Millions of people live in modern-day slavery

A recent article argues that it is much easier to tear down statues and find people to blame than to actually work on eliminating modern-day slavery, even though there are plenty of real problems that should be tackled.

POLITICS JUNE 30. 2020 13:27

In its recently published article titled Modern Slavery and Woke Hypocrisy, Gatestone Institute argues that Black Lives Matter (BLM) is duplicitous and hypocritical in suggesting that the source of all problems are the sinful white people who have shipped over their slaves from Africa, one of the basic axioms of the movement that s nearly sparked an outright racial war.

Firstly, an estimated 9.2 million people in Africa still live in „modern-day” slavery, the Global Slavery Index found last year. This includes forced labour, forced sexual exploitation and forced marriage. There are more than three times as many people in forced servitude today as were captured and sold during the 350-year span of the transatlantic slave trade, according to the United Nations International Labor Organization (ILO). In addition, criminal networks earn about 150 billion dollars a year with modern-day slavery, which is almost as much as drug smuggling and weapons trafficking combined.

In Mali, the number of „internal” slaves is estimated at 250 thousand. The Guardian spoke to a slave woman named Raichatou, who said she became a slave at the age of seven, when her mother, who was also a slave, died. „My father could only watch on helplessly as my mother s master came to claim me and my brothers,” she said. Raichatou worked for 20 years as a servant of the family without pay and was then forced to marry another slave whom she didn t know. „My master only wanted me to have children so that he would have more slaves in the future,” she said. 

According to estimates, around 20 per cent of Mauritania s population still lives in slavery, despite an official ban on the practice in 1981. The slaves are mostly black Africans from the Haratin minority, as opposed to almost half of the population, who are Arabs or Berbers. Aichetou Mint M barack was also a Haratine slave. She, just like her sister, was also taken away from her mother and then given to a member of the master s family to be a servant. She got married in the home of her masters and had eight children, two of whom were taken away from her to serve as slaves in other families.

Last year, Time magazine spoke to a Nigerian man who on his way to Europe when he was sold as a slave. When he reached the country s southern border, he met a seemingly friendly taxi driver who offered to take him to the capital  Tripoli, for free. Instead, he was sold to an „Arab man”, for 200 dollars and was forced to work off his „debt” on a construction site, a pattern that repeated each time he was sold and resold.

Sex trafficking is also part of modern slavery. The Nigerian mafia, for instance, was engaged in trafficking some 20 thousand Nigerian women, including minors, according to a 2019 report by the Washington Post. In Sicily, Nigerian women are forced into prostitution (debt slavery) by the Nigerian mafia there to pay off the costs of their travel from Nigeria to Europe.

It would appear that BLM s woke activists and their kneeling supporters have no concern for all of the above, neither do they care about the plight of modern slaves in today s UK, where – according to the 2018 Global Slavery Index – there are still an estimated 136,000 people living in modern slavery, with Albanians and Vietnamese constituting the majority of slaves. They were mostly trafficked into the UK and forced into slavery by people smugglers to pay off transportation costs (like in the case of Nigerian prostitutes). They are primarily forced to work on cannabis farms across the UK that supply Britain s 2.6-billion-pound cannabis black market. Others are forced to work in brothels and restaurants or kept in domestic servitude behind the doors of private residences. Over half of the new arrivals smuggled in from Vietnam in the hope of a better life and trapped in some form of slavery are under the age of 18.

POLITICS

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africa, modern slavery, study