Thousands still live in slavery in north

“The government believes slavery ended with independence, when many of the people who had been living as slaves in the colonial period were freed,” said Temedt President Mohammed Ag Akeratane, “but I would estimate there are still several thousand people living in slavery or slavery-like conditions in modern Mali.”

According to Temedt, which means “solidarity” in the Touareg language Tamasheq, slavery continues in the north in the region of Gao 1,200km north of the capital, Bamako, and around the town of Menaka 1,500km north of Bamako.

Most of the slavery takes place between the Berber-descended Touaregs and the indigenous Bella people who live in this region, although the Peul and Songhai communities have also been known to use slaves in the past, according to Temedt.

Iddar Ag Ogazide, a Bella, said he lived as a slave in Ansongo, 80km south of Gao, where he worked for the Touareg Ag Baye family for 35 years without receiving a salary or an education.  The Ag Bayes bought his great-grandmother and inherited his family members from one generation to the next. In March 2008 Iddar finally could not take any more and hatched a successful escape plan - he is currently living in Gao.

Photo: Celeste Hicks/IRIN

Shelter just outside the town of Gao in northern Mali.

It is not clear what the state could do in cases such as Iddar’s, as Mali has no law formally forbidding slavery. Although Mali's constitution states all people are equal, and the country has signed up to the major international conventions banning slavery, including the UN supplementary convention on abolishing slavery (1956), officially the practice was never criminalised in Mali, which makes it difficult to seek legal redress in cases such as Iddar Ag Ogazide's.

Nevertheless, Temedt has instructed a lawyer to work with Iddar and another escaped female slave in Gao. “We would like to see if they can take a case to court for compensation,” said Temedt’s Akeratane. At the time of writing Temedt was also exploring the possibility of bringing forward a case for child abduction for his son, Ahmed.

"The difficulty of constructing a case for Iddar demonstrates the need for a law criminalising slavery in Mali," said Romana Cacchioli from Anti-Slavery International, a London-based human rights organisation which is supporting Temedt’s efforts.

But according to Akeratane, when interviewed in April in Malian paper Nouvelle Republique, there are currently many cases awaiting judgement and going nowhere fast, which sets an unpromising precedent for future ex-slaves who wish to pursue justice.

Shifting attitudes

One of Temedt’s principal goals is to instil a sense of pride in ex-slaves for their ethnic and cultural identity, which Akeratane hopes will help them to demand equal rights. The organisation runs human rights awareness sessions for groups vulnerable to slavery to make them aware they do not have to accept the tradition.

Support for the organisation is growing. Temedt has been in operation for just over two years and now has 18,000 members across eight regions of the country. It has also started to work with anti-slavery groups across the borders in Niger and Mauritania. Akeratane believes this is the first time the sensitive issue of continuing slavery is being tackled head -on in the country.

He is confident that attitudes will shift and slavery will one day be eradicated in Mali. Gamer Dicko, a Bamako-based journalist who comes from a black Tamasheq family, agrees: “Things are changing today, but very slowly. There are some black Tamasheq who say OK, our fathers were slaves but we are not. They are proud of their dress and speaking their own language.”

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