jack sparrow wrote:Definition of SAVAGE
1. A person regarded as primitive or uncivilized.
2. A person regarded as brutal, fierce, or vicious.
Moulkheir, who is in her 40s, was born a slave and spent her childhood tending her master’s herds. When she reached puberty, her owner took her out into the fields and raped her for the first time.
In the next few years, she was to bear him five children – all of whom were also born into slavery.
Staggeringly, the tradition is so ingrained in the Mauritanian psyche that Moulkheir did not even question the way she was treated.
‘I was like an animal living with animals,’ she told CNN’s John D. Sutter when he visited the country in December as part of the network’s ongoing Freedom Project, which was set up to fight modern day slavery.
The cataclysmic event which was to shatter her existence forever took place on an ordinary afternoon when she returned home from tending the goats.
Lying dead in the dust outside the hut was her youngest child, a little girl who had only just started to crawl.
Moulkheir’s master – and the child’s father – had dumped the baby outside to die.
He told her she would work faster without the girl tied to her back.
Moulkheir asked to bury the baby. The man refused.
‘(He told me) her soul was a dog’s soul,’ she said.
She was only able to lay her child to rest at the end of the day, in a shallow grave with no burial rites.
‘I only had my tears to console me,’ she told the anti-slavery activists who eventually helped free her.
‘I cried a lot for my daughter and the situation I was in. Instead of understanding, they ordered me to shut up.’
Moulkheir tried to carry on with her life. After owning another person was criminalised in 2007, an action group intervened and she briefly found herself free.
But her joy was short-lived. She and her children had gone to work for a former Mauritanian army colonel. There was no job. Instead the family was enslaved once more.
‘He turned out to be worse,’ Moulkheir said. ‘He beat me and slept with my daughters. He would fire above their heads with a gun.’
Selek’ha was beaten from the age of 13 and soon the colonel began raping her. She fell pregnant when she was 15 or 16.
The teenager was petrified that her master would be furious and feared for herself and her baby.
Her terror was well-founded. At nine months pregnant, the colonel put her in a pickup truck and drove furiously at high speeds along a rough dirt track.
'They put me in a car and drove it hard,' she said. 'And the baby came out of me dead.'
This terrible event was the turning point for Moulkheir and her family.
With the help of SOS Slaves, an action group established by a former master and a slave, they all finally escaped.
Moulkheir and Selek’ha now live in a very basic one-room shack in the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott and attend a nearby school set up by SOS.
But they are both still desperate for justice and are attempting to take their two former owners to court.
‘I demand justice – justice for my daughter that they killed, and justice for all the time they spent beating and abusing me,’ Moulkher told CNN.
Read more:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1qPZWi2aJSo that is not savage behaviour?
or just black Africans?
