20 - The Story of Saaba

Summary

This chapter describes the story of a young Fula-speaking woman known as Saaba who was sold as a slave in the Algerian Sahara in 1877. Many people had arrived in the Sahara as slaves as a result of the endemic wars that plagued the middle Niger River region in the second half of the nineteenth century. Concealing slavery was important at this time when, on one hand, colonial leaders had publically pledged themselves to abolishing slavery in Africa, and on the other, when slave-traders sold captives from Saaba's homeland, the middle Niger River region, despite the fact that they were freeborn Muslims like her. Saaba was one of many who received neither the emancipation promised by colonial rule nor the full protection and rights of the precolonial legal system. A witness and victim of criminal activities on both sides of the colonial situation, Saaba was destined to oblivion.