by Justin Marozzi, UnHerd
The Gulf is built on exploitation
At first glance, Hamey is deceptively normal. Squat and dark, with deep brown eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard, he looks like thousands of other middle-aged men in Bamako, Mali’s dusty, sweat-soaked capital. In fact, Hamey was once a slave, a condition he endured until 2018 — when he was in his mid-fifties — and which his family had suffered for as many generations as he could remember. Finally, Hamey escaped, fleeing the village where he’d been publicly whipped and beaten. But in Bamako, he faced new challenges, struggling to provide for two wives and 12 twelve children, together living in a squalid temporary shelter. “I have too much pain in my heart,” he told me, when we met in 2020. “I’m closer to despair than hope.”
Modern slavery is not limited to remote corners of West Africa. There are reportedly 1.1 million people living in modern slavery in the US, and 122,000 in the UK. Yet the numbers are clear, with the Arab world, and especially the Gulf, now a hub of modern slavery in the 21st century. Echoed in other corners of the Islamic world, Mali included, it speaks to a practice with deep cultural roots — and to how different societies choose to deal with their past in strikingly different ways.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many Westerners tend to focus on their own historical relationship with slavery. But if the triangular Atlantic trade came strewn with blood, it was far from unique in either scale or timespan. Enduring some 400 years until the 19th century, European slavers turned some 14 million Africans into property. By contrast, the slave trade in the Muslim world has been even more enduring. Beginning in the 7th century, and continuing right into modern times, the institution has overseen the enslavement of up to 17 million souls.