Africa’s Sorrow, Obama’s Shame

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Front Page Magazine: Africa’s Sorrow, Obama’s Shame

July 8, 2013 By Stephen Brown

 

It was another devastating blow for black Africa’s most powerless from the world’s most powerful black American. Like in his 2009 African visit when he visited a former European slave depot in Ghana, during his recently concluded 2013 African tour U.S. President Barack Obama again deemed that the defunct trans- Atlantic slave trade was the only past black African slavery worthy of his attention.

 

Ironically, Obama would not have had to stray far from his African tour’s itinerary to do so. Just across Senegal’s northern border in Mauritania, for example, the anti-slavery organization SOS Esclaves estimates that there are about 500,000 black African slaves in the country’s population of 3.1 million. Their masters are the Arab and Berber Mauritanians, who share only the same Islamic religion with their chattel. Unlike the slaves who went through the Door of No Return, though, who were often captured in the old-fashioned, village-burning slave raid (as currently occurs in Sudan), the Mauritanian African slaves are the product of a system that has kept them in a state of bondage going back, in some cases, several hundred years.

 

Even more ironic, if Obama truly was interested in the issue of black African slavery and promoting human rights, as he stated he was, all he had to do was look over his shoulder when he was on Goree Island. According to Cotton’s book, Silent Terror: A Journey Into Contemporary African Slavery, the result of his trip documenting slavery in Mauritania, Mauritanian Arabs and Berbers bring their black slaves with them to work in Dakar almost within sight of Goree Island. Cotton quotes from a book by an African scholar, Garba Diallo, who spoke with two such slaves working in their master’s store in Dakar.