 Well, good evening, everybody. Welcome. It's just at 5.6, so I think we should start. It gives me a very great pleasure to welcome people here today. My name is Wayne Dooling. I'm merely in my capacity as chair of the Center for African Studies at SOAS, but I'm also in store and of slavery. So I have an interest in these topics. Our event today is the combination of I shouldn't say combination, because I'm sure there's a lot more to come. But it's one major step in a very long project, ongoing project, which is headed by my colleague, Dr. Marie Roday, second from your right, who is a very well established historian on West Africa, the West African Sahel, and very specifically on slavery. And Marie has been heading this project and several projects, which is the outcome of several major research grants. And Marie will speak in more detail about those grants. But of course, today, we are here today and partly to commemorate the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery. And this project is, or at least the papers we'll hear today and the presentations we'll hear today speak very directly to that topic. And I guess I should say it's of course of no, it'll be of no surprise to people in this room. And I should say we are, this is a webinar, so we have very many people online. But very many people in this country would think of the ending of slavery as having occurred with British emancipation in the 1830s, first the ending of the British slave trade in 1808, and then the ending of British slavery in 1834, 1838. And I guess some of us who would associate the ending of slavery with the long end in the Americas in Cuba and in Brazil. But today, we'll speak about the fact that slavery has a very long tail and continues in various forms today in parts of the African continent and specifically today we'll speak about the Sahel. So without any further ado, I will hand you over to my colleague. But before I do so, if I could say to people present, but also to people online, if you could just sort of take note of the fact that this, the image is some of the images you'll see today you might find quite distressing, so please feel free to leave the room if you wish. Of course, we hope that all people stay, but this is just a sort of disclaimer, I suppose. And if you don't want to appear on camera, I should remind you that this session is recorded. This is very specifically for people online, so please feel free to turn off your cameras. So welcome again and thank you, Marie. Would you like to come here? So I'm very glad to be here today to present some of the results of this long term project. So I will just introduce our guest today. So I will be introducing some of the outcomes of our ongoing project on slavery and forced migration in Mali, in Western Mali, and talking about how people attempt to escape slavery these days in Mali. Then we will move to a talk by Salufu Kamara, who is a Mali and anti-slavery activist of the Gambana RMFP movement. We'll be talking about activism against this and this slavery in West Africa and in Mali in particular. Our third guest is Asa Konate Kamara, also a Mali and anti-slavery activist of the Gambana movement, and she will be talking on on women against slavery in Mali and the importance of the women's activities and activism against slavery in Mali. And we'll finish with an online presentation by my colleague Lot Peckman, who is also co-ed on this project, who will be presenting some of her research linked to this project. So let's start. So this is a UKIRI funding research project entitled Slavery and Forced Migration in Western Mali. It's Lafmig, which started in 2020, and it's a three year project. So you can see on the screen, of course, Mali, but more specifically the region of Kairi Western Mali, the region the project is concerned with. So this is an international project with a team based here at SOAS, but also in Bamako with Professor Bakai Kamara of the Law School of Bamako, Dr. Lot Peckman at the University of Copenhagen, who is an anthropologist, Musa Kallapo, Mamadou San-Sisi, and Mayem Kullibali, who are our civil society partner with the organization Don Kossira. And joining the team as well is Iliad Jadi, who is an advocacy expert. So the objectives of the project were to conduct research on forced displacement, which are a result of decent based slavery in Western Mali people falsely displaced internally because they were expelled from their villages or because they tried to escape violence and had no choice to survive but to resettle elsewhere. So that's why you have this link made between slavery and forced migration in this project. So we are looking at this protracted displacement and how people, once they are displaced, escaping slavery, how they try to rebuild their lives and to integrate in the host societies where they resettle. But so that's the aspect of the research, but it's a research action project. So one part is also to advocate for concrete actions to fight against slavery in Mali in particular, but more generally in West Africa in the Sahel. So we do advocacy for the criminalization of decent based slavery and its promulgation as a law in Mali because until today, while slavery is abolished but not criminalized in Mali, decent based slavery is not criminalized. And linked to that is a series of activities we have conducted and continue to conduct it to promote intra-community dialogue and peace and understanding of the situation and of the victims of decent based slavery and a broader raising awareness program on the issue of decent based slavery to fight against even discrimination and to work for human rights. And Don Cosira is our central partner to do special activities with school children in Western Mali to raise awareness. So today, for example, they organize a SLAM competition in Cai, the main city of Western Mali, with seven high schools, secondary schools, with students to SLAM on the topic of decent based slavery. So that's in short what the project is about. So what is decent based slavery in Mali today? We often as when it was introducing the topic, we often think of slavery as something of the past. We have some dates of its abolition in Europe and the transatlantic world. And there was even for West Africa, what used to be French West Africa, an abolition of domestic slavery in 1905. But despite this abolition, it didn't mean the end of the practice, which adapted to this new legal environment to continue under other forms, but still in a violent way. So many people still suffer of discrimination and violence as a result of their hereditary slave status. It's based on the fact that because they had supposedly one ancestor at some time who was enslaved, they automatically inherit the status. It's hereditary. They cannot escape it or not easily. So until today, the descendants of the so-called enslaved despite abolition are still called slaves in some communities, especially in Western Mali. And this violence, it's based on stigmatization, discrimination. And our guest today will talk more specifically about that. But this violence can be very serious. It comes to exactions and even more murder. And we'll talk about such cases in a moment. And of course, people try, when it comes to this extent of violence in some of these villages, they have no choice but to escape, to migrate, to leave their community of origin where they were born, very often to resettle elsewhere, to escape slavery. So today in Western Mali, since 2018, you have more than 3,000 people who had to escape like this from one day to the other, to leave most of their belongings in the village of origin and just trying to resettle wherever they can. So we have been working with one of these host communities, the village of Mambiri in the Kitah district, which is also part of the region of Western Mali, of the region of Cai. And we have conducted two quantitative surveys and one qualitative survey from 2020 to 2022. And in this specific village, actually, there was the incoming of 1,203 people escaping slavery within three weeks in this village. They were coming from five different villages locating about 150 kilometers north of Mambiri. And within three weeks, they resettled in this small village. So the population doubled within three weeks in January 2019. So for the first quantitative surveys, we've interviewed 100 women and 100 men who had been falsely displaced escaping slavery to know about the kind of violence they experienced. And for the second quantitative survey, we interviewed both host populations and escapees and displaced ones, about 400 people in total, to try to understand the kind of social dynamic and the kind of integration that was a socio-economic survey. And we also did qualitative interviews in Mambiri. So in Mambiri, you have a population of 2,783 inhabitants of which 136 households. And out of these 136 households today, you have 31 who were displaced and adding up to the existing population. That is 1,203 people. That is 43% of the population today. Seventy-three percent of these family aids are involved in agriculture and 27% in livestock farming, which is a main or secondary activity. So obviously, in such situations where people are mostly in agriculture, of course what becomes crucial is access to land and in a situation in an environment which is quite vulnerable to climate hazards. So it has also, of course, pressure on land access and survival. So when we conduct this quantitative survey about the kind of violence that this population displaced, falsely displaced population experienced, we calculated that 85% of the displaced interviewees in Mambiri had experienced violence and or deprivation in their village of origin. It ranges from insults, threats to physical abuse, but also deprivation of health care, education, food and other kinds of deprivation. Sorry, my tables are mostly in French, but I will explain them in English anyway, so just illustrative. Among the households who have access to land, displaced households have on average much less land available for cultivation, less than three hectares on average per household. Compared with four indigenous households, almost nine hectares on average per household. But what is also important to keep in mind is that the displaced households are very often much larger. They are composed of many more people than the indigenous population in Mambiri. It's important within this framework not only to consider the average number of hectares per household, but also the number of hectares per adult. If we consider that at least one extra is needed for approximately two adults to be able to gain a sufficient subsistence level, that means a kind of threshold below which households do not have enough land to earn sufficient subsistence. Actually among the displaced households, it's only four of the 23 who are in a case where they are able to gain a sufficient subsistence level while compared with the local population, the native population of Mambiri, it's 62 to 72. So they are obviously in the displaced population are in a far more vulnerable population situation when it comes to access to land. But still they have been a strong commitment from the villager of Mambiri to give land or rent land to the incoming displaced population. And this is to praise here how much generous they have been to host these populations, these incoming populations. As I said they arrived within three weeks with hardly anything. So they had to rebuild their life. But still access to land despite this great generosity, access to land remains insufficient. And when it comes to even the community garden, which is very popular with Mambiri's women, its surface is still insufficient for everyone to have a plot. Only 8% of the displaced women have access to it. So these are just a few figures to introduce a situation for the host communities and the displaced populations, what kind of issues and difficulties they are faced with. And that's here my final slide. What are the issues at stake here? Discrimination and violence linked to disinvest slavery leads, as I've shown, to forced displacement. We generate pressure on land in the host villages but also on infrastructure. I highlighted the land tenure aspect but there are many other pressures like access to healthcare and to schools. I just got a message from Mambiri this morning telling me that there are too many schoolchildren and do also to these incoming populations in the school and the village is not able to pay for enough school teachers. So these displacements are long-lasting and pose real development challenges because these populations are in Mambiri to stay. They have already started building their houses in concrete and cement. So 91% of the displaced persons interviewed declared that they had no intention of ever returning to their village of origin. So it's about how these host communities, I chose only the example of Mambiri because it's where we've conducted detailed research and interviews but actually these issues are also at stake in other host communities confronted with the same situation. And even beyond the risk of conflict around land tenure, this pressure on local resources makes the village more vulnerable, including two terrorist groups. Actually there was a couple of months ago an attack. I mean Mambiri is at the border with the forest and there was an official forest post outside of Mambiri and it was attacked by we don't know terrorist bandits but just to say that the risk of terrorist groups and bandits are here and they can exploit of course a vulnerability, the social vulnerabilities of these villages despite all the generosity of the host population. If there are increased tensions around natural resources of course they become more vulnerable to any kind of manipulation. So I will just stop here and I will invite Salufu Kamara. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Salufu Laji Kamara. I am the Vice President of the Organization Anti-Slavery RMP Gambana Mali. I would like to continue in English but unfortunately I have difficulties to continue. I would have liked to carry on in English but unfortunately it's going to be difficult for me. So I am here today to talk to you about our movement called Gambana. So I am here today to talk to you about our movement which is called Gambana. So in Soninke Gambana means equality in rights in duty and in dignity. This movement of emancipation came from Mauritania and when it came to Mali we created our own organization which is called the RMFP so this is Mali Anurali for Brotherhood and Progress. It was created on the 1st of April 2017. Before the creation of this organization and before the Gambana movement there were some resistance and some revolts among slaves. But these resistance were isolated and were repressed bloodily. So the WhatsApp network allowed people to meet together and to work together against slavery. So it helped us to mobilize and we've seen many people assigned with state status join the Gambana movement. Regarding the increasing of the adhesion to Gambana among the people assigned with state status. The slaves were always responded with violence. It came to assassination. Today we have more than 6,722 active members of our movement. Today there are more than 6,722 active members in Gambana and the RMFP. And so in Mali there is an estimation that there is more than 11,000 members and supporters of the Gambana movement. So this increasing in activism against anti-slavery activism was responded with violence and physical aggressions. This violence included physical aggressions like public lynching, beatings and restrictions on public goods, for example water of healthcare. It was a restriction on the access to land. And because it was not sufficient they decided to chase people away from their villages and homes. And that's how it came with 3,000 refugees inside Mali because they were chased from their villages. Most of these people are children and women up to 76 percent. And so the movement has partly taken up in charge these refugees inside the country. Slavers also export slavery practices wherever they go in the world. So even in Europe in France some slavery forces people to work for them without being paid. So for example for the household chores, cleaning, shopping, cooking and all of this without being paid. And people of these two communities are forbidden to get married even if they're in love. For example in the diaspora in France we registered sex engagement cancellation because of slavery. Some marriage still carry on thanks to the determination of the engaged people themselves and of the support of the association. Coming back into Mali for example in 2020 four people were murdered under the eyes of their wives and children. The only reason they were murdered was because they refused the status of the slave status. We also encountered difficulties with state and religious authorities. Indeed at the beginning of the movement we encountered a generalized denial from any part. Now authority wanted to admit that slavery was a reality in Mali. Each violence which is committed against all members we filed a legal complaint. But most of this complaints remained without results until now. So we're happy to see that thanks to the efforts of NGOs of all movements and the Malian government begin to understand the stakes and to take the measure of the phenomena of this slavery. I would like to thank the actors of the Miflo SOS of London and Dr. Marie Rode who did not manage the efforts to explain the problem of slavery as a result of discrimination. And here I would like to thank the Slavic Project and the Swaz University and all the actors of the Slavic Project, especially Dr. Marie Woodhead, that led it, for their help for us, because it was really important to get people to understand the phenomenon of this slavery. The conferences, workshops and advocacy activities really helped to raise awareness around this issue. And thanks to all these, we are happy to see that the Malian government had begun to consider the adoption of a law criminalizing this slavery at last. And I would like to continue to carry on because I have so many things to say, but given the time, I'm going to leave you with that and I thank you for your attention. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Asa Konate. I am the General Secretary of the Women's Section of the RMFP, so the Malian running for Brotherhood and Progress. I thank the organizer of this conference for inviting us to this event. It is an opportunity for us to talk to you about this in-base slavery and its consequences on women. This in-base slavery is a reality in West Africa. It is a reality that we experience in all flesh. On the 29th July, 2022, my aunt, Djago C.B.J., was severely murdered at the age of 71 by slavers in Western Mali because she dared to stand up to them. The story began three years before her death when her son came to the village with a gambana tricot. The story began three years before her death when Hassan returned to the village with a gambana t-shirt. The slavers, also called nobles, wanted to forbid him to wear this t-shirt, and they called his mother to subdue him. She replied that she fully supported Hassan. In retaliation, they forbade her access to the field that she had always cultivated. She filed the complaint and won her case, which gave her ownership on the field. But the slavers first came to attack her in 2021 while she was working there. In May 2022, she assaulted her again and told her to bring her t-shirt the next time she came to work on the field. On the 29th of July 2022, they carried out their threats while she was working in a field, the gast dragged and murdered her, they cut her body into pieces and tried to burn it. When the fire didn't burn, they put her body in a bag and threw it into a swamp. Her lifeless body was found the next day. My own story is an extreme case, but it's not an isolated case. In general, women, along with children, are the main victims of this and be slavery. As a woman is a movement, I particularly want to bring the voice of women in the fight against slavery in Africa. All the children of a woman considered as slaves will be systematically assigned to the status of slaves. In certain villages where there is a category of slaves that belong to the whole village, the women considered as slaves are at the sexual disposal of the nobles. In some villages where there is a category of slaves that belong to the whole village, the women considered as slaves are at the sexual disposal of the nobles. If a woman considered as a slave is married, the master will never accept this marriage and will continue to have sex with this woman. If a woman considered as a slave is married, the master will not respect this marriage and will continue to dispose of this woman sexually. Women, especially young girls, are forced to do the domestic work for the noble women, laundering millets, doing the laundry, sweeping, drying water, etc. After the murder of my aunt, the addictions of Gambana have exploded because women are the most victims of this practice. They are so engaged in the struggle within Gambana. These are the most active women in the exchange group and social networks. They show on WhatsApp the violence they have suffered. There are groups reserved for women. They are the most numerous in the manifestation in Mali, as in the diaspora. They collect the money to support the victims and the activities of the movement. They are the ones who collect money to support the victims and the activities of the movement. So all this shows how fully committed women are to the fight against Decent Bay slavery in West Africa and in Mali. Thank you for your attention. We will now move to an online presentation by my colleague, Dr. Loth Pellekmans. So I might be saying some things that have already been said, but then I'll try to go quickly over them. And I really would like to focus a bit tonight on the role of social media in this anti-slavery activism, which is actually quite transnational, as I will demonstrate here. And this fits in a longer-standing research I've been doing on West African anti-slavery movements. So the people of the movement you saw tonight, Hassa and Mr. Salifou, they are part of the Gambana movement, more specifically the Malian branch. But the movement I've been studying more generally is called Gambanajou Fede. As you can see here, it regroups four countries. But my field work has been mainly with people in France, mainly based in Paris, like Hassa and Salifou, the two people just talking to you. They also live in France, in Paris. And I've been talking to people mainly from Mauritania and Mali. And the role of social media, I think Mr. Salifou also already mentioned it. The role of WhatsApp is quite important. And compared to the other movements I've been studying over the past 10 years, it clearly also contributed a lot to the success and the very quick mobilization that this movement was able to make. And of course, it also resulted in polarization and violent conflicts. I'm making a documentary movie, both on the movement itself and on the role of women. And unfortunately it's not ready yet, so I can't show you anything of it tonight. I'll look to do so later. It's been mentioned, so I hope you are all understanding what decent-based slavery is about. Maybe just underlining one issue, namely that the social, political and economic power remained with free-born elites today, or so-called free-born or noble elites. So the people who used to enslave people in the past and still consider themselves owners. And we are not in transatlantic nor explicitly racialized contexts. So it's rather through purity of blood than through skin color that status and positions are being... So there is a big transnational activism going on within this movement, the Gambana movement, Gambana meaning equality. The network, as I mentioned, is between four countries, and you can see here in this scheme made by one of my students. It's not complete, but it gives you an idea of the Mauritanian network, the green one, the Malian network, the blue one, and the Senegalese and Gambian networks, and the different branches they have. They have a huge part. Sometimes they are allied with other anti-slavery movements as well. They fight for equality and rights and dignity, and so, as has been mentioned as well, there's been a lot of focus on getting a law passed, criminalizing decent-based slavery. That's especially in Mali, still a problem, but even in the countries where such laws exist, such as in Mauritania, their application remains complicated because governments and people in high positions are often also descendants of former enslavers, of former nobility, and so they are the power holders, and they are not willing to let their privileges go. More specifically for the Soninke and this Gambana movement is the fact that they have a very vast diaspora around the world. I mentioned that I worked in Paris, France, where there's probably one of the biggest parts of this diaspora, and in Paris it's sometimes also called, at least for the Malian part, Bamako Surzen, so it's the second biggest village or city with Malian Soninke in the world after Bamako in Mali itself. So the diaspora plays a big role, and this has been made possible, of course, through social media. What are they doing? What are the activities about? And what are they contesting? Well, as I show here on the slide, so they have actually a double mission internally among the Soninke communities themselves. They have to kind of fight against the idea that decent-based slavery is a custom, a lada, which is the Soninke word, it's a kind of social contract that has to be respected and maintained, a historical relation that shouldn't be just given up, according to, of course, those people benefiting from it. So that's the internal mission they have to manage to cross new messages about this. The second one is vis-à-vis the international community, because decent-based slavery is something that is rather unknown for many people, difficult to understand, not always straightforward. There are very many different regional variations in some regions. The legacies are not as strong as in others. It's even very different from one family and one small village to the other. So in some villages also with the current activism, we see that there's a lot of incidents while in others there is much less, because in some villages there are more peaceful and less trained, polarized relations. So that's part of what they have to fight against. I don't know in view of time if I am allowed to show a one-minute small excerpt of a reportage, but I'll go on to say something about this activism via social media. It's really thanks to the arrival of WhatsApp that the movement, which actually has a long history in many ways, Salifou also mentioned that it's mainly started in Mauritania and then more specifically in the Mauritanian diaspora, and also in Mauritania itself. But the thing is that even though there are voices protesting and trying to go against existing discriminations, it's really the fact that everyone started to have phones, phone connections and access to groups, WhatsApp groups, that kind of started to create this new collective identity. Almost you could say whereby people started to understand, okay, this is not just happening in our village, this is not just a problem we are facing as a family or as individuals, this is something big and it's actually not okay. And so the fact that WhatsApp on top of just being a social media that is quite accessible, easy to download, not too heavy for low quality phones, it's also a very good media because we are talking here about societies and I just gave a comparative figure here where, especially Mali, and especially by the way the western part of Mali has a very low literacy rate, as you can see here, 36%. This is a figure from 2018 and of course for what figures are worth. But it says something about how few people can write and read, but WhatsApp allows as opposed to other social media, actually allows to do the voice messages, the oral messages, which makes that and it of course has the visual function, but other social media do have that as well. So it really allows for people to exchange without necessarily needing to be able to read. And on top of that of course WhatsApp is quite a well protected media which also turns out to be a good thing in view of the current tensions of activists vis-à-vis their opponents. So the network and or the fora as they are called within the movements, they are organized in groups and I didn't know anything about the exact technical details of WhatsApp but it turns out that if you make a group it can be max 256 persons and per country this slide or this scheme you see here, it's for Mauritania and as you can see all the way below the forum consists of 20 of such groups. But apart from those bigger groups you also have village groups and you also have diaspora groups often communicating, not often but also communicating in French for example, there's this one group called ECIER. And so all these groups make people come in and when Mr. Salifou mentioned before that they have 6700 members, that's mostly the paying members but the active members on WhatsApp. I'm not sure if there are official figures currently but this goes way beyond and it also connects people sitting in Gabon, in China, in Saudi Arabia, in Paris, all following what's being posted there. And so what you also get is a kind of very without by the way making a too positive message about this because there's also constraints and of course negative sides but a small peasant in a small village can post a message online saying I've been attacked this morning and then the message immediately travels the world. So that really helped the movement to gain in a very short time span because as you heard 2017 was the first setup of the movement so to speak of course with some historical precedence but not really an official movement. And in the meantime it has become in any village where you say the word Gambana people will know what it's about and even in the national scene of Mali people will know what this movement is about so they really had an impact that none of the other movements that I've been looking into managed to make. For good and for bad because of course this also contributed to the polarization of the debate and in the meantime people can only be in favor or very much in favor of Gambana or totally against and kind of the middle ground positions have kind of vanished or at least it's very difficult for people to try to moderate in this activist field. So the fora they are very big, they're very many and so especially I've been working with some of the people who are high up in the movement, the secretary-general the vice-presidents like Mr. Cameron and they receive on a daily basis hundreds of messages and so some of them are literally totally overwhelmed and constantly online trying to follow, trying to filter and trying to then also coordinate what to do with some messages that are really about incidents that need action. So yeah, this is an enormous work and this kind of hyper connectivity of course also generates its challenges. Apart from WhatsApp there's of course also Facebook groups and there has even been Gambana had its own radio channel they even had their own online journal or news edition they didn't have money to continue that but and then they have merchandising and as I mentioned currently Gambana is just at least for people at her it's something really cool and it really gained an image. A lot of artists are making songs about Gambana I just went to Senegal and spoke with a girl who actually got beaten because she was listening to one of those Gambana songs by the person who hired her so the movement really in so many ways managed to make itself visible not only vis-à-vis the outside world but mainly also among people that before never really spoke to each other and maybe didn't realize that they were sharing a condition of discrimination that was not supposed to stay on. So because I only have 10 minutes I'll stop here and just try to wrap up again saying that social media has been really important to amplify voices that be forced to the loan and maybe one more example people also shared histories so people speaking about how one of their sisters in the past has been murdered because she did something very minor small thing wrong and so you get this kind of archiving also of stories of exploitation of discrimination and of difficulties people encounter and it's the first time also that people want to talk about it because for a long time it has been so taboo and so stigmatizing to have this identity to have undergone this kind of humiliations if you want and it has been too shameful to even address and now people start to talk about it and also start to communicate with their children and across the generations and I think that's a very important and probably good thing because it really makes this kind of counter stigma possible whereby people start to take pride in who they are and start to understand where they come from and really try to change the association with their identity so to speak. So it was really a taboo issue especially by the way in Soninke societies I've been working on decent based slavery in West Africa for quite a while and it was quite well known to be an issue in Tamashek or Tuareg societies or among the Moors and so forth and so on but Soninke never ever was there any big mention of this being a contemporary issue so it was very much taboo to speak about it and as I think Hassa also mentioned especially abuse vis-à-vis women, sexual abuse children being born not having a father because of the abuse and then become pastor kids that then in turn also became very vulnerable to exploitation because they don't have fathers to protect them so this vicious circle now might at least the movements made that these issues have been openly put on the table and that they have been amplified and vis-à-visualised. So I think I'll keep it here and thank you for your attention looking forward to the discussion. Interesting set of presentations and papers and thank you also for keeping to time so well. We have plenty of time, we've got about 50 minutes of discussion and questions. We have quite a substantial online audience but can I open our floor to discussion and questions? Yes, please go ahead. If I could ask you, if you don't mind identifying yourself please, if all people asking questions could identify themselves. Thank you, my name is Peter Cheney, I'm from Northern Ireland. I was involved in a project supporting the Great Green Wall project a few years back and I just wondered how helpful is the Great Green Wall in tackling slavery? OK, so the question is about the Great Green Wall and it has been involved in this project so is the project of the Great Green Wall an impact on the fight against slavery and if so, which one? OK, my colleagues here have never heard of this project and I believe I suspect that a lot of populations in West Africa have never heard of this project in practice so I'm afraid I don't see where there might have been some impact here against slavery. So I'm afraid I don't see where there might have been some impact here on the fight against slavery. So my name is I'm a member of Moumangambanarou I would like to express in French to ask some questions to the president Good evening Mr. Kamara Good evening I'm a member of Moumangambanarou I'm originally from Mauritania I'm from Moumangambanarou I'm from Moumangambanarou Just a small question about our detractors who tell us we are here in the West in our climatic saloon far from reality and those who are on the ground are the ones who pay the price for example, we talked about this in Mali unfortunately in Mauritania it's not possible to get there but there are oppressions in Mauritania too For me, isn't there another alternative or other means I mean, I'm talking about a defensive way we have to say we are here we want a fast passive why aren't we opting for other means because we always have the pressure that defines the situation when we see our detractors who are the slaves the feudal I call them the slaves who don't want to let go of the business who have killed the slaves oppressed for years as you said in your speech that there were years there were people who started this fight before us but they didn't have anything to do with it it's not the time to think differently I thank you Do you want to ask a question in English as well or shall we translate for you? Is it active? Okay, so the answer here is a member of the Gambanatu from Mauritania It was I'm talking about some people some openness that are saying that in fact it's too easy to be on the Europe side and to discuss these issues and protect these areas far from the reality but they wanted to stress the need to think another way because the slavers always their visions of things and their vision of who is good who is bad and who is fault it is it is not time to change the mentalities because they came to any extremities even murder as we say here Did I understood correctly what Yeah, just what I want to say Okay We are far away from the reality People Like I said As you know I'm sorry and as you know Laba is the translation for those who are online in the Sorry I want to say it's time for us as a member of the Gambanatu to change the things but by any means it's not necessary this is what I'm saying we can't be here just talking on WhatsApp in social media so we have to think about different things Thank you He reformed the question in English but he said Don't think about other means for the fight because we continue Yeah, that's it We understood We can't go to the army No The fundamental question here is whether we should resort to to the fighting battle to violence against the oppressive So Thank you very much brother of Gammanaru Moritani Gammanaru we are the same we are ego I understood your question even if you wanted to formulate it so what I'm telling you we have been since the beginning and when violence has reached a certain level we have been pushed we have been trained the way of fighting and above all we have been pushed towards violence and that's what we have always refused So when the repression came from say come slavers with violence there was really a will to push the gambanas to violence that's why they always refused to do to take arms against the slavers The first reason why we can't accept an armed fight is that minorities in the villages in general if I take the example of my own village So in my village in the Kairi region in Lani there were seven families and two slavery activists that were attacked into and the objective was to eliminate this family of my village and the objective of the slavers was to eliminate these families from the village but quickly we were able to find the support of the public force to fight specifically and that's the only reason why these families can now be in their villages in peace and that's why the policy to not answer to violence by violence as lowest shows that the violence was only on one side the side of the slavers and that's why the government is now in all favor there was a change in the government and that we are the ones that are supposed to support it So in my village there were more than 30 WhatsApp groups that used to go to arms and this was a slavers group and now they have all disappeared because they were exposed as a valiant one Thank you Could I perhaps ask a question for those of us who don't know the slavery particularly well I wonder if you could say something about the slavers and who these people are and what their identities are I had another historian's question which is if you could say something about the relationship between the form of slavery that you were describing and earlier historical forms of slavery and if there are any sort of continuities and differences So The slavers are like any other of us There is no way to distinguish them from another person and we vote This phenomenon is only based on the origins of anyone So when we talk about this and the slavery in Europe we are not truly understood because when we talk about slavery especially in Europe people put it in the past and seek to contextualize it as only a thing of the past So This slavery in Africa is also something that has roots in the past So Before slavery was based on capture of people kidnapping of people that were still attached, displaced and now the international community could end this part of slavery is perpetuated by the women descendants of slaves Because all women descendants of slaves will become systematically slaves like Asa explained And this is a endless slavery And that's why we have to fight it now in the present So, did you have a question? Did you see the questions? Yes, there's only one that I can ask My name is Penny David and I work for an NGO which is active in Ghana where slavery sounds very different from the slavery that we're hearing about tonight In Ghana, as far as I know the former slaves are pretty well integrated nowadays There are small things like for example if you're an elder from a slave family you can't become a village chief but I don't know that it goes much further than that I wonder why what is the reason that your slavery continues without end and in Ghana it's pretty much finished Is it something to do with poverty? So, what does the person say? She's engaged in a Ghana NGO and from what she saw, what she understood in Ghana, the end of slavery is quite different There's something that lasts for example when you're an elder from a slave family you can't become a chief but apart from that it seems to be disappearing and she wonders why there's a difference between the two countries if it's a relationship with poverty I don't know if there are things that come to your mind And this one doesn't have a relationship with poverty I had the honor to participate at a conference in Yaoundé where we met the researchers and a lot of researchers we were sent by Emile Faux in Yaoundé to attend this conference and we went there and there there are 20 forms of slavery that exist in Africa So, in our case it's slavery by ascendance so this is deeply rooted in some places such as the Soninque the Qassonque the Peul and a little bit in the north of Mali but it has nothing to do with poverty The proof today that most slaves descendants are better equipped than most slaves So this has nothing to do with poverty So, it had the chance to go to Yaoundé for a conference and to meet with many researchers and so on thanks to the Slavic project and more than 24 forms of slavery were registered and so this one is a decent based slavery and so it runs in different backgrounds especially in the Soninque community Qassonque Qassonque and for the communities and a bit in the north of Mali and so it's for him it has nothing to do with poverty it's a difference to slavery We have a question from the audience, can I just read it out to you? And she forgot to translate the last part is that to the extent that today many so-called descendants of slaves are sometimes far richer than the so-called descendants of the enslavers because they migrated for example to Europe and they were able to make ends meet but despite that even as I mean I did that to what has been said even in France where there is no poverty to the same extent as back in Africa there are of course social issues but this is of course different the system is perpetrated in the diaspora also as we said poverty doesn't come into the pictures in such case I added that just to say that they perpetrated the system while there is no poverty Let me just we have only one question from the audience, if I can encourage members of the audience to please ask questions so the question is are there diva-scent based slavery activities or movements in Nigeria so it's a question about the rest of West Africa if you have any sort of comparative insight So the question is, do you know about slavery in Nigeria and in the rest of West Africa Yes In the rest of West Africa in Nigeria there is this form of slavery and also in the countries like the Deguine Guinea-Bisao Guinea-Konakri Senegal Mauritania Gambia Nigeria Nigeria and Burkina Faso So in most of the countries of West Africa where there are these Soninke communities Peul communities Kassonke communities and communities also as we call Mandeng So this slave phenomenon exists everywhere as we explained in our intervention even in the United States it exists because they emigrated there and in Europe it exists because they are among you here and everywhere in the world they try to export it So yes, this form of slavery exists elsewhere in West Africa so it quoted the case of Nigeria, Niger, Senegal Gambia, two Guineas Guinea-Bisao and Guinea-Konakri in Mali and so since it has a link with some very large communities so Fulbe community Soninke community, Kassonke community so everywhere they go they can carry on these practices of the same base slavery even in the US and etc and definitely it exists in other parts of West Africa Thank you, Esteban Thank you so much for this very moving presentation and project My name is Steo Salas I'm a lecturer in African history here at SOS and I have two questions One is about women Does the identity of having the slave identity legacy come from the women themselves or is there a way to prove this historically In other words Is this attribution of a slave identity a possibility for illegal enslavement although we are not talking here about legal terms but or is that something people recognize for themselves freely and the other question is well it seems like the state is pretty much absent from the area and if it is present in the name of authorities then it's in a very weak way Does this absence or weakness of the state have to do anything with the legacies of French colonialism So does France recognize any responsibility in this In other words do reparations play a role in this story Thank you Thank you He already thank you for this presentation which had a lot of aspects and moving So there are two questions The first is about women If I understood well and you will correct me Do women transmit slavery I will have to an identity Do they recognize themselves slaves? Do they transmit it? Is this identity transmitted not only and transmitted by women the fact that they are mostly slaves victims of slavery by coincidence Children Is there an identity transmission of the slave identity by women? And how does it happen? And the second question will be about the role of the state which seems quite absent in what you say So does this absence also have a relationship with the heritage of the French colonization and if yes does France recognize a responsibility or are there interactions on these questions Thank you very much for your question What is for women? There is no woman who would accept to be slaves in fact It was something that has been assumed since it is by ascending in fact since it descends and we tell you that you are a slave but it is not a label on you it is not something that is seen Yes, there is no woman who would accept to be a slave by her own choice So it was really something that was imposed from the outside and that was passed on and passed on and there is it is still something that is imposed from the outside and it does not wear this etiquette by choice So on the other hand for example I could tell you that there are men who want the slave to remain in our house who want to remain always slaves so we fight against them not just the slaves they do not want it to stop they want it to continue and there is no interest they have no interest at all but they want it to stay So what she says is that there are some slaves that wanted to remain same that does not want any change but it is mostly men in fact and so women are more in the fight against this and so the men they want slavery to keep going and not slaves and they do not have any interest in it but they suffer less from its consequences So for them it is like it is the custom it must stay I found that with my father, my grandmother it must stay while it is not the case my grandmother, my grandfather it was their time my time now it is something it is just a custom it was something I received from my father from my grandmother that I inherited and it is okay and it is not the case it is something that was the case in the past but my time is now the present and I want things to go on to change and to answer the question regarding French colonialism and its impact on slavery clearly despite this official abolition as we have seen elsewhere the colonial authorities turn a blind eye on to the situation I mean the 20 years after the official abolition they just said anyway it is a finished business we have abolished slavery so it is all done no need to go into that again to check whether there is slavery happening still what the French authorities are more concerned about these days is the fact that there are a number of binational French Malians who are concerned with that and when people were falsely expelled from their villages they turned first to the Malian authorities who didn't want to deal with that but there were some binational in these populations which were expelled so they turned to the French Embassy in Mali they did a sitting in front of the French Embassy saying we are binational how is it possible that we are expelled from our own villages like this and victims of violence so the French Embassy from what I understood contacted the Malian authorities and pressured them to find a solution but that was just in the moment because they were basically sitting in front of the embassy and making a lot of noise to contest the situation so now some of these populations are still hostage somewhere in Bamako but there is no longstanding support from government what they are even more concerned about is the security situation the French they are afraid and I had this conversation with some of them the French authorities they are concerned that again the authorities Malian or French they think that because of the violence and the frustration of which these populations are victims they will turn to terrorism is the importation of terrorism through migration to France with a bunch of people frustrated turning to terrorism what I explained to them is that anyway this terrorism predated these tensions in these villages and terrorism terrorists just exploit these tensions but basically right now anyone for any kind of background has reasons linked with the fact that the state in Mali is very weak as every reason to be frustrated and to turn to terrorism no matter whether they are discriminated as formerly enslaved descendants of slaves or they are from the elitons nobility etc I mean there are enough reasons to turn to terrorism unfortunately I mean no good reasons obviously but just stop calling the victims a terrorist I keep saying and try to understand where the vulnerabilities are is when the state is not here in these regions so no talk of reparation anyway we have another question hello thank you for the presentation very touching stuff I guess I'll go to a Mali specific question there was a brief mention that you're gaining some ground in materializing some laws recently and I'm wondering what the influence of regime changes and the interim governments are in your struggle I guess against the descendants of slaves in Mali thank you how is it about I lost the thread so apparently what he understood is that there was a change in the government we could hope that there is a law that passes etc is it also linked to the change of the government he didn't say it but clearly the fact that there was a coup of state, two coups of state and suddenly the military is it an influence on what is going on at the level of the government of the subconscious in any case what we can note is that the old government that was in place didn't want to take care of these phenomena of the struggle against the descendants of slaves why? because it's disillusion so what we can say is that the former government didn't want to get involved in resolving the issue of disinvasion and he explains that it was partly because they were elected so the elites work for the majority except that the government is a military government they try to put equity of justice in the affairs of the state so he explains that elected people tend to seek to please the majority whereas here which is a military government they tend to seek more equity justice in the state yes it's the change of the government that made that today we have a law project and that we hope that this law project will be voted before the end of the transition so that there is a law that criminalizes the slavery by sentence like Mauritania, Gambia for example so this project of law criminalizing disinvasion is to be adopted and they really hope to see it coming before the end of the transition so that there is really a law that criminalizes such acts of violence and discrimination like there is a law in Mauritania and Gambia and Niger and I can add that's what we also tried as a project to do in our advocacy to make the authorities understand this is your opportunity now you call for a transition for change in the governance that will be in all your benefits to pass this law now as a milestone in the transition if they do it I'll try at least not please come in just to also a bit of the longer history of Malian and other governments not being very willing to support anti-slavery activism whether it's Kambana or other movements some governors or presidents have in silence supported somehow some of the movements but didn't want to be associated with this issue because it's so stigmatizing and shameful to associate oneself with this past that people get worried people get reproaches or be even defined themselves as probably being of slave descent and so the whole issue of slave of being categorized as belonging to the group of formerly enslaved is very big and especially in politics it has very often been used to disqualify people and so for example one of Mali's former presidents has been described on the first page of a book of one of his adversaries who published under an anonymous name of Les Fanks he actually mentions that this former president must have been of slave descent or categorized as being of slave descent because he's clearly not capable of ruling the country and of course someone who has this background is not capable of ruling so there is this long history of the history of slavery being used to disqualify people to actually be able to have authority and to take on positions of authority and political positions. I have to apologize to some members in our online audience say a few questions. I don't quite know how I missed it, I kept on checking and I don't know if they just flooded in or not but there's a question from my very close colleague Ida Hajjavani about the nature of perceptions of descent place slavery amongst the youth in the diaspora so she says I'm interested in the perception of descent slavery among young people in the diaspora for example in France or Belgium you mentioned that young couples are sometimes forced not to marry, some do and would you say that there's a huge difference in how descent slavery is perceived amongst the youth? This is the question about the perception of descent slavery in the young generation of diasporas in France or elsewhere in Europe and in the world. You mentioned that there were marriages that were not possible, others that were not possible. How do young people position themselves in relation to these questions? What about this position? As far as the implications of the youth in relation to the existence of ascending slavery and we have we continue to sensitize them and most of the young people fall down when they go for example to their country of origin whether it's the Senegal-Moritan or the other where they go on vacation that's where they realize that they are descent slaves because in all ways and when we come from this community the ascending slaves do everything to make them understand as soon as they see you. By saying we are descent slaves we are masters and you are descent slaves. So today young people start to take the concrete measure of this phenomenon in the Jaspera to try to get to those who can arrive when they go to the country or even here as I highlighted in my intervention when there will be a question between two young people of the two communities of living together like that so all of this is to be watched by the loop and all of this is how I would say banned for the slaves. Okay, so there is really a huge effort to raise awareness among the young people about the Senbei slavery because some of them are not even aware that there are of slave descent and they come to for example they live in Europe and they come to their origin country whether Mauritania or Mali or Niger and they are reminded constantly that in fact there are some descendants of slaves and the slavers always keep going with we are the masters you are a slave and so sometimes they can be really bewildered by the extent to which it goes they didn't even know by coming in and so they get involved in it by taking the measure of the phenomenon and there is also the cases of people that just fall in love and can't marry with someone even in Europe with someone of another origin let's say and so this young people are more directly concerned but when they are they are quite seriously and so they want to get involved once they realize and so we are really happy to see that young people get more and more involved in demonstration in the anti-slavery movement thank you there is another question I noticed a lot typing an answer to it perhaps you could just tell us a lot but the question is what role do you think the construction of post-colonial national narrative has had on the amnesia around descent based slavery again what role do you think the construction of post-colonial national narrative has had on the amnesia around descent based slavery so during the colonization both communities were it's quite seriously and so this in the slavery was not as much an issue because both sides were striking by the weight of the colonization and so it was not as much an issue because both sides were striking by the weight of colonial power and so that's when the colonization and that's the master came to make himself more known and wanted those practices to be applied so I wanted to explain to you what existed before what issues existed before so for example when the children of slavers were called to come into the army they sent instead the children of their slaves another phenomenon I was myself victim of this in the villages we had the right to study until college so when we were in the villages we had the right to study until secondary school and when we get to high school everything is done for us not to be able to graduate and the slaves put all their honor points so that a slave descendant could not be part of the elite so it's segregation at all levels we think of studies we think of the army we also think of immigration we do everything so that the slave descendant could not arrive to a better future whereas regarding army studies regarding immigration slavers really put all their efforts to prevent people to access a bit of future when they were signed with slave status so that postcolonial regimes like the ones of the first president of Mali in their discourses they promoted citizenship and equality in rights and they insisted on that and that's why some who were still enslaved decided hearing these kind of discourses to escape slavery and to build new life as well but still the main focus was on anti-colonialism and this idea that actually slavery was the way these nationalist discourses define colonialism they define it as slavery and that's where it blurred to some extent the discourse and the fight against slavery or a decent based slavery because all the discourses about slavery were not about decent based slavery but were against colonialism even despite this promotion of citizenship basically decent based slavery was never publicly discussed by the authorities in Mali on the long term locally but very few of them so that basically there was a complete silence a long term silence about these issues which remain nonetheless a public secret nobody talked about it or nobody wanted to talk about it but everybody knew and that's why sometimes it reemerged we mentioned the case of politics politicians were disqualified because said to be of descendants of formerly enslaved but that's when it so just to say there was no public space to listen to the victims people didn't want to hear them it's not that the victims couldn't speak about the situation is that there was no authority ready to listen to them we've come to the end of our time but if it's okay with our speakers if I could just allow one further question and then we'll call it today so the question is from Martin Klein who wants to know does Kampana have support among the professional elites especially among lawyers, teachers, professors these sorts of people civil servants he posed the question it's an online question are you supported by the elite by the intellectuals by the teachers are you able to have a part of the elite with you yes we are starting to be supported by a part of the elite and as you know in all the elite and the intellectuals are the last to arrive so yes we are starting to be supported by the elites but as you know in any class fight the intellectuals are always the last coming I'm not anti-intellectual but what I wanted to say is that it's the constant that we have done after a few years of struggle that we have been joined by intellectuals not everyone but who really support us I am not anti-intellectual that's just the conclusion I drew but some intellectuals came to us after a few years of fighting and slavery not all of them but those who support us and those who support us we also have the support of some intellectuals the Uridis the Quranic intellectuals who invest a lot in the explanation of slavery by ascendance because we have they wanted to put a religious connotation in the explanation of slavery by ascendance and we are also joined by some Muslim intellectuals that really are committed to educate people on disin-based slavery because the slavers put into disin-based slavery a religious argument whereas it was not at first okay well thank you very much all that's left for me to do is to thank our speakers very warmly for giving us an incredibly enriching evening and then to thank members of our audience both people present here as well as the online audience for their very interesting and stimulating questions Lot is Lot I saw you were typing a question for a very long time also typing an answer for a very long time I don't know if you want to finish it recorded won't it really so hopefully we'll have a record of today's events for people who want to look at things afterwards so thank you very much thank you very much everyone else for organizing the event today