An Escape From Slavery

Just as Frederick Douglass once toured free states to rally support, Moctar Teyeb said Thursday that he came to Los Angeles to call for an end to slavery.

Teyeb, who says he escaped a master in the West African country of Mauritania, wants Americans to see that human chattel is not a thing of the past and he presents himself as living proof.

“My name is Moctar Teyeb and I am a slave,” he said at a West Los Angeles symposium on slavery marking Black History Month. “For the first 19 years of my life I served as a slave to my master, and I have no paper from him to prove I’m free.”

Teyeb, 39, said his mission was to tell of slavery because many people in industrialized nations are unaware that it still exists.

According to the U.S. State Department, people are bought, sold and held as captive laborers in Sudan and possibly in Mauritania.

About 400 people attended the daylong symposium at the Museum of Tolerance.

Teyeb was joined by self-proclaimed “modern-day abolitionists” like Charles Jacobs, research director of the American Anti-Slavery Group. Jacobs said the conference should inform Americans that “although this is Black History Month, black slavery is not history.”

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, one of the conference’s organizers, said the symposium was needed to prompt action from a superpower like the United States, which has its own history of slavery.

Teyeb said his experiences show that slavery continues when laws against it are passed but not enforced.

Slavery was outlawed in Mauritania in 1980. But some people still work for former masters, and some may be held against their will, according to the State Department’s annual human rights report.

Federal officials have reported that slavery is practiced in Sudan. In 1996, two Baltimore Sun reporters brought attention to the issue by purchasing two Sudanese slaves for a total of $1,000 and freeing them.

Sudan has said that what is practiced there is not slavery, but hostage-taking by warring sides in a civil war. The State Department reports that both the government and rebel armies force captives into labor.

Gregory Kane, one of the reporters who made the 1996 slave purchase, attended the symposium Thursday and said such distinctions are irrelevant to captives.

“If you are a hostage and your ransom is not paid, you are a slave,” he said.

Laws barring slavery in Mauritania are seldom enforced and often ignored by both masters and slaves, Teyeb said.

“Slavery never ended. We have been bought and sold like property and bred like farm animals,” he said.

Teyeb said his father’s side of the family had been enslaved for three generations, and “on my mother’s side we cannot remember a time when we were free.”

Because many families have been enslaved for generations and some believe that their lot is God’s will, Teyeb said, Mauritanian slaves sometimes continue to willingly serve their masters.

“We are subjected to both physical and mental slavery,” he said.

But Teyeb said he “could never accept that existence. Even at 3 or 4 years old I instinctively asked questions,” he said.

Teyeb said members of his family were heroes in a civil war and thus treated with some leniency by their masters. “I challenged my master’s commands, but he was not so strict, so I was lucky,” he said.

In free moments away from home, Teyeb said, he did chores for local schoolchildren and asked them in return to teach him the alphabet. He was also able to raise some money by buying candy at a market and reselling it near the school, he said.

When he was 19, Teyeb’s master sent him alone to the capital to meet the master’s brother, who was returning after working in Iran, Teyeb said. Instead, Teyeb said, he fled to neighboring Senegal, where at 21 he was able to begin school.

Teyeb said he eventually studied electronics and law in Libya and Morocco, then moved to Paris. In 1995, he immigrated to the United State, sponsored by a friend who employed him as a servant, he said. Teyeb now lives in the Bronx.

Allegations of continued slavery in Africa and what should be done about it remain hotly contested. Christian groups cite slavery in Sudan as an example of persecution by Muslims of a Christian minority. But Islamic organizations have said reports of slavery are often sensationalized to malign Muslims.

In Mauritania, most slaves and masters are Islamic, said Teyeb, who is Muslim.

Human rights groups that purchase freedom for captives have also been attacked by those who believe the practice perpetuates slavery by giving captors profits.

But Jacobs said that until the United States and other powerful nations make ending slavery a priority, having freedom bought by outsiders is appreciated by the enslaved.

“When you look into the eyes” of those whose freedom is purchased, he said, you know “it’s a solution that works for them.”

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Slave States?

Though outlawed in both countries, slavery is still practiced in Sudan and possible Mauritania, according to the U.S. State Department.