True Tales of Modern-Day Slaves

By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet. Posted July 11, 2006.

Say what you will about the USA, but slavery has been illegal here since the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865, and was outlawed long before that in many states. North Americans tend to see slavery in sepia tones, as a legacy, because in practice it belongs to our receding past.

OK, not for the preteen girl forced to serve the large Orange County family of Abdelnasser Eid Youssef Ibrahim and Amal Ahmed Ewis-abd Motelib from 2000 to 2002 while being slapped and threatened and forbidden to go outside. But Ibrahim and Motelib are on trial, charged with keeping a child in involuntary servitude, facing an October 23 sentencing. As part of a plea deal, they must pay the now-16-year-old some $100,000 in restitution and back wages. In the courtroom, Motelib told the judge through a translator: "We did a mistake here in the United States of America because … at that time we were new here." The Los Angeles Times called the keeping of poor children as servants in wealthy households "a common though illegal practice in Egypt."

Slavery thrives. From Albanian sex workers to Indian cigarette-rollers to black Africans bought and sold in Mauritania and Sudan: According to latter-day abolitionists such as the Boston-based American Anti-Slavery Group, more people -- AASG estimates some 27 million -- are owned now than ever before.

As Andrew Crofts writes in The Little Hero: One Boy's Fight For Freedom (Vision Press, 2006), Iqbal Masih was four years old when his half-brother, contemplating marriage and seeking capital, sold the boy to a carpet maker. A few months later, the first carpet maker sold Iqbal to another carpet maker, in whose factory he joined rows of empty-eyed children who hunched coughing over looms, raped now and then by overseers. Far from home, the laborers "didn't even know the names of their villages … the single room of the factory was the only world they knew." Slashed sometimes by the sharp weaving-tools they plied in semidarkness, "they would have to dip the wounds into burning hot oil to seal them and then go back to work the moment the blood had stopped flowing." Sleeping on the crowded factory floor as those first few months turned into six years, Iqbal strained to remember his toddlerhood days spent splashing with friends in a sun-dappled canal.

Child labor and other forms of slavery are illegal in Pakistan, but Crofts describes a crushing silence and indifference that sustains the old system for money's sake: "Life is cheap in Lahore." One night Iqbal managed to flee through a window and find a policeman, whom he begged to arrest the factory boss. Instead, the cop brought him back to be punished by being hung upside down from a twirling ceiling fan. Escaping again, Iqbal lived on the street eating slops -- "a small boy flitting in and out of the shadows like a night insect," ventures Crofts, a British ghostwriter who under other bylines has written celebrity "autobiographies" and who recounts Iqbal's saga in passages by turns preachy and pretty ("a fanfare of horn blasts"; "a maze of towering walls"), but ever-earnest. How else, anyway, could you tell the true tale of someone the world imagines exists only in history books: a slave, born in 1982?

At a rally whose printed banners looked like mere squiggles to him, Iqbal discovered the Bonded Labour Liberation Front (BLLF), an India-based NGO at whose Lahore Freedom Campus he and other ex-slaves slept serenely behind steel gates and learned "to read and write, to add up numbers, so [they] can get proper jobs." As the school's most outspoken crusader, joining rescue-raids on factories whose chattel escaped onto BLLF trucks shouting, "We are free," adolescent Iqbal gained international fame, winning a $10,000 Reebok Foundation Youth in Action Award at age 12. A few months later, he was gunned down while riding a bicycle in the Pakistani countryside. This isn't a spoiler, so don't say I've ruined your surprise. Croft starts his book with the death scene. The rest is in flashback. BLLF maintains that Iqbal was assassinated by a "carpet-mafia" hitman. Pakistani officials contend that the slaying was unrelated to Iqbal's activism, but that he mocked a farm worker whom he discovered having sex with a donkey, and the farm worker shot him.

Thanks largely to corporate giant Reebok -- and ABC News, which named him its Person of the Week -- Iqbal Masih became a household name, at least among Western confabs such as myhero.com and freethechildren.org, and in Western classrooms where his story has spawned countless antislavery assignments. By contrast, most unpaid laborers live and die in total obscurity, picking coffee beans in Benin, planting pipelines in Burma, scrubbing floors in Paris and sucking dick everywhere undreamed-of, which of course is the whole point of not paying them. Tourists snap temple photos. Shoppers simper over diamonds and silk. It's so easy not to imagine the loom, the plough, the Chinese prison yard where petty thieves and Falun Gongers paint Easter toys and knit sweaters all night for the Western world. Let a hundred boycotts bloom. But still.

It's the undocumented-immigrant sex trade that Juan Bonilla skewers in his novel "The Nubian Prince" (Metropolitan, 2006). Its narrator, Moisés Calderón, the restless intellectual twentysomething son of suicidal parents, travels far and wide as a scout for Club Olympus, the world's most exclusive hot box. Its "boys and girls … serve as companions or pets" to fantastically rich clients who pay 600 euros for actual acts and another 300 for "image rights": memories, jackoff-fodder -- "You know," Moiss explains with the shimmering boredom that Bonilla nails so well, "all the fantasy sex the clients will have after it's over."

Photo credit: (c) Kay Chernush for the U.S. State Department. Courtesy of Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.

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