON, MA 02116, USA.
