The shackles that remain

When I first met Aichana while doing research in Africa, the heat from the Sahara that was sweeping through Mauritania's capital had made it so difficult to sleep indoors that she had thrown a mattress on the terrace of a friend's home. Aichana's dark skin blended easily into the night. The blue scarf she'd wrapped around her long hair was about the only bright spot coming from the shadows. Everything else about her faded into the blackness of the evening.

I'd never met anyone like Aichana. A few months before, she had been a piece of property - for that's what you call someone owned by someone else. For the 29 years she'd been with her master, a man named Mohamed Ould Moissa, she had scavenged for firewood and herded livestock and done all the cooking and cleaning. Mr. Ould Moissa was her life because she had no life; he was her life because she was a slave.

This is the weekend when Jews mark Passover, their holiday of liberation. Passover celebrates the Jews' exodus from slavery in Egypt about 3,300 years ago. It is not, though, a parochial holiday: Most broadly, it honors the quest by all people to be freed from fetters and restraints. Thus, Passover is an apt moment to remember Aichana and the millions of other slaves around the globe.

The shackles that bind contemporary slaves may be political, economic, sexual. They may even be shackles of the imagination, for what is worse than a mind whose confines are defined and imposed by others?

Slavery persists around the world, although often it does not correspond to our traditional notion of a master and a slave. The International Labor Organization, for instance, has estimated that around the globe, 218 million children ages 5 to 17 are working; of these, 74 million children perform especially hazardous work from which they should be immediately withdrawn. Another 8.4 million children have been coerced into prostitution or pornography or into militias in war zones. From Russia, tens of thousands of women have disappeared into brothels in Germany, Greece, Portugal, Israel, China, Japan, Thailand and the United States. Debts as high as $30,000 to the "agency" that "resettled" them consign these women to not years but a lifetime of prostitution. Also known as "bonded labor," this form of debt has trapped millions of people in nonprostitution slavery, especially on large farms in South Asia, where entire families are kept like cattle.