A long way from Freetown: the Sierra Leonean women deceived into slavery
Tens of millions of people are currently living in slavery. The trafficking of women from Sierra Leone to Oman is just one example of the current global crisis of slavery.
By Georgia L. Gilholy
Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone.
An estimated 40 million people are currently trapped in slavery. This figure is the equivalent of well over half the UK population and over three times the number of victims of slavery at the height of the Atlantic triangle in the eighteenth century.
Despite this grim fact, the approach to slavery in everyday conversation in Britain, Ireland and indeed across the developed world is rarely an urgent one, unless it concerns the latest centuries-old statue or plaque a committee of students or local councillors are considering pulling down.
It is not my intention to dismiss the importance of historic abuses, it is from these events that we can draw moral lessons, and indeed the Atlantic slave trade is a crucial example of how tireless activism, much of it from devout Christians, contributed to the outlawing of an abhorrent practice.
Yet, on the planet there are tens of millions of living, breathing humans who are victims of the ultimate crime- not being considered humans at all.
The trafficking of labour from Sierra Leone to Oman is just one example of this global crisis.
The BBC obtained video footage of a young Sierra Leonean woman, Kadiatu, pottering around a luxurious Omanese mansion, where each marble surfaced room has an attached bathroom, humming a hymn she learnt in her rural Sierra Leonean upbringing. “We are tired of crying every day and night, these people treat us like a slave,” she said.
She said she wished to make her mother proud, and that she could not find the money to finish a catering course. In desperate search of work, an online agent promised her overseas work as a cook in Oman, which she believed was in Europe. Upon arrival in Oman, via traffickers in Senegal, her passport was seized by a recruitment agency.
She described gruelling workdays that lasted from 4:30 am to midnight, with just an hour’s respite in the afternoon and no days off.
Under Oman’s kafala system, migrants into two-year ‘contracts’ with employers, absconding from which remains a crime, and maids have been known to be arrested before boarding planes. There is no legal minimum wage or maximum working hours. Employers generally pay a fee to agencies to ‘buy’ the worker, the costs of which are often illegally recouped from the worker’s already paltry wages. Physical and sexual abuse are likely commonplace.
Meanwhile, employers who decide to dump the maids often keep their passports, and they are thus unable to return home even if they were to scrape together the money for a plane fare. In the capital of Muscat two exhausted and confused escaped maids were killed after being hit by cars as they unknowingly wandered onto a busy road. Moreover, Oman’s strict Coronavirus lockdown policies likely exacerbated the abuse, given that the maids were surrounded by their abusive employers 24/7 as they were made to work and study from home.
Recent arrivals from Sierra Leone and other West African nations are particularly vulnerable to these kinds of abuses in the Gulf nations. While South Asian and Pacific workers also share a history of abhorrent treatment at the hands of ‘employers’ in the region, their presence has now been established for so long that more deft source nations, such as Indonesia and the Philippines example, have negotiated a better deal for their citizens, and years of presence there means personal support networks exist for workers of those nationalities, especially in the UAE and Kuwait where a more international presence means modern slavery, while still very much an issue, can sometimes risk thornier PR issues than in the less globally visible Oman.
Still recovering from the conclusion to its debilitating civil war in 2002, Sierra Leone’s already fragile agrarian-based economy has been badly scarred by the Coronavirus pandemic, and real GDP was estimated to have contracted by 2.7% across 2020 after surging by 5.4% in 2019. Opposition parties continue to face police violence and restrictions on expression and assembly. Corruption is visible at every level of governance, and journalists regularly face bogus defamation charges. Sierra Leone’s financial and structural woes are so much so that its authorities are essentially unbothered at the outward movement of people who risk adding another digit to their poverty figures.
The idea of a swift solution to modern slavery seems distant. Individual governments either lack the political and economic resources to hold others to account on the practice, or those who see themselves are reaping the surface benefits of a vast number of unpaid workers have no incentive to even in the United Kingdom, where the government regularly harps on about cracking down on human trafficking, the number of people identified as victims of modern slavery has been multiplying year on year, with over 10,000 people referred to authorities in 2019, with real figures likely exceeding this by a long shot. The reality is that slavery never left the global economy, it’s just easier for those in countries where it is less visible to pretend it did.