Slave: Snatched off Britain’s streets. The truth from the victim who brought down her traffickers.

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Mende Nazer lost her childhood at age twelve, when she was sold into slavery. It all began one horrific night in 1993, when Arab raiders swept through her Nuba village, murdering the adults and rounding up thirty-one children, including Mende. My original intention was to find a book that would describe Sudan positively. I fear I've failed at that. Recovered Histories Anti-Slavery International has digitised its collection of 18th and 19th century literature on the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Recovered Histories captures the narratives of the enslaved, enslavers, slave ship surgeons, abolitionists, parliamentarians, clergy, planters and rebels. For the first time since I'd been captured, I was sitting on a chair in a living room being treated like everyone else. The strange thing was that I didn't really like it. I'd spent so many years being treated like a slave and that's what I'd become used to. (259)

Ottobah Cugoano, ed. Vincent Carretta, 'Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evils of Slavery' (Penguin Classics 1999)

The contentious core of the book by Williams – who was the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago for 25 years until his death in 1981 – was that the abolition of the slave trade was not born out of humanitarian wishes but of economic necessity. To think that, almost 80 years after it was published, Britain is finally discovering Capitalism and Slavery is amazing Erica Williams Connell His daughter described how a letter he wrote to that effect “dropped like a bomb in 10 Downing Street”.

What a book - I cried and my heart broke. The language of the book is easy and simplistic. The story is told, with no literary embellishments and in the author's own voice - she is not a writer and so there is a matter of fact style (it was told to Damien Lewis, a journalist who helped Mende during her escape and who penned the book, but I'm glad he kept it simple). The book has 2 halves. The first is about Mende's life growing up in a small village in the Nuba mountains of Sudan; and then life after Arab raiders killed many of the people in her village, and captured her and other kids to be used as slaves for wealthy families. One of my professors is convinced megacities are the future. Even today, London's budget is bigger than several countries. Such mega-cities are fascinating because they are so international. There are so many cultures represented everywhere. Reading this book was the first time I had considered that international cities also import the troubles of their residents. It makes me think about how our world is so connected, slavery in Sudan also means slavery in London just as covid-19 in China can easily mean covid-19 everywhere else. So Slave: My True Story is an autobiography of Mende Nazer. Born in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, when she was about 12, she was kidnapped by Arab slave raiders and sold to a wealthy family in Khartoum. Eventually, she was taken to London and manages to escape, after seven years of slavery. Something about the dignity and courage of Mende Nazar as she recounts her appalling story grabs hold of your heart, allowing you to read on when it is almost unbearable. This book is roughly split into three parts. The first part details her childhood in the Nuba Mountains. While Mende describes it positively, there were definitely some heartbreaking scenes here, such as her experiences with female genital mutilation. However, as a whole, Mende's family seems so full of love and warmth and hearing stories of her childhood was really interesting. The second part describes her abduction and work in Khartoum. Finally, the last part talks about London and her eventual escape.William St. Clair, 'The Grand Slave Emporium: Cape Coast Castle and the British slave trade' Profile Books 2006 Mary Prince, 'The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave' ed. Sarah Salih, Penguin Classics 2000 In this book, Mende recounts the story through her own eyes with the help of author Damien Lewis. Because of the oral-tradition culture in which Mende grew up, she was able to remember and retell many vivid details and facts of the life she knew during her childhood and the life she later came to know as a slave in a bustling modern city. The first portion of the book recounts Mende’s childhood growing up in the Nuba mountains, a life full of familial love and enjoyment of life, with a few accounts that convey disdain for some of the difficult ways and traditions of that life (e.g., female genital mutilation/circumcision). I was touched by the recounting of her parent’s love and gentleness with her, loving her always, and sometimes with firmness, but without physical force—something that became routine in her days of enslavement.

I wish there was more about how she got used to living in the UK because that scene with the bus was really interesting. After all those years, Rahab [the woman who owned me] had completely destroyed my sense of my own identity and my own self-worth. I believed that I didn't deserve to be paid for my work. I lived in a state of complete terror of her. And I was still only a child. To rebel against the woman whom I called "master" and who called me "slave" had become unthinkable. It lay outside the range of possibilities that I could contemplate. (200) Melinda Elder, 'The Slave Trade and the Economic Development of 18th Century Lancaster Keele University Press 1992

this freedom was a terrifying thing. I was captured when I was still a child. I spent my teenage years and my early adulthood in slavery. For all that time, I had no freedom. I was a non-person. I didn't really exist. (311) Slave is the true story of Mende Nazer, a Sudanese woman whose childhood ended when she was captured and enslaved around age 12. One thing that made Mende’s story particularly stand out to me is that we are about the same age. Her slavery did not take place in the huts and villages of Sudan, but in the relatively modern city of Khartoum, where her well-to-do captors had most of the modern conveniences that we do (electricity, washer/dryer, stove/oven, etc). Emma Christopher, 'Slave ships, sailors and their captive cargoes 1730-1807' Cambridge University Press 2006 Williams Connell is the founding curator of the Eric Williams Memorial Collection Research Library, Archives and Museum at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago. Speaking from her home in Miami, Florida, she said, “To think that almost 80 years after it was published, Britain is finally discovering Capitalism and Slavery is amazing to me.

The next portion describes her capture, abuse, and rape, and then her being sold as a slave to a respected family in Sudan’s capital. There she worked for seven years, suffering physical, verbal, and emotional abuse before being sold to her “master’s” relatives, who ironically worked for the Sudanese embassy in London. London is where Mende escaped to freedom, but even there such an escape was an unlikely possibility. Paul Lovejoy, 'Transformations in Slavery: A history of slavery in Africa' Cambridge University Press There have been many rebuttals and affirmations of what has become known the Williams Thesis since it was first published in 1944, and in answer to these, Williams Connell quoted from the foreword of the recent third edition, by William Darity of Duke University in North Carolina, who wrote: “Although scholars of the British Industrial Revolution generally have ignored Williams’s proposition, they only can continue to do so by placing their own intellectual integrity at peril.” Everyone who has heard about the book finally being re-published in the UK has said the same thing to me: well, it’s about time!” Escaped but not free. The Brtitish government would not give her asylum saying that forced labour did not constitute a threat to her human rights. No doubt pressure from the Islamic Fundamentalist government of Sudan. It took two years, the fake court case from her dreadful owners and her book to be published in Germany the ensuing storm of publicity making it difficult for the British to send her home so then she was granted the right to stay.Michael Jordan, 'The Great Abolition Sham: The True Story of the End of the British Slave Trade' Sutton 2005 To conclude, Slave: My True Story is not an easy book to read. It's upsetting and it's unpleasant. However, this is also a remarkable tale of a brave young woman and a first hand account of a huge problem. The focus of this book is Mende. The Sudanese wars aren't explained at all. I recently finished First Raise A Flag: How South Sudan Won the Longest War but Lost the Peace so I felt like I could understand what was going on but for people who have not, this is not the book to turn to for Sudanese history. Rather, it describes Nuba culture and life in Khartoum through the eyes of a young girl. The National Archives also has a slavery section, which is a portal to research guides, digitised documents and teaching resources on Britain's slave trade and the abolition movement. Eventually she escaped and they were caught. But not only got away with it but sued a newspaper for saying they were slavers instead of legitimately employing an au pair (who was brought in on false papers). The newspaper did not investigate Mende's claims (pressure from the UK government?) and paid out. The diplomats had previously been charged with slavery but that time claimed diplomatic immunity to escape prosecution. It was a way of life for them. Why pay for an au pair, a nanny, a cook and a cleaner when you can enslave a child and instead of regular pay cheques, give her regular beatings. Both in their various ways, ensure compliance.