Asylum Network

Stories of Survival

Aminata

Mauritania

Aminata is making up for lost time. An asylee from a destitute African country, she is living and working in New York City, learning English and saving up for a computer. Although she works the cash register at a local supermarket (earning her living by operating a technology she had never even seen before three years ago), her goal is to open a hair salon where she will plait and braid the hair of ex-patriot Africans like herself.

Until she escaped Mauritania in 1997, such a seemingly normal life was an unfathomable dream. Aminata was born a slave in 1942. “Owned” by an Arab family, her parents, grandparents and great-grandparents had been slaves before her. She is a link in a generational chain that is almost never broken in Mauritania – Aminata’s children were born enslaved to the same family.

“Ever since I was old enough to walk, I was forced to perform manual labor for this family all day, every day,” she said. “We never had days off. We hardly knew that it was Saturday or Sunday, because we had to work every day. Even if we were sick, we had to work.”

Outside Mauritania, it is little known that slavery is engrained in the country’s national culture and consciousness. Amnesty International and Kevin Bales, executive director of Free the Slaves, have each extensively documented the pervasiveness of slavery in Mauritania: The country’s economy, such as it is, is entirely borne upon the backs of its slaves. They sweep, clean, care for children, work the fields, build houses, haul water and bricks, tend sheep and livestock.

Although it was officially outlawed in 1980, slavery’s abolition has never been enforced by the government. Ownership of slaves was made illegal, but no legal change in the relationship between master and liberated slave was enforced – masters, or chiefs, are not required to pay their slaves, who in turn have no legal protection and nowhere to go. For its part, the government can claim that slavery has been abolished, which is legally, if not practically, true.

“Open your eyes, listen with your ears and do some research. There are people who suffer. There are slaves,” implored Aminata. “They killed my parents in front of me. They killed people in front of me. Maybe that’s why I’m afraid of nothing.”

As a young girl, Aminata gradually took over her mother’s duties caring for one of the master’s five wives and her 15 children. Aminata started each day by preparing their breakfast at 5 a.m. Because her township only had one well, this often meant trekking from village to village in search of water and wood for kindling. The day would end with Aminata massaging the legs and arms of her master’s wife because she had trouble sleeping. Beatings were routine, and there was nothing she could do to protect herself from the wooden stick or leather belt that was frequently used to inflict punishment.

Aminata, like most slaves, was denied an education. However, one of the chief’s sons had been tenderly raised by Aminata’s mother. In a gesture of gratitude, he took it upon himself to educate Aminata. His father let him take 10-year old Aminata into private quarters, assuming that he was raping the girl. Instead, Aminata was taught to speak French, read and write.

Still, her days were filled with endless hardship. and mindless brutality. One day in 1987 Aminata tried to intervene when her own mother was being beaten. Her audacity enraged the master. As punishment, he bound her hands, branded her like chattel with a burning iron, and struck her across the left brow, the ring on his finger leaving a deep scar.

Aminata first tried to escape this unbearable life in the early 1990s. But since she had never before been outside her village, she took a wrong turn upon sneaking off the compound. Instead of heading towards the Senegalese border, she walked for two days in the wrong direction. She took refuge with the slaves of another family, but was soon discovered. Her master and his men retrieved her immediately.

“They bound my wrists and ankles and tied me to a date tree in the middle of the family compound, and left me there for a week,” she said, rolling up her sleeves to expose dark scars snaking around her wrists. “He cut my wrists with a razor, so that I bled terribly.”

When her own son tried to escape not long after, she was punished in his place. When the master could not find the boy, he locked Aminata in a small windowless hut for three days without food or water. “It was too small for me to stand up in,” she said. She survived on bread and water slipped to her by other slaves.

Five years later, in 1996, Aminata’s father was blamed for negligence when the master’s camels disappeared. He was beaten so badly that within two months of the incident, he died. Less than a year later, Aminata’s mother also died, worn out by a life of slavery.

Despairing and newly determined, Aminata struck upon an escape plan: A fellow slave spirited her off the family grounds and escorted her to the Senegal River. At the river, a man with a small wooden boat agreed to sneak her into Senegal, where she was led to a safe house run by a former slave from Mauritania.

She stayed at the house, a sanctuary for runaways, from 1997 until late 1999, when her fear of being captured became overwhelming. The master of the house, himself an escaped slave, empathized and arranged for her passage to the United States on a Greek boat, the captain of which agreed to hide her on board and drop her off in Baltimore.

Once in Maryland, Aminata made her way to New York with the help of a few sympathetic Africans, a string of sympathetic strangers. With help from people she met in Harlem, she started her immigration application process immediately. Her case was referred to immigration court, so she hired a lawyer for $200, money she earned by braiding hair. But the lawyer was a no-show, and the judge, realizing she had no counsel, gave her a list of nonprofit organizations that would provide free legal service.

“I saw the name New York Association for New Americans and I said ‘that’s it,’” recalled Aminata. She contacted NYANA and met with attorney Jennifer Guilfoyle, who worked with the Physicians for Human Rights Asylum Network to schedule a medical evaluation by New York emergency medicine physician Seth Manoach.

Aminata was granted asylum in August of 2001 and is now working to bring her three children, two of whom are in Senegal, to the United States. She sends money for their education and is in regular touch with them. The third is unreachable, still enslaved in Mauritania.

“The only thing I miss are my children, but not Africa, not Mauritania,” she said, adding that although she “will do anything” to bring them over, she still would have tried to escape even if it had meant never seeing her children again.

Working as a cashier, hoping to own a computer and, perhaps, her own business, Aminata has a message for the world – she wants to give speeches and she wants to tell people her story.

“I want everyone to understand that there are slaves, especially in Mauritania. People have to know about this. Otherwise people back there will amount to nothing. The journalists need to write about it, because slavery exists,” said Aminata, truly free for the first time in her life. “The first night I was here, I said ‘I am in a different world.’ Back home, we didn’t have electricity. There was no telephone, there’s nothing. It was a new life. It’s hard at first, but with time, it gets better. It gets better.”

© Physicians for Human Rights