I've Stopped Reading News Stories about 200 Kidnapped Nigerian Girls & Maybe You Should Too

Child Slavery in Nigeria

First let me say that I am heartsick at the news of these Nigerian school girls being abducted by Muslim terrorists, who are now threatening to sell them into slavery. But having lived and worked in Africa, things aren't always what they seem.  In trying to explain where I'm coming from, I would first like to pose a question.  Which event carved a deeper scar on the human soul -- the Holocaust or 9/11?   In magnitude there is no comparison, even though those personally affected would understandably have a different sense of the two tragedies' emotional scale.  But let me get back to the situation iat hand.

Conservative Christians have tried to turn the abduction of the Nigerian school girls into a lurid meme of savage Muslims ravaging young Christian virgins and selling them in slave markets. Feminists haven't gone that far. But the interpretations I read have emphasized the fact that these impoverished girls are being punished by their fanatical attackers for getting an education, so that they will have no options in life and because of sexism nobody has raised a finger to rescue them.

Now, here is where the missing context becomes so important.  Nigeria has been identified as one of the four countries in the world with the largest number of child slaves.  Yes, I said child slaves (see BBC article).  These are not young girls abducted into the harems of ugly old Muslim men.  To the contrary they are nearly 700,000 children with many of them being girls, who are bought and sold by professional Nigerian families in the Christian south as domestic servants.

 And feminists -- please take note of who buys these child slaves.  It is professional couples, where the husband and wife both work and they need domestic servants to raise the children and manage the household.  So let's take a moment to reflect on the tragic situation of the 200 school girls. What makes this situation horrifying in Nigeria is not what makes it horrifying to us.  Every wealthy Nigerian household has child slaves. And bytheway, most wealthy Nigerians are Christians since the Muslims are mostly living in the impoverished north. (The fact that wealth is not being distributed is one of the main reasons for the strife in the country.)  In any case, the fact  that  girls will be sold into slavery is just a fact of life in Nigeria, many of whom will be sexually abused. What makes this tragic in the Nigerian context is that the  girls who were kidnapped were not designated to live out their lives as slaves.  In fact, they were getting an education, so that they might grow up to be professional women, who would marry professional men and therefore be on the market for s-l-a-v-e-s to manage their households and raise their children.

Now what does any of this have to do with the Holocaust and 9/11?    While I grieve for the girls who have been abducted, I have decided to save the greater share of my grief and rage for the 700,000 child slaves who are today as I write this post working and in some cases being sexually abused in the homes of privileged Nigerians.

But where does my rage come from?  Can you imagine how I feel as an African-American woman to have learned this morning that many of these child slaves are abducted at the ages of 6 and 7 and then taken to the neighboring, poorer countries of Togo and Benin.  There they are forced to work breaking stones and doing other menial tasks to make them more docile and to forget who their families were and where they came from. In this way, the slave marketers can get higher prices for the slaves when they bring them to Lagos and other Nigerian cities.

Nigeria is today sliding into a civil war.  The  Christian south has refused to share its oil wealth with the impoverished Muslim north. There had been a tacit agreement that Nigeria would alternate Christian and Muslim presidents. The election of their current President, Goodluck Jonathan broke that agreement.  The news accounts about the missing girls have said nothing about the 1400 other school children who have been killed, and thus the local government was warned not to build the boarding school, where the girls were taken from.  The government troops have killed and terrorized so many Muslim families, that those sitting on the fence are now joining Boko Haram.

So where do you stand?  Myself, I stand against slavery.  I desperately want to see those girls rescued. But I know that it would have nothing whatsoever to do with ending that despicable institution in Nigeria.