Once he was a slave himself, today Brahim Ramdhane is involved in Mauritania against oppression and serfdom. His strongest weapon: enabling children to go to school
One morning at the end of August, Brahim Ramdhane, 55, parked his SUV in front of a dune in the Mauritanian desert. Leather flip-flops separate his feet from the glowing sand, a light wind puffs his traditional West African robe into a balloon. He’s staring at a rusty metal plate on a whitewashed fountain that hasn’t been used to draw water for a long time. Brahim Ramdhane came 160 kilometers by car from the capital Nouakschott in search of traces of his past. All he finds when he arrives is the remains of this well. No more tents, no more villages, no more people far and wide.
Here Ramdhane remembers his childhood. As a five-year-old he sees himself lowering rubber sacks into the 60-meter-deep shaft, hears the creaking winch, remembers the terrible heat in which he had to toil. “Brahim, get water”, “Brahim, make tea”, “Brahim, look for the donkeys”, his masters from the Daddah family ordered. When he ran out to that well, wearing only a loincloth or old rags, the sand burned under his bare feet. He was a slave then.
Brahim Ramdhane belongs to the Haratin, former slaves and their descendants, who today see themselves as an ethnic group. As “dark-skinned Moors” they make up about half of the four million people in Mauritania, next to the “white Moors” and “black Africans: inside”. Ramdhane only learned in the course of his life that the division into “blacks” and “whites” as slaves and slave owners is not a law of nature and probably not the will of Allah either. Because it was only by chance that he went to school. Today he works with his foundation to ensure that more Haratin children go to school. Thanks in part to his commitment, in 2007, Mauritania became the last country in the world to criminalize slavery. But it will be a long time before it has finally disappeared from people’s minds.
Fifty years ago, five slave-holding families of the Daddah clan and 25 slave families lived in Ain Salama with its well. His master family alone served two dozen other serfs in addition to his mother and Brahim himself. The center of the village was made up of the masters’ large tents, around them were the smaller tents of their slaves: inside. In between the enclosures for goats and cows and a bit outside tents for Koran lessons and school.
Already at the age of four Brahim milked the goats in the morning and then drove them into the desert steppe in search of some grass and a few bushes. Back in the village he had to be content with the leftover breakfast from the slave owners. Then he ran for miles looking for firewood. Tied with a cord, he carried it home on his head and piled it around the fireplace. He never found rest.
“My mother wanted me to be a good and valued servant,” says Ramdhane. The mother of eight, deeply religious and illiterate, believed that rebellious people should go to hellfire. That’s why she beat her son when he didn’t want to work. Ramdhane says, “She did this because she loved me.” Her reputation as a good servant should pay off for her son.
Only the white children from the big tents attended the Koran school from their fourth birthday and learned to read and write. They wore shoes to protect them from the hot sand and beautiful boubous, traditional robes. They slept with their parents on tapis, beds made of wood and fur. Sometimes the masters would call Brahim over in the evening, and then he would have to sleep in the sand at their foot, separated from his family.
In October 1971, Brahim was almost six years old when 13 free children in Ain Salama were waiting to start school after finishing school. The government only paid a teacher if he taught to at least 15 students. That is why the slave owners resorted to a trick every year: they put slave children in the free places when the school inspector came from the capital. If he gave the permission, the slave children had to disappear again. The Haratin should toil instead of learning Arabic, French, mathematics and the Koran.
On Brahim’s first day of school the unimaginable happened: his mother, otherwise godly and submissive, rebelled against this arbitrariness. “If Brahim has to leave school, then I’ll leave you,” she threatened. Because it was considered indispensable for the Masters, Brahim was allowed to stay.
Before school he now milked the goats for the masters ‘breakfast, at lunchtime he fetched water on the donkeys’ backs before returning to school in the afternoon. In the evening he would sit in the light of an oil lamp, leaning over the Arabic alphabet, drawing letter by letter in his exercise book. After one school year he had caught up with his classmates from the Koran school and was promoted to middle school in the next town.
Brahim Ramdhane gets into his parked Toyota and leaves the place in the early years of his life. He drives the dusty road towards Boutilimit, where he went to middle school, past goats stretching their necks for the long leaves of a neem tree, past camels strutting leisurely through the scrubland.
In just a few minutes he has arrived in the transit city of Boutilimit. The traffic from pick-ups, minibuses and cars builds up around an intersection with carpets on the roof, seat cushions and sacks on the loading areas and overcrowded seats. Goats travel tied up on the roof as well as camels on loading areas. Here the drivers supply themselves with bread, water and diesel for long tours in the desert.
On the grounds of Ramdhane’s former middle school, two donkeys chew on leaves in the shade of a tree. A rusting pick-up truck with flat tires and a cannibalized cockpit stands between bushes and grasses. “My feeling of freedom began here,” says Ramdhane and heads for the central building, a gray brick block with two classrooms. Goat droppings lie on the threshold. It’s nice and cool. Stripes of light fall through narrow window slits onto 18 dusty school desks. Ramdhane sits down on the second bench in the middle row with his arms crossed and thinks about the last time he sat there.
That was 43 years ago. Around 30 boys and girls were sitting in front of their exercise books and learning French grammar. Bright faces like those of the slave owners’ children. But also dark ones. Brahim was amazed. Didn’t Allah make the slaves dark? How could it be that he was studying here with children who looked like him but were not serfs? Apparently it was not an irrevocable law that the color of the skin determined the path of life. Mauritania’s children received their status through their mother: if their mother was a slave, the children also belonged to their masters.
After the first week of school, Brahim ran home through the sand to his village of Ain Salama, where he had to transform himself from a student into a slave again. But he didn’t want any more. He made a decision: in the masters’ tent, he demonstratively sat down with them. They recognized his change. Since they accepted school attendance, they now saw him at eye level. He was even allowed to eat from the same plate with them. He was surprised and understood, “You treat me as I give myself.” Brahim was in a gray area of roles between student and slave, so he tested them out. When his master sent a slave to work, he poisoned: “Do the work yourself.” Stubbornly he raised his chin in the air and asked: “Why do you need slaves for this?”
He also reproached his mother. “Why don’t you go away? Why don’t you move to the city? ”His mother replied,“ The masters are my family, just like you are. ”Only when Brahim would earn his own money, she promised, would she move to him and lead a free life.
After three years he passed the middle school examination, received a scholarship and moved to Rosso, where he switched to high school. He would live there in the future, in a student dormitory. That was 1980 – and the beginning of great changes.
This year, the 17-year-old Brahim sits in a courtroom in Rosso every day for two weeks. He wants to support his uncle Mohamed Messoud, who is indicted along with eleven other men. On the first day a public prosecutor reads out the allegations: “Leading an unregistered organization, resisting the police and inciting the division of the country.” Messoud and the others belong to the anti-slave movement “El Hor” (“The Free”). When at the beginning of the same year a young woman was publicly sold as a slave in a market in Atar, “El Hor” organized demonstrations in all the major cities of the country. Police arrest the leaders; the government wants to make an example of them.
The public prosecutor says: “I demand the death penalty.” Brahim is outraged, jumps up and shouts: “They are not murderers!” There is tumult in the hall, lawyers scream, relatives cry. Then the defendants have the floor. “We don’t want the split in Mauritania, we want equality,” they explain. “Slavery is against human right.” It is the first time Brahim has heard people publicly denounce slavery.
Brahim’s uncle and the others tell of their peaceful protests, the co-defendants, who were once slaves, of humiliation and harassment. Some – including Brahim’s uncle – were sent to prison for several years, while others got away with suspended sentences. Brahim hears their reports and thinks: “You are telling about my life and that of my mother.” And then he knows: “I want to be a leader like you.”
The years go by with secret information campaigns against slavery, high school exams and studies of sociology. Slavery is abolished in 1981 but remains unpunished. Brahim Ramdhane becomes a philosophy teacher and marries his middle school girlfriend. Every few years the school authorities send him to another city in the desert state that is twice the size of Spain. His family is moving too. From 2001 he worked as a philosophy teacher at a high school in the capital Nouakchott, and had his fourth and fifth children.
The country is also developing further: international protests and demands from citizens’ movements lead to the Mauritanian parliament making slavery a punishable offense in 2007. A historic success that activists like Brahim Ramdhane can build on: In 2010 he and friends founded the IRA-Mauritania organization. Its 200 or so members liberate slaves by leading police officers to slave owners’ homes, forcing them to act. Some slaveholders are questioned, but no one is convicted. Instead, many activists go to jail.
“We helped many slaves free themselves,” says Ramdhane. As Vice President he travels to international congresses and reports on the dependence of slaves. Because it is not iron chains that bind the serfs to their masters, but ignorance and psychological oppression. After a few years the movement split over the question of how to proceed: there are fewer and fewer slaves, but the former serfs continue to suffer from discrimination, poverty and a lack of education. Instead of toiling for others, many Haratins are now unemployed. Part of the IRA leadership wants to join the government, change the country from above. Brahim Ramdhane does not trust politics. He remains an activist.
At the end of 2014, Ramdhane drove through the villages in southern Mauritania in a motorcade. He meets with farm workers. Former slaves are driven from their ancestral land here for white Moors to own. “The land is yours, you have farmed it for generations, not the former slave owners who have enriched themselves by working with slaves,” he tells them. A few kilometers before Rosso, where he wants to give his closing speech at the end of the multi-day journey, the police stop the parade and arrest Ramdhane and other activists.
After 19 months in prison, Brahim Ramdhane goes his own way and in his fight against discrimination against former slaves falls back on the means that have made him strong over the years: education. Through them he realized that he is equal and that he can direct his fate through knowledge.
At the end of August 2021, the sun is beating down on the megacity of Nouakchott. Not a breeze blows in the Haratin district of Darnaim that day. On the main street rickety cars honk, small grocery stores, laundries and workshops line up. In a sandy side street, goats eat the garbage that has been blown into the air, children play between concrete stone walls.
Here Aminetou, 20 years old, tall, wrapped in a black robe and a salmon-colored headscarf, hurries across the street with his head bowed. She is on her way to see her aunt. There she bakes muffins every morning during school holidays and delivers them to grocery stores. It is a small miracle that Aminetou still goes to school. From her vacation job, she pays for school books and the internet contingent for her cell phone so that she can study.
The young woman embodies everything that Brahim Ramdhane fought for over the past few years. It shows that the descendants of slaves can free themselves from their misery if they have access to education. Aminetou failed her middle school exam twice. Your parents couldn’t help. The father works on the construction site and her mother sits hunched over bowls of grain every day, sifting wheat semolina to make couscous for the market. Both learned the Koran as children, nothing else. Your seven children should have it better than you. But this is not that easy.
Ninety children were studying in Amintetou’s class, the science teachers seldom came to class, they were paid so badly, and when they came they only taught half-heartedly. “It was a terrible waste of time,” says Aminetou. But she did not let herself be discouraged and sought help. She found it three years ago with the help of her uncle in a red two-story corner house in the center of Nouakchott.
A sign is emblazoned here: “Headquarters of the Sahel Foundation. For the defense of human rights, the support of education and social peace ”. Brahim Ramdhane sits behind a bulky, dark wooden desk. He clarifies questions about the preparation of the student ceremony with the staff, he signs letters of recommendation for volunteers, and in between his two mobile phones ring. The papers in front of him flutter in the wind from the fans. The screams of donkeys and the honking of traffic can be heard through the open window. There is a thin layer of sand dust on the coffee table, armchairs and photos on the walls. In one picture, John Kerry, then US Secretary of State, gives Brahim Ramdhane a framed certificate: an award for his work against slavery.
It is from here that Ramdhane now heads his Sahel Foundation. With free Koran lessons, the application for identity papers, without which children cannot go to school, with pressure on the authorities and school places in private schools, he takes action against the exclusion of the Haratin. “In general, private schools are for white Mauritanians,” he says, “but after all the discussions about racism in society, more people understand the unequal access requirements to good schools.” but hardly to be found in public offices or in cultural and economic positions.
For that to change, Haratin would have to receive the same education. “We encourage students who want to learn, who perform well and who have an idea of where they want to work in society through private schools,” says Ramdhane. There children learn in smaller classes, the teachers are paid better. Since 2017, Ramdhane has been sending more than 1000 children to private schools across Mauritania every year. To do this, he negotiates with the school directors about free places or pays the school fees with donations, which he receives mainly from private sponsors and non-governmental organizations from abroad. Aminetou got one of these places three years ago.
At the end of the day, when the muffins are baked and delivered, she sits hunched over her handle. She is studying in a voluntary vacation course for her scientific focus. After changing schools, she passed the middle school exam with no difficulty. In the first year of high school, she earned the title of second best student in her class. A year later she is currently best in class. “It feels great to be the best,” says Aminetou with beaming eyes, “on the one hand because I worked it out myself, on the other hand because my parents are proud and Ramdhane in the Sahel Foundation sees that he is in me promotes the right one, someone who really wants to learn. “
Aminetou wants to become a doctor. That’s why she studies six evenings a week instead of being with her large family. In the previous year, only eight percent of all students passed the Abitur, which means that Mauritania has the lowest Abitur rate in the world.
Brahim Ramdhane leans back in his wobbly desk chair and watches the video on his smartphone of the ceremony that his foundation celebrated today with 80 children, their parents and sponsors in the foundation’s courtyard. A sea of brightly colored robes in the first afternoon shadow of the high house. The national anthem sounds tinny from the loudspeakers, the children sing along loudly. Ramdhane is sitting behind a row of microphones in a gold dashiki, a West African suit. In a raised voice, he reminds us of the long road most families have traveled, of slavery and poverty. And he calls out to the children: “You are free. Your knowledge gives you the power to change your world. Those who do not learn will never be free! “
