So, as this is missing persons adjacent, I thought I would recommend the book Slave: My True Story by Mende Nazer and Damien Lewis. Mende was abducted at the age of twelve or so (she doesn’t know her date of birth) and enslaved for close to a decade before she escaped. And this happened in modern times, in the 1990s.
I will warn people that it’s pretty graphic. Mende describes the circumcision she endured at age 9 (a tribal custom) and also describes experiencing sexual abuse while she was enslaved.
The first part describes her childhood in south Sudan; she was a member of the Duba tribe. She had a very happy childhood as the adored youngest child in the family, and you learn a lot about the Duba culture from her memories. I don’t know how the Duba live today but in the 70s and early 80s when Mende was growing up, they lived much differently than people do in the West. They lived in grass huts and nudity or near-nudity was common. Mende didn’t wear clothes regularly until she was old enough to attend school, for which she was given a uniform. Her parents didn’t wear clothes either, or shoes. She learned Arabic at school (the Duba children weren’t allowed to speak in their native language there, and were called “savages” by the Arab teachers) and dreamed of becoming a doctor. Her father (an illiterate cattle farmer) told her he would do everything he could to try to make that happen.
When she was about twelve, Arabs from north Sudan raided Mende’s village, captured her and many other children, took them to Khartoum and sold them as slaves. Mende and her family were Muslims, and Muslims are not supposed to enslave other Muslims, but it didn’t matter. Her owner, a devout Muslim, told her “Islam isn’t for black people like you.” She spent seven or eight years with one family, cooking and cleaning and caring for the children, almost never leaving their house. Her owner was the mother of the family, and treated her quite badly.
She was able to escape after her owner “lent” her to the owner’s sister who lived in London, and the sister “lent” her to friends for a short period, and those friends told her that how she was being treated was against the law in England and that she was entitled to wages and days off. Mende was allowed to go outside while she was in London, and she kept questioning dark-skinned black people on the street until she found one who was south Sudanese like her, and then told them she was enslaved and begged for help, and they helped her.
This book was very enlightening to me about modern slavery, and also about the psychological affects it has on both the enslaved person and the enslaver. Mende had opportunities to escape her enslavement in Sudan, which she never took because she was terrified of her owner and felt she had little chance of succeeding anyway, and then later because she was so depressed from being so horribly abused that she felt as if she deserved to be treated this way. And it felt to me like the owner felt she HAD to treat Mende this way, because if she treated Mende with kindness and respect, then that would be acknowledging that she didn’t deserve to be enslaved. The same way as how she would not acknowledge Mende’s Muslim faith, because that would be admitting that what she was doing to Mende was horribly wrong and against the teachings of her faith.
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