Mauritania: the last country on earth to abolish slavery

Mauritania abolished slavery in 1981. It was the last country on earth to do so, and it did not make owning a person a criminal offence until 2007. The descendants of the enslaved, the Haratin, are roughly forty per cent of the population, and the practice has not ended.

This is the country whose absence from our audit corpus started this section. It is also the single clearest answer to anyone who says the history on these pages is medieval.

The conquest, eleventh century

The Almoravids emerged in the eleventh century from the Sanhaja Berber confederation of the western Sahara, in what is now Mauritania and southern Morocco. They were a religious reform movement that became an empire: they took Morocco, founded Marrakesh, destroyed the Ghana Empire’s hold on the trans-Saharan trade, and crossed into Spain in 1086 to halt the Christian reconquest at Sagrajas.

The territory that became Mauritania was Islamized in that movement and then Arabized over the following centuries by the migration of the Beni Hassan, whose dialect, Hassaniya, is the country’s Arabic today.

The caste that conquest built

Mauritanian society still carries the shape of that history in a way few societies do so openly.

The Bidan, the “white Moors,” Arab-Berber, historically the slave-owning class.
The Haratin, the “black Moors,” the descendants of enslaved sub-Saharan Africans, Arabic-speaking, Muslim, and roughly forty per cent of the population.
The non-Arab African groups of the south, Halpulaar, Soninke and Wolof.

The Haratin speak the same language and practise the same religion as the people who owned their ancestors, which is why the situation is so persistent and so hard to see from outside: this is not a religious minority being oppressed. It is a hereditary caste inside a single religious community, produced by the trans-Saharan slave trade and never dismantled.

The abolitions, plural

Mauritania has abolished slavery repeatedly, which is itself the evidence that the earlier abolitions did not work.

1905: abolished by the French colonial administration.
1961: the independence constitution.
1981: abolished again by presidential decree, the last country in the world to do so, and with no criminal penalty attached.
2007: criminalized, twenty-six years after abolition.
2015: a new law raising the penalty to twenty years and declaring slavery a crime against humanity.

Between 1981 and 2007 owning a human being in Mauritania was illegal in the sense that it had no legal standing, and legal in the sense that nobody could be prosecuted for it.

What is happening now

The numbers are contested and the disagreement is instructive.

The Global Slavery Index has estimated around 90,000 people in modern slavery in Mauritania, roughly 2 per cent of the population, with a far larger share assessed as vulnerable. Local sources quoted by the BBC and CNN have given figures as high as 20 per cent. Nobody has a census, because the state’s official position is that the problem is solved.

Treat the low figure as a floor rather than a total. It is derived from surveys in a country where the practice is criminal, hereditary, rural and denied by the government.

What is not contested is the enforcement record. Prosecutions since 2007 can be counted on two hands. Meanwhile the anti-slavery activists have been imprisoned: Biram Dah Abeid, a Haratin abolitionist and presidential candidate, has been jailed repeatedly, and organisations documenting the practice have been refused legal registration.

The part that matters for the argument

Slavery in the Islamic world is usually discussed, when it is discussed, in the past tense and at a distance, as a medieval institution comparable to institutions everyone else has also abandoned. Mauritania is the control on that claim. The trade that supplied it ran for thirteen centuries, the caste it created is still there, the last legal abolition is younger than most people reading this, and the state that finally criminalized it in 2007 now prosecutes the people who report it rather than the people who practise it.

The Atlantic slave trade ended in the nineteenth century and is examined in every Western classroom. This one is still running, and the countries whose delegates lecture the UN Human Rights Council about apartheid have not put it on an agenda.