The Ebony Market

"Mohammed Ali Ag Attaher, a rich and powerful man, engaged me as a servant," a half-naked African told the French police in Bamako. "At the same time he hired another man and his wife and child. That was a long time ago--about 15 years. I should say. All of us made the holy pilgrimage to Mecca, and there my master sent me to work at the house of Prince Abdullah Feisal. Long months went by and one day I learned that Mohammed Ali had returned to Africa. The prince ordered me to come before him and told me that I was no longer a free man but had been sold as a slave. Several years later, the prince ordered his overseer to sell me in the slave market of Jidda. I was taken there in a truck. I entered a large, obscure hall. There were many men and women gathered there--slaves like myself. I managed to escape . . . Several times I tried to slip aboard boats leaving for Africa. But the police were on my tracks. Nevertheless, I managed to stow away in a cargo ship and reached the Sudan. I was free . . .

"In Arabia I saw many slaves of my race. There are slave markets in all the big towns there. The slave traffic starts at sundown. The big chiefs examine us and select those they want, just like at a camel fair. You can buy a man like me for a pinch of gold." Ex-Slave Awad El Goud is only one of many French African Moslems who have been kidnaped into slavery as pilgrims to Mecca. Last week his story was told in Paris by Emmanuel La Graviere, Calvinist minister and Assemblyman of the French Union. "In the course of an investigation over the past few months in French West Africa," said La Graviere, "I have obtained proof that several hundred Negroes have been sent as slaves by African dealers to the Arab states of Yemen and Saudi Arabia. The Arab is a proud man and there are certain domestic jobs he doesn't like to do. If he can afford it, he wants slaves to do them." With their new, oil-born wealth, the minister went on, many Arabs can now afford this luxury, and many procurers in the French Sudan, Ubangi-shari. Chad, the Cameroons and some British territories are ready and willing to satisfy their needs on "the ebony market" at prices ranging from $1,150 to a paltry $570 per slave (women usually sell for slightly more than men). La Graviere's charges and the evidence which supported them have already sparked the French police into an investigation.

In 1950 a U.N. Economic and Social Council committee on forced labor sent out a questionnaire urging all member nations to report on the extent of slavery in their territories. Loftily denying the existence of such a horrid thing, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia never answered the questionnaire. Anti-Slaver La Graviere hopes his own nation will put the problem before the U.N. General Assembly.

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