'Slavery Is Their Reality'.(Mauritania)

Abdel Nasser was given his first slave, a cherubic 5-year-old named Yebawwa, in 1969. According to a tradition among so-called white Moors in Mauritania, a boy asks for a coveted object at the moment of his circumcision. Many request a gun or a camel. Most, especially those in the elite warrior caste to which Nasser belongs, ask for a slave. Though Mauritania formally abolished slavery in 1981, Arab white Moors in the country still hold an estimated tens of thousands of black Moors, who are Afro-Mauritanian, as slaves--or in what the U.S. State Department prefers to call the "vestiges of slavery." The black Moors have no legal rights and receive no pay; within Mauritania's rigid, racialized caste system, they carry water, tend camels and even wash their masters' feet. Masters often take female slaves as concubines. "I have personal knowledge of this," Nasser says.

So do others. While the Mauritanian government denies the existence of slaves, last week Amnesty International released a report that detailed slavery in the country and criticized the government for turning a "blind eye" to the problem. According to the report, "the government has not prosecuted a single offender for retaining a slave, or for buying or selling someone into slavery." Instead the task has fallen to people like Nasser, 38, who now lives in France, and his partner Boubacar Messaoud, a former slave still in Mauritania. Since 1995 their advocacy group SOS Slaves has worked to free slaves throughout the country through information campaigns, legal advocacy and even clandestine rescue operations.

Mauritania has banned SOS from operating in the country, but the group continues to press the country's military leader, Col. Maaouya ould Taya, to enforce abolition, which made slavery illegal but did not criminalize slave ownership. It's not been an easy fight. Nasser, who moonlights as an art-gallery assistant in Paris, has been convicted in absentia for operating an illegal NGO. Messaoud works in the Mauritanian city of Nouakchott as a counselor for escaped slaves. He's been arrested repeatedly. SOS works with the rare sympathetic imam who will defend escaped slaves in Sharia courts, and with the rare lawyer who will do the same pro bono in asylum courts overseas. Most daringly, SOS uses ex-slaves to infiltrate nomadic camps in remote parts of the country. They tell current slaves that freedom is possible.

The vast majority, however, are too scared to follow. Certainly, some slaves fear physical punishment if they flee. Most, however, are held in place by what Frederick Douglass once called "the ...