Chittlin' Talk: Student filmmaker Jigar Mehta documents slavery's persistence in West Africa

Friday, March 30, 2007

Student filmmaker Jigar Mehta documents slavery's persistence in West Africa

"Slavery — in the form of manual labor, sheep herding, cattle herding, construction, and domestic work — has been going on for over 800 years since the Arabs came down," said Mehta. Mauritania’s population is a mixture of indigenous West Africans (also called "Black Moors" and "Afro-Mauritanians") and Arabs from North Africa, or "White Moors." Everyone is Muslim but slavery persists despite the Mauritanian government’s legal ban on slavery.

Go to http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/09/13_mehta.shtml

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Booker T. Washington said:

"There is another class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs -- partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs....There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who do not want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public."