Anyway, good news for a change! Hadidjatou Mani (alternately Adidjatou Mani Koraou) won her case against the Nigerien government for failing to protect her from slavery. The Community Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) ordered Niger to pay Ms. Mani damages in the amount of 10,000 CFA francs (somewhere in the vicinity of $20,000).
Slavery, which was allegedly abolished upon independence from France in 1960, was criminalized in Niger in 2003. Local anti-slavery NGO Timidria estimated in 2004 that despite this legislation, at least 43,000 people remained enslaved in Niger, most of them members of a hereditary slave caste. A big slave-freeing party was planned for spring 2005, but the Tuareg tribal leaders backed out at the last minute and announced that there were no slaves, and that being the case, they couldn't possible free anyone, so everybody might as well just go home. (That actually happened; everyone had already shown up for the ceremony and everything.)
Ms. Mani's case is fairly typical: She was born into slavery and, in 1996, sold at age 12 by her mother's owner to a man named El Hadj Souleymane Naroua who used her for labor and sex. Naroua gave her a "liberation certificate" in 2005. (That thing had better have had some REALLY fancy calligraphy, because otherwise, the two year delay post-criminalization of slavery is just unconscionable.) When she attempted to leave, certificate in hand, he explained that actually, that whole "freedom" thing just meant an upgrade to concubine status. She eventually fled and married another man, at which point Mr. Naroua had her prosecuted, then jailed, for bigamy. Awesome. She hopes that the new ECOWAS verdict will overturn her bigamy conviction.
Typically, most of the media coverage of Ms. Mani's case reports that she was "SOLD AT AGE 12 INTO SEXUAL SLAVERY!!!1!! OMG SEX SLAVE WOWZ0RZ!!" Let's unpack that a bit, shall we?
According to these articles Ms. Mani was sold as a sadaka, which they say means "sex slave," to her master. But, they also say that after she was "liberated," Mr. Naroua forced her into a wahiya marriage to prevent her from leaving. This is confusing, because apparently, sadaka and wahiya are synonyms used in Niger (among the Hausa and Taureg respectively) to describe women taken as illegal fifth wives. Because Islam allows only four wives, these women have no legal status. So, yes, this system of concubinage constitutes sexual slavery by any reasonable standard, but it seems a bit sensationalist to define the word sadaka* that way, particularly given the misleading distinction drawn from wahiya "marriage."
Side note: Am I the only one wondering what kind of legal system refuses to recognize the existence of a marriage when it comes to allowing a woman to claim legal benefits, but will then turn around and convict her for bigamy if she marries someone else legally? How does that make sense?
And while I'm ranting, isn't it interesting that we never hear the house slaves of the American South referred to as sex slaves despite all the forced sex inflicted upon them? Ms. Mani was indeed raped repeatedly by her master over a 10 year period, but she was also forced to perform arduous domestic and agricultural labor on a daily basis for her master and his four legal wives. I wonder who gets to make the call of what constitutes rape incidental to one's status as chattel versus sexual slavery. Anyone else think it has something to do with our assessment of the perpetrators' comparative barbarism?
Anyway, congratulations to Ms. Mani, and a hearty "way to not suck!" to the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice for their first ever ruling on slavery.
*Lengthy linguistic digression: I did some investigating to see whether the phonetic similarity of sadaka to the Hebrew term tzedakah (which is usually translated as "charity") was a coincidence. It's not; they're the same word. The Hausa custom of sadaka marriage is traditionally an act of charity from which the bride's family does not expect to derive financial benefit. Apparently, the practice has evolved (or devolved, I guess) to provide a way to get rid of unattractive daughters to men who already have a few wives lying around and maybe milk some money out of the new husband. This historical overview of slavery in Niger notes another route to becoming a sadaka: If a man has a child with his female slave the slave becomes er sadaka ("integrated") and her child has legal status as a non-slave. I'm thinking this was probably the situation with Ms. Mani, given that she bore 3 of Naoura's children while enslaved. Anyway, I think it's pretty interesting that, as a result of coverage of Ms. Mani's case (and the power of the internets), the word sadaka will now mean "sex slave" despite the fact that there's no evidence it was ever used that way before.
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