Massachusetts News
By Naomi Schaefer

May 12—The African slave trade continues to this day but few major black leaders in America, including Harvard scholars Cornell West and Henry Louis Gates, want to say much or do anything about it. 

     Major human-rights groups like Amnesty International are also keeping mum. But the anti-Semitic black leader Louis Farrakhan is talking—he and his Nation of Islam deny that slavery still exists in Africa.

     Jesse Sage, associate director of the Somerville-based American Anti-Slavery Group, told Massachusetts News: “It’s still a mystery to me why all of the people who claim to be such advocates for human rights have ignored this issue for so long.” Sage’s group, which held a press conference yesterday in Boston, has received little support from the African-American community. 

     “It would be empowering for all Americans and African-Americans in particular to get involved,” said Sage, adding that there are more people enslaved today “than ever before in human history.” The latest statistics say there are about 27 million people enslaved worldwide. The American Anti-Slavery Group (www.anti-slavery.org) works to “document, publicize, and combat modern-day slavery.” 
 
     Yet even in Boston, home to such prominent intellectuals as West and Gates, the anti-slavery movement has encountered virtual silence. At the press conference, for instance, Moctar Teyeb stood in front of Faneuil Hall—where Frederick Douglass stood almost 150 years ago—and told the story of his own exodous from slavery in Mauritania, in northwest Africa, just south of Morocco. Teyeb had been enslaved there for 19 years. [(Paul, check coverage in morning) Yet the press conference received scant pre-publicity and little coverage in the Massachusetts media.] 

Modern Slavery Is Edited Out

     Much of the story of modern slavery in Africa was in fact cut out of Prof. Gates’s recently released CD-tome on Africa, Encarta Africana, which he edited.  The project claims to be “the largest CD collection of knowledge about geography, history, and culture of Africa and people of African descent.”
 
     But Ari Nave—a researcher/writer on slavery for Gates and who was responsible for the volume’s article “Trans-Saharan and Red Sea Slave Trade”—told  Massachusetts News that he was surprised to see that all but one sentence on modern-day slavery in Africa had been cut from the final version of the text.

     While Nave said that he was “totally flabbergasted to find that there was widespread institutionalized slavery” today in Africa, the final CD-version of the article with his byline reads that only “a minor underground trade in slaves probably still exists.”
 
     Nave said he doesn’t know how much of the decision to edit out the facts about today’s African slavery was “politically motivated.” But he does believe that the subject of  contemporary African slavery would “interest the primary consumers of the [so-called] Afropaedia.” 
 
     Massachusetts News left several messages with Louis and Gates, who were in Boston this week, but neither scholar returned the calls.

Disappointment With Black Reaction

     Jok Madut Jok, a professor of history at Loyola Marymount University, has been studying slavery in the Sudan for the last nine years. “I am disappointed with the reaction, especially from African-Americans,” he told Massachusetts News. He blames the poor reaction partly on the influence of the Muslim African-American community, led by Louis Farrakhan. 
 
     “They have denied that slavery still exists,” said Jok. “They are still resistant to the idea because they have a good relationship with the Sudanese government.” Jok claims that Farrakhan and many of his followers “have done business with that government” and says, “When the Sudan does well economically, they build up their war machine and have the ability to take more slaves from the South.” Sage agreed with the view that Farrakhan’s connections with the Sudanese government are partly responsible for the silence about the contemporary African slave trade.
 
     But there are other reasons for the silence, said  Jok. “African-Americans are afraid to acknowledge the situation because they think it promotes white attitudes of supremacy” to know that slavery still goes on in Africa today, he said. 
 
     Nevertheless, Jok insists that those responsible for the modern slave trade must be held accountable. “While they have held Europeans and Americans and even Jews to the fire for participation [in slavery], they have forgotten the Arabs’ participation,” said Jok, adding that the Arab role in slavery began in the 15th century. No matter what the consequences, he said, “to fail to acknowledge this is to be oblivious to the suffering of Africans that still goes on today.”

Slavery is an International Problem

     But Richard Newman, a research officer at Harvard’s W.E.B. Dubois Institute, told Massachusetts News that he doesn’t understand “why fighting slavery is the special responsibility of people of color.”

     “If there is slavery” today, said Newman, “why isn’t it the responsibility of everybody.” Newman then cited a recent study in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which discusses slave labor in Thailand, India, and Indonesia. “Slavery is not an African phenomenon. It’s an international phenomenon,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense to focus on Africa when slavery broadly defined is international.”

     When asked about why the American Anti-Slavery Group hasn’t been able to gain much support from the African-American community, Newman said there is “a lot of suspicion about the group” because its focus is largely on African slavery. But Sage said that his group tries to focus on Sudan and Mauritania because they are the “worst and most often ignored cases of slavery.”

New Anti-Slavery Action?

     Despite slights by the academic community, Sage claims that his group sees progress. After listening to Moctar Teyeb speak, Rev. Ray Hammond of the Black Ministerial Alliance organized a committee to follow the progress of this issue. Details of the committee’s work have not yet been made public and Hammond was not available for comment. 
 
     Sage predicts this issue will get more attention in the near future. High schools nationwide have raised money to participate in a slave buy-back program. Sage said he hopes that groups like “Unicef will be embarrassed by kids who have done more to free slaves than they have.”
 
     Recently, Sage’s group has come under fire by UNICEF leaders. They claim that through its policy of buying slaves out of bondage, the American Anti-Slavery Group is only fueling the slave trade.
 
     Sage also told Massachusetts News that his group’s  pleas have been ignored by Amnesty International, which assured Sage and his colleagues that it would look into the issue. Five years later, Amnesty International has failed to act, said Sage. 
 
 

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