In Mauritania, Aichana was among the lucky few: By the time she reached her late 20s, she resolved to leave her master. She first escaped by herself, then returned a few weeks later with government officials who freed her four children. They all moved to Nouakchott, the capital, where, with difficulty, they got by; Mauritanians do not take lightly to someone flouting the nation's rigid caste system.
But hard as her new life was, Aichana was relieved. When slaves are too old or too feeble to do what their master wants, he figuratively takes his foot off them and rolls them into their grave. The slave is done with his life; the master is done with his property. This is as basic a transaction as you can find, a transaction that is ancient and primeval and horrible, all at the same time - a transaction that slights everything we have come to believe about the intractable and inevitable and progressive trajectory of this race we call human.
Africa convinced me that universal abolition remains a compelling and durable myth. For if slavery is being practiced today, if people - anywhere - are still being treated like commodities that walk and talk just like the people who claim ownership over them, then some parts of the world have traveled little moral distance in the last century. And some people - "slaves" - are still forced to do their damnedest to cheat the devil of the cruelest theft of all: the theft of dignity and honor and strength, a theft that means that the rich, satisfying banquet of true freedom is for others, while their own lives are stunted in service to "masters," a word as rueful as it is antiquated.
Thankfully, slavery today is a fraction of what it had been more than a century ago. Yet not completely eradicating it may be proof that we humans are more flawed than we like to admit, that we haven't quite made it to the point of treating all people with an essential decency. Maybe we never will, yet the promise of Passover - the Promised Land of freedom, the blessed land of dignity - should be the horizon on which we set our eyes. Without that, pharaoh reigns, with death as his companion.
Arthur J. Magida is writer in residence at the University of Baltimore. His latest book is "Opening the Doors of Wonder: Reflections on Religious Rites of Passage." His e-mail is amagida2@aol.com.
