Fidgeting nervously
with the rough bright yellow cotton shawl she had wrapped around herself
from head to toe, Aichana Bint Abeid Bilal explained her name.
"It means 'our'
Aicha, the daughter of the 'Abd', which means the slave. And Bilal
was the slave of the Prophet Mohammed, who was the first to issue
the call to prayer from the Kabbah in Mecca," she said.
Each of her names
was intended to remind her that she was a slave, from a slave class
whose names had borne that label over the centuries.
Her tone was unemotional.
The long fingers of her hard-worn hands were gripped tightly in the
shawl, as she told of her father the slave, her mother the slave,
her children and her brothers and sisters, who were all claimed by
her master, and her sister and cousin who still live enslaved in the
village of Lemkeya, 100 miles south-east of the Mauritanian capital,
Nouakchott.
"My sister and
my cousin are still with the master. For them, what I did was against
the law. To my cousin and my sister, what I did was illegal. What
is legal is for them to stay with the master. The master [pretended
to] them that I was in prison because I had fled, and that I had been
tortured. That frightened them," and they had no way of knowing that
she had escaped.
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