Mauritania Abolishes Slavery — Twice
Mauritania abolished slavery in 1981, the last country in the world to do so, and made it a crime only in 2007. The institution there is hereditary and descent-based. The Haratin, sometimes called Black Moors, are the descendants of people enslaved by the Arab-Berber Bidhan over centuries, and status passes through the mother; the relationship is enforced by custom, religious instruction and economic dependence rather than by chains. Abolition had been declared before — by the French in 1905, and in the constitution at independence in 1960 — and the 1981 ordinance was the third attempt. It provided for compensation to owners, which was never paid, and no criminal penalty at all, so there was nothing to prosecute. The 2007 law made enslavement punishable by up to ten years, and specialised courts were created in 2015 with penalties raised to twenty. Prosecutions have been very few. Estimates of the number of people still in some form of hereditary servitude range from tens of thousands to several hundred thousand out of a population of about 4.7 million, and the government's position is that the problem consists of the after-effects of slavery rather than slavery. Anti-slavery campaigners have been imprisoned more often than slaveholders. Biram Dah Abeid, who burned books of religious jurisprudence used to justify the practice, has been jailed repeatedly and came second in the presidential election of 2019. The Haratin remain the poorest and least educated part of the country. The pattern is worth stating plainly. A practice was abolished four times over a century by governments that did not intend to enforce the abolition, and the people who campaign against it are prosecuted under laws about public order and racial incitement.
- Year: 1981 CE
- Category: Social
