In the 1980s, people wore sweaters and shoulder pads and listened to music on Walkmans. Some even dared to dream about video phone calls and world peace. The documentary film Black and White Democracy shows how Brazil suffered simultaneously from a poor economy, lack of democracy and fear instilled by the military junta.
Even if the state is ruled with austerity and fear, the people can enforce equality with football and rock music. Football is a way to compensate for illiteracy and political unawareness, to learn about cooperation, and to change society one pawn at a time.
The Brazilian democratic movement was even named after a football team, the Corinthians Democracy. When the film asks why anyone would bother to fight for democracy and the importance of voting, the answers echo deep humanity.


Law Yarn is a unique resource that supports good health outcomes in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
Law Yarn helps health workers to yarn with members of remote and urban communities about their legal problems and connect them to legal help.
Legal problems with money, housing, crime and families will lead to poor health if they are not resolved.
Without Law Yarn the problems won't be identified and will instead be ignored. This turns them into bigger problems.
Law Yarn was officially launched in Cairns on 30 May 2018 by the Queensland Attorney-General, The Honourable Yvette D'Ath at Wuchopperen Health Service as a Reconciliation Week Event.
Law Yarn was also presented at LawRight's Public Interest Address in Brisbane on 9 August 2018. At the event, Uncle Des Sandy welcomed attendees to his country, Mr Mick Gooda presented a thoughtful, optimistic and challenging speech, and Donnella Mills explained the development of the Law Yarn with her community.
Law Yarn uses images of cyclones, mangroves, stars and journeys to help vulnerable communities recognise their legal problems in context and learn where to get help.
Four icons embedded in the artwork represent the main legal problems and help structure the yarn.
Based in Cairns, the Law Yarn project is led by LawRight, a community legal service and delivered in collaboration with Wuchopperen Health Service and Queensland Indigenous Family Violence Legal Service (QIFVLS).
Law Yarn will be trialled at Wuchopperen Health Service where LawRight and QIFVLS operate legal clinics on-site weekly. Fiona Allison and Chris Cuneen, distinguished academics in the field of Indigenous legal need will independently evaluate the trial.
These services, together with Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander Legal Services (ATSILS) met in Cairns in 2017 to develop culturally safe resources based on LawRight's successful Legal Health Check resources, which can be viewed at www.legalhealthcheck.org.au. Noted artist, Riki Salam, designed Law Yarn using the content and inspiration of the workshop.
"I am really excited about this work and the impact it will have on the Aboriginal health and legal sectors", noted Sam Wild, Direct or of Awakening Cultural Ways and workshop facilitator.
Donnella Mills, proud Torres Strait Islander woman and Deputy Chair of National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations (NACCHO), is the LawRight Project Lawyer. The project is funded by the Queensland Government.
Legal and health services throughout Australia have expressed interest in this innovative and holistic approach to the health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
'Your Law Yarn' artwork was created by Riki Salam, WeAre27 Creative, Copyright 2018.
For more details about Law Yarn, please contact Sue Garlick, LawRight Joint Director at sue.garlick@lawright.org.au.
Workers use the Law Yarn to help their clients recognise their legal issues and get legal help.
You can sponsor a Law Yarn bag for a health or community worker.
You can make a donation at lawright.org.au/donate - select Law Yarn as the appeal.
If you make a donation, we will contact you to arrange collection or delivery of your gift.
Thank you to everyone who has sponsored a Law Yarn resource for a worker.


I'm sitting in the Surgical Family waiting room at Boston's famed Mass General Hospital. People are talking quietly or reading hardcover books. A woman in her 40's wearing black track pants and white sneakers is slumped across two chairs, snoring. An elderly man sits upright as he naps, his head bobbing down to the collar of his violet dress shirt. Out of the 40 or so people here no one is on a device. There are no televisions or bright lights. We're all in a quiet waiting womb.
I, and I suspect the others, are feeling vulnerable, unable to concentrate on anything but our loved one. How will the surgery turn out? Will it be easier or more complicated than the doctors' expected? Will we be able to take our son, daughter, mother, father, wife, husband, sister, best friend home soon or will surprises force a longer hospital stay?
We are all on alert, fully awake and quiet amid the stress of not knowing.
My son was hit by a car two weeks ago while riding his bike back to his dorm in Savannah, Ga. God caught him as he spun from the bike, bounced off the car and kissed the pavement with his beautiful 19 year-old face. He had no concussion, a miracle. The local hospital stitched up the gash on his forehead, put his finger in a splint, and told him to find a plastic surgeon to repair the four broken bones in his face. So here we are.
This mother bear nodded in fierce agreement. Oh, how lucky we are.
But now I am on edge, waiting for the surgeon's call.
And I am remarkably creative.
Ideas for an education program that I've been wrestling with floated out of nowhere an hour ago. It's like I was taking dictation from some learned person who said, "Here is what people want to learn and what you need to teach them."
I've been struggling to figure out how to put this program together for three weeks and then -- BAM! – done in 20 minutes.
Sounds crazy. But research shows that when there's less activity in our brain's frontal lobes, we're more likely to come up with an original idea.
According to Dr. Rex Jung of University of New Mexico, inventive brains are less packed and organized and so nerve traffic is slowed down. This gives the opportunity for more unusual connections to be made even if it takes a little while to do so.
Because my brain is much less full than usual as I sit quietly thinking about not much of anything but my son, my brain has been experiencing what Dr. Jung calls "transient hypofrontality." This frontal lobe change has allowed my brain to make new connections, to think more creatively if you will.
There are far better ways to experience this calm brain state than sitting in a waiting room. Researchers recommend running, meditating, walking, and other activities that require us to turn off our devices and noisy brain talk and just be quiet.
My brain was so thoughtful delivering a creative gift of a new idea this morning.
The best gift, however, was the call from the surgeon telling me that my son's procedure was over and was not as complicated as they had expected. Maybe we should play The Head and the Heart's "Sounds Like Hallelujah" on the ride home.


In the Evolutionary Systems Biology Group, we study the evolution and evolvability of biological systems at all levels of biological organization, from genes and genomes to biological networks and whole organisms. We develop bioinformatics tools to integrate data from a variety of sources, including comparative whole-genome sequence data, microarray expression data, and high-throughput protein interaction data. Our work uses comparative analysis of genomic data, laboratory evolution experiments and mathematical modelling.
Genomic organization underlying deletional robustness in bacterial metabolic systems.
High mutation rates limit evolutionary adaptation in Escherichia coli.


when are you guys at AMD going to fix the mouse micro freezing?
i don't want your help i am pointing to show my dissatisfaction and just Fix this... it is not just isolated to just me..
Please use the original discussion to provide your feedback on this issue.
After installing "Win10-64Bit-Radeon-Software-Adrenalin-Edition-18.10.1-Oct10" I began experiencing the mouse stuttering/freezing problem.
I rolled back the driver version by performing a clean install of "Win10-64Bit-Radeon-Software-Adrenalin-Edition-18.9.3-Sept26". The mouse problem is now gone. I would suggest giving this specific driver version a try.
I experienced the same thing with the last drivers actually... I think I made a mistake by buying Radeon.. got a brand new Rx 570 and I'm already suffering with battlefront 2 artifacts or wherever is that's going on in my endmwirh this game.. and tbh I'm starting to wonder if it's the game or text card or something else, but I have no idea how to know this specially if support doesn't come around to help me about it!
Angeh, Your problem sounds different from MK's. Start your own thread and include as much info as possible.
well you tell me then why am i also experiencing the mouse freezing on 18.9.3?
Last week it was pretty clear to me that after updating my graphics drivers (AMD Radeon Adrenaline software) something broke, so it was relatively easy to pin point what components I've installed or changed in the last couple of days. After reverting to the last known working configuration, the problem was solved. It did require a couple of hours from the moment I identified the problem, till I was able to get my system to behave correctly; it is a shame that drivers with such problems get released.
I would like to note that I've experienced similar mouse stuttering symptoms with other systems (non AMD hardware). While investigating possible root causes I was amazed by the myriad of signatures that people report (and the esoteric "fixes" you'll find). I guess there are plenty of possible causes for such behavior. For example, in my previous gaming rig, using a Bluetooth wireless mouse (Logitech M720) on a WIFI+Bluetooth network adapter (Intel) would cause random mouse stuttering. The problem was very difficult to debug, because it only occurred under specific conditions at random times. So it would be wise to look into other possible causes besides the video card.
All in all, if you had a previous working configuration, I would suggest you revert to that, then try to identify what breaks the configuration. If you believe it is related to a specific hardware device (ex. Graphics card), try uninstalling that specific driver and/or hardware and see if the symptoms still exist. If you happen to have a spare graphics card (or onboard video card), try using that device to isolate the behavior.
Hope that helps you solve the problem you are experiencing.
Maybe because Microsoft pulled the update due to too many errors? It has not been released yet.
File deletion bug is fixed too although after fiddling around I did manage to lose my profile picture.
Anyway I'd say this is between AMD and microsoft. Betcha AMD will have to release a hotfix.
Tried BF1 on 18.9.3 and it worked ok until the driver crashed.


text:
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proxy season
board diversity
Jeff Cossette
Podcast: New technologies bring retail investors into focus
Proxy season said to feature long-term focus
This year's season will see support for long-termism, ESG and gender diversity, report predicts
Companies wanting to know what to expect this proxy season should take note of the long-term-focused messages coming from some of the world's largest investors, according to the latest ProxyPulse report from Broadridge and PwC.
Citing BlackRock CEO Larry Fink's 2019 annual letter to portfolio company CEOs and State Street Global Advisors (SSGA) president and CEO Cyrus Taraporevala's 2019 letter to portfolio company boards, the ProxyPulse report notes that investors are 'highlighting the impact of culture, purpose and stewardship on a company's long-term strategy and success.'
Looking back on trends from the 2018 proxy season, the report also notes that ESG is expected to remain a key trend in 2019, as is gender diversity with 'legislators, investors and proxy advisers weighing in' on the issue.
It adds that the 2018 'mini-season' saw an increase in support for shareholder proposals, with support greatest for shareholder voting rights and reporting on diversity. Proposals along diversity lines typically saw support in the range of 40 percent to 55 percent, while those focused on shareholder voting rights typically saw support in the range of 40 percent to 50 percent, a Broadridge spokesperson explains.
'Support for shareholder proposals rose among institutional investors and retail shareholders alike to 43 percent of the shares voted. That's a higher level than we've seen in recent years,' Chuck Callan, Broadridge senior vice president of regulatory affairs, tells Corporate Secretary sister publication IR Magazine. 'The proposals spanned a wide range of topics, including gender diversity, climate change, political contributions, voting rights, proxy access and executive pay.'
As evidence for the continuing drive to boost gender diversity, the ProxyPulse authors cite the California bill aimed at boosting female representation on company boards headquartered in the state, which was signed into law in September last year. A similar bill was introduced in New Jersey in late November 2018.
On the voting front, the report notes that SSGA will, from 2020, begin voting against the entire nominating and governance committee (not just the chair) at companies without at least one woman on the board. The report adds that BlackRock 'encourages' boards to have at least two female directors and Vanguard is broadly supportive of initiatives to increase gender diversity in the boardroom.
'Starting in 2019, proxy advisory firm Glass Lewis will generally recommend voting against nominating committee chairs on boards without a single female director,' the report authors continue. 'In some cases, the recommendation may extend to other members of the committee as well. ISS will recommend voting against nominating committee chairs on boards of Russell 3000 or S&P 1500 companies with no female directors in the 2020 proxy season.'
The most recent mini-season, which saw 1,024 US company meetings held between July 1 and December 31, 2018, typically sees fewer companies – around 20 percent of listed firms, with most tending to be smaller companies – hold their AGMs, according to ProxyPulse.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


It's official! Organizations and governments are (finally) declaring a maximum amount of daily sugar intake. So, how much sugar is too much?
While guidelines may be a step forward, there are still a few problems. One – they don't all agree with each other. And, two, I don't necessarily agree with them either.
We all know sugar is NOT a health food. It isn't full of nutrition, and excess consumption is not associated with great health. And yet, so many people are addicted to sugar and it's destroying their health.
ProTip – I have a 5-day sugar free challenge that is free and includes meal plan guides and recipes. Give it a try and get a jump start on breaking your sugar addiction. Get started here.
Are you tired of chasing the latest diet plan trying to lose weight?
I'll help you get off the diet roller coaster for good.
Fruit and other healthy whole foods contain sugar. They also contain water, fiber, vitamins, minerals, and other phytochemicals. They are good for you. Eating fruits and vegetables is a well-proven way to reduce the risks of many chronic diseases.
"Added sugars," on the other hand, are concerning. In 2013, the American Heart Association calculated that about 25,000 deaths per year were due to sweetened beverages. "Added sugars" are also in baked goods, candies, soups, sauces, and other processed foods. You can find sugar on the ingredient list under many names, often ending in "-ose." These include glucose, fructose, sucrose, etc.
The "official" change is the new Nutrition Facts tables. You may know they declare the amount of sugar, but don't give it a %DV (% daily value). This means they've never had a "benchmark" maximum daily value to use. They haven't declared how much is too much. Now, we have implemented a %DV for sugar.
In the USA, the labels are not declaring "total" sugars but will differentiate between naturally occurring and added sugars. They have decided on a %DV maximum of 50 g of "added" sugars each day. Unfortunately, this is still more than the American Heart Association's recommended maximum of 24 g/day added sugar for women, and 36 g/day added sugar for men.
And, in 2008, the average daily total sugar intake in the USA was 76.7 grams per day. This is way above the max % DV and over three times the amount recommended by the AHA.
For one thing, I'd ditch as many processed foods as possible, regardless of their sugar content. There are a ton of studies that show that processed foods are bad for your health. Period. I wouldn't recommend eating your "daily value" of sugar from sweetened processed foods. I don't recommend even 50 g of "added" sugar per day. Get your sugar from whole, unprocessed fruits first.
Reduce (or eliminate) sugar-sweetened beverages; this includes soda pop, sweetened coffee/tea, sports drinks, etc. Instead, have fruit-infused water. Or try drinking your coffee/tea "black" or with a touch of cinnamon or vanilla instead.
Reduce (or eliminate) your desserts and baked goods and bake your own instead. You can easily reduce the sugar in a recipe by half.
Instead of a granola bar (or other sugary snacks), try fruit, a few nuts, or veggies with hummus. These are easy grab-and-go snacks if you prepare them in a "to-go" container the night before.
Give my 5 Day Sugar-Free Challenge a try and get a jump start on breaking your sugar addiction. Click here to get started.
it's time to bring in an expert nutrition and fitness troubleshooter.
Guaranteed results. See if you qualify for a spot today.


text:
The Force of Things
Reviews of Force of Things
Sack of Rome
Excellent Cadavers
Benevolence and Betrayal
La Repubblica Blog
Can the Vatican Survive the Age of Digital Media?
Why the Vati-Leaks Trial Did Nothing for Vatican Transparency
The Body Under the Rug
The Paradox of the New Elite
A Soccer Scandal Made for Television
Cameras Shoot Where Uzis Can't
The Latest Obscenity Has Seven Letters
Experts Can Help Rebuild A Country
Historians Trace an Unholy Alliance; Religion as the Root Of Nationalist Feeling
Did Knives and Forks Cut Murders?; Counting Backward, Historians Resurrect Crime
How the Press Saw the 2000 Election
A Fight to Preserve A Literary Legacy
A Life Divided: Italy's Quixote Of Terrorism
Kinder, Gentler Fascism
Backward Runs French. Reels the Mind.
Textbook Publishers Learn to Avoid Messing With Texas
With the Index of Leading Economic Indicators, a Social Report Card
Scholars Are Quietly Offering New Theories of the Koran
What Is America's Place In the World Now?
Grounded by an Income Gap
Islam Experts Off On a Wild Ride, Willing or Not
Suddenly, Americans Trust Uncle Sam
Globalization Now, A Sequel of Sorts
Adding Up the Costs Of Cyberdemocracy
Italy's Moment of Decision
New Attention for the Idea That Abortion Averts Crime
Prospecting For Truth In the Ore Of Memory
The Original Spin Doctor
The Strange Victory of Padre Pio
The Corrupt Reign of Emperor Silvio
Italy Against Itself
Italy: The Crooks in Control
The Berlusconi Show
Italy: The Family Business
'Apocalypse Soon': An Exchange
Making Way for Berlusconi
Palermo: The Photography of Death
The Betrayal of History
Italy: The Convulsions of Normalcy
Pope Francis Against the Roman Curia
Maybe Italy's Politicians Aren't Crazier Than Ours
Benedict XVI Resigns: A New Path for the Papacy?
The Spy Who Failed
Alexandria Resurrected
Library Privileges
Girls! Girls! Girls!
Head Found on Fifth Avenue
The Ganges' Next Life
Perils of the Sphinx
Who Burned Atlanta
The Fall of Caesar
The Mafia's Biggest Mistake
Museumgoers
Homeless on Election Night
Has Silvio Berlusconi Ruined Italy Forever?
A Riot in Calabria
Force of Things Reading at NYU
PBS Interview on Berlusconi and the Press
Scandali del sesso: Liscia, Gassata o Ferrarelle?, 30 Gennaio, 2014
The Last Slaves of Mauritania, NY Review of Books, Nov 23, 2017
by Alexander Stille
in Articles, The New York Review of Books
Comments Off on The Last Slaves of Mauritania, NY Review of Books, Nov 23, 2017
You can both see the desert and feel its presence in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, which goes months at a time without rain. Although it is a city of one million people, rivulets of sand collect along the main paved thoroughfares of the city center, in front of a handful of government buildings and small hotels. The backstreets and peripheral neighborhoods are a mix of dirt and sand. Chickens, donkeys, and goats wander the streets as if their owners had recently packed up and moved in from the countryside, which, in fact, they often have. Barely five thousand people lived in Nouakchott when Mauritania was granted its independence from France in 1960, some 70 percent of whom were nomadic pastoralists, and more than 90 percent lived in rural areas. A fierce drought during the 1970s drove most of the desert nomads toward the cities. Now more than a quarter of the country's nearly four million inhabitants live in Nouakchott and 60 percent of the country's population is urban.
The place has a recent, improvised feel: there is no older, distinctive architecture; the streets are long stretches of mostly single-story cement and concrete buildings, like the strip malls at the edge of many American cities in the Southwest. Many people in Nouakchott still have strong ties to their original villages and return during the rainy season. The city's residents—whether rich or poor—generally wear traditional Mauritanian dress. The men sometimes wear Western-style clothing but often prefer flowing blue and white robes, called boubous, over baggy pants, with their heads wrapped in cloth, an outfit that manages to be both elegant and well suited to the desert climate. The women almost always dress in long, light, loose-fitting fabrics, known as mulafa, which wrap around their bodies and cover their heads, in deference to Islamic custom. Unlike the dull gray and black garments common in the Gulf States, the Mauritanian mulafa are often brightly colored and allow women to move freely on the streets.
The one thing most people know about Mauritania—if they know anything at all—is that it was the last country on earth to abolish slavery, in 1981. Slavery was not actually made a crime until 2007, suggesting that it was still widely practiced, and it persists on a clandestine basis although it is believed to involve a very small percentage of the population. Less well known is that in the same year that Mauritania declared its intention to abolish slavery (encoded in law the following year), it also announced that it would become a sharia nation, making Koranic precepts the law of the land.
These parallel developments—the push against the slave system on the one hand and the rapid Islamification of Mauritanian public and political life on the other—are at the center of an excellent recent book, Prêcher dans le désert (Preaching in the Desert), by the Mauritanian political scientist Zekeria Ould Ahmed Salem. He is himself a product of the changes Mauritania has undergone since its independence from colonial rule. For the past fifteen years Salem has had a professorship at the University of Nouakchott, the country's first university, which was created in 1980.
Salem's book opens with an incendiary scene in which these two developments collide. On April 27, 2012, the prominent political figure Biram Dah Abeid held a demonstration near his local mosque and, before a stunned crowd of followers, burned a set of Islamic religious-legal texts that had been used for centuries to justify slavery in Mauritania. Abeid fully intended to challenge and provoke Mauritania's religious and political authorities. Quite predictably, he was arrested the next day and crowds of demonstrators demanded that he be put to death for blasphemy, a serious crime under Islamic religious law.
The book burning produced an intense debate among religious scholars about the status of slavery in Islam and inspired counterdemonstrations by former slaves who supported Abeid. After a few months in prison, he was released. This auto-da-fé, in Salem's view, reflects not only the bold self-confidence of a new generation of abolitionist leaders but also the degree to which social conflicts in Mauritania tend to invoke the language of religion. "It is extremely significant," Salem told me at his house in Nouakchott, "that Biram carried out his book burning after Friday prayers and with the blessing of an imam."
Near the beginning of his book Salem tells the story of a former French colonial official who, during the transition to independence, suggested to his Mauritanian colleagues that they might want to build a mosque in the newly created capital of Nouakchott. His interlocutors dismissed the idea: "We don't need a roof over our heads to pray to God," they responded. Mauritania is almost entirely Muslim and was initially created as the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, but the nature of worship in the country has evolved. In predominantly nomadic Mauritania, people generally worshiped in their own tents; religion was largely a private matter. Today, according to Salem, there are 7,643 prayer sites in Mauritania, including 1,834 large mosques. Many of these were created with help from benefactors from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, which have also had a leading part in religious education in Mauritania. And so in recent decades Mauritanian Islam has grown stricter, even as the country has become more urban and connected to the rest of the Arab world.
The persistence of pockets of clandestine slavery in Mauritania tempts outside observers to see the country as stuck in a remote past. But little is archaic about the problems Mauritania faces now: struggles for power and control of resources; income inequality; systemic discrimination; tension between authoritarian control and demands for popular participation; negotiations between identities of race, religion, language, and ethnicity. And while the idea of widespread socially sanctioned slavery in the twenty-first century—as opposed to criminal human trafficking—may seem shocking, it is useful to remember that Jim Crow was alive and well in the United States in 1960, when Mauritania gained its independence.
Located below Morocco and above Senegal, along the Atlantic Ocean, Mauritania shares a long border in its interior desert with Mali, Algeria, and Western Sahara. A little under a third of its population is made up of Arab-Berber people known as beydane (whites), who came down from the north and captured large numbers of dark-skinned people from sub-Saharan Africa. Thus there is a racial component to Mauritanian slavery, although it is a complicated one: after centuries of intermarriage and concubinage, some haratin—as former slaves are called—are lighter-skinned than their former masters. Slavery was also practiced by the dark-skinned sub-Saharan groups who live in southern Mauritania along the Senegal River. Moreover, the haratin,having lived among the beydane for centuries, have much in common with them: they speak the same Mauritanian version of Arabic called Hassaniya, while most of the Afro-Mauritanians of the south speak Wolof, Pulaar, and Soninke, languages also spoken in neighboring Senegal and Mali. Some refer to the haratin as "black Moors." These racial, linguistic, and cultural complications have been obstacles for the antislavery movement. When Mauritania and Senegal fought a war between 1989 and 1990, haratin troops were sometimes used against Afro-Mauritanians, who suffered purges, deportations, and land confiscation.
Slavery had an important place in Mauritania's nomadic rural life. Slaves generally lived on close terms with their masters, often as virtual members of the family. Some were treated kindly, some with cruelty, but they were always in a position of inferiority, doing most of the hard labor, herding goats, tending crops, and performing domestic service. The system was sanctioned by religious authorities and reinforced by a pervasive caste system. At the top were the marabouts—the religious caste, a bit like the Brahmin in Hinduism—and the guerriers, the warrior caste, both consisting of major slave owners who considered manual labor dishonorable. Below these were castes often linked to specific professions, such as the griots (musicians and entertainers), and artisans such as the forgerons (metal workers). Near the bottom of the totem pole were the haratin, former slaves who had been granted their freedom, and below them, at the very bottom, the slaves.
It was—and to some degree still is—a form of slavery without chains, reinforced by every class of society. When I visited Biram Dah Abeid this past May, I also interviewed three young, recently liberated slaves, none of them more than twenty-five years old. They all explained that the fiercest resistance they encountered when they began to push for their freedom came from their own families. Having a family member leave his or her master and go to the authorities was seen as a betrayal, a social disgrace that would harm the rest of the family and possibly damn the former slave's soul to hell. "If you leave you will no longer be my son," one boy says his mother told him.
The slave system began to come apart when a severe drought in the late 1960s pushed most of the country's people from the desert into the cities, much as Jim Crow began to weaken when the cotton industry collapsed in the first decades of the twentieth century and black former sharecroppers moved to cities of the South and the industrial cities of the North. During the drought, which lasted between 1968 and 1974, slave owners began killing their livestock and were no longer able to feed their large extended families, particularly their slaves. About 100,000 people died of famine in the Sahelregion—the strip of land that stretches between the Sahara desert and sub-Saharan Africa. Arab nomads went to the city in search of new opportunities and many slaves were left to fend for themselves. Some became wage laborers in the country's iron mines, which replaced livestock as the country's chief industry. Others joined the military or did odd jobs in the growing cities. Many searched for their former masters in order to get them to sign their freedom papers, which would allow them to qualify for certain jobs or educational opportunities. In a matter of about two decades, Mauritania transformed from a country in which two thirds of the population was nomadic to one, in 1988, in which only 12 percent was.
The pioneers of Mauritania's antislavery movement belonged to a small haratin elite. They had been educated in French colonial schools that still taught the Republican dogma of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. One of the movement's most important figures is Boubacar Messaoud, the seventy-two-year-old founder and president of an abolitionist group called SOS Esclaves who was born into slavery in 1945. "I ended up in school almost by chance," Messaoud told me in his home in Nouakchott. (An architect, he designed his house and the surrounding neighborhood himself.) "I happened to be coming in from the fields when I saw a crowd of kids heading toward school. I wanted to go too." He later won scholarships to study architecture in both Mali and the Soviet Union. Messaoud was a member of a small group of slaves or former slaves that got a leg up from the French schooling system. "Many of the Arab-Berbers," he said, "didn't want to send their children to the French schools," fearing they would subject students to religious conversion and cultural and linguistic colonization, and so "some of them would send their slave children instead" to create the appearance of cooperation with colonial authorities.
The colonial French administration had an ambiguous, contradictory attitude toward slavery. Officially, France abolished slavery at home and in its colonies in 1848. But it took a more hands-off approach in Mauritania, which it had not really colonized until the early twentieth century; even then, it ruled at a remove, from nearby Senegal. In Mauritania it adopted a policy of "indirect rule," not wanting to anger the Arab-Berber tribal leaders whom it needed to keep some control. It banned the sale of slaves but not domestic slave ownership, purportedly out of respect for local religious customs.
Living in a slave family, Messaoud quickly came to loathe the institution: "I saw terrible situations under slavery, people being beaten, a woman practically raped in front of me. The master could come into the room of a female slave and do whatever he wanted." Messaoud's schoolmates called him Boubacar abid, the slave, to distinguish him from another boy with the same first name.
Messaoud began to see a political opportunity toward the end of the 1970s. Mauritania's failure to win a war with Morocco over the Western Sahara led to a coup d'état that brought in a regime somewhat more open to political opposition. He was among the founders of a new party called El-Hor (The Freeman), which appealed openly to the haratin. Messaoud and his associates organized a series of antislavery protests—the first in Mauritania's history—in early 1980, after a slave girl of fifteen was sold off in a semipublic auction. Instead of investigating the auction, the Mauritanian authorities arrested Messaoud and eight other El-Hor leaders and placed them on trial in a town in the south of the country. The government hoped to portray them as political schemers trying to divide Mauritania by promoting the haratin as a separate ethnic group. The trial proved to be a public relations fiasco for the government. Messaoud and his codefendants were released after several months in prison, and in July of that year the government issued a decree officially abolishing slavery, which was enacted into law the following year.
The law was hailed as an important victory—the government had previously been reluctant to recognize that slavery even existed—but it changed very little. It contained a stipulation that slave owners should be paid for the loss of their property, as if they, and not those who had been deprived of their freedom, should be the ones compensated. The authorities shrewdly brought some haratin leaders into the government, dividing the antislavery movement. The military junta's leader, Mohamed Kouna ould Haidallah, conducted a complicated balancing act: while abolishing slavery he also played to his Arab-Berber base, reaffirming sharia as the law of the land and making Arabic the official national language, which did not sit well with the non-Arab-speaking peoples in the country's south.
During the same period an Afro-Mauritanian movement arose called FLAM (Forces de Libération Africaines de Mauritanie) with which few haratin identified; its leaders were mainly Pulaar speakers from southern Mauritania. Further racial violence erupted after a border dispute between Senegal and Mauritania brought the two countries to war in 1989. The Mauritanian government deported at least 75,000 Afro-Mauritanians to Senegal and confiscated their land on the pretext that they were Senegalese. The Mauritanian army also conducted a purge of its black troops, murdering several hundred Afro-Mauritanian officers and soldiers. In one of the most infamous incidents, in 1990 the army celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the country's independence by hanging twenty-eight black soldiers who had been abducted from the barracks in the town of Inal.
The government now took the position that, since slavery had been abolished, it no longer existed and should not be spoken of. Boubacar Messaoud founded SOS Esclaves in 1995 to bring new attention to the issue, but he was arrested in 1998 and again in 2002 merely for giving interviews in which he discussed slavery. Some, like Abeid, believe that the antislavery law of 2007 led traditional haratin advocates to let down their guard. A very few Mauritanians still do own slaves, and the effects of the caste system remain apparent. The country's government, military, clergy, business elite, and university system are all dominated by high caste Arab-Berbers.
A year after the passage of the penal slavery law, Biram Dah Abeid, who had been secretary general of SOS Esclaves, broke away from Messaoud and formed his own, more radical group called IRA (Initiative pour la Résurgence du Mouvement Abolitionniste), which the Mauritanian government has refused to recognize as an NGO. Abeid told me that the group has so far carried out four protests he calls coups d'éclat, or "acts of rupture," directed at "the symbols of Arab-Berber domination." These included a march to commemorate the massacre of black soldiers at Inal and a public protest at a police station in Nouakchott over the police's failure to arrest a woman—an executive working at the state bank—who kept two domestic slaves she had received as a wedding present. When they refused to disperse, Biram and some of his followers were arrested, put on trial, convicted, and imprisoned for several months before being released; the woman in question was later arrested.
Abeid is also exploring the possibility of uniting Mauritania's haratin with Afro-Mauritanians from the country's south. He earned his longest prison sentence for leading a relatively small and peaceful march in 2014 in the south of Mauritania, aimed at protesting what he called "land slavery," after the failure of land reform. He was not alone in this effort; other resistance groups, including Touche Pas à Ma Nationalité (Hands Off My Nationality), are also organizing the country's Afro-Mauritanians.
"It was the idea of uniting the haratin and the Afro-Mauritanians," Salem told me, "that really worried the government." When Abeid ran for president of Mauritania in 2014—an election that most opposition parties chose to boycott because they were denied the freedom to campaign—he officially won only 8 percent of the vote. "There was a great deal of fraud," he says. But the country's haratin make up roughly 45 percent of the population and the Afro-Mauritanians another 25 percent. If they voted together in the 2019 election, in which Abeid says he plans to run, they would constitute a clear majority.
The most surprising of Abeid's coups so far has been the 2012 book burning with which Salem's study begins. The famous medieval Islamic legal text Abeid destroyed, he told me, "continues to be used to train judges in Mauritania and justifies the buying, selling, and beating of slaves, the rape of women." According to Abeid "the haratincommunity was perplexed initially" but came to his defense when they heard members of the Arab-Berber community demand his execution. Abeid spent three months on death row before his sentence was commuted. Haratin prison guards signaled to him that the battle for public opinion outside prison was going well. "It was an affirmation of our kind of Islam," Abeid now says. "With this act, the religious authorities lost control of society."
The response to Abeid's book burning suggests the extent to which political and social issues are being worked out now in the religious sphere, using religious language. The first generation of abolitionists, like Boubacar Messaoud, had a much more secular approach to politics. Messaoud was influenced by the popularity of Marxism across Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, something that has largely vanished. A recurring theme in Prêcher dans le désert is that Mauritania's antislavery movement has increasingly come to benefit from the public predominance of Islam.
Slaves were traditionally prevented from receiving a religious education, which placed them at a severe disadvantage in a country where knowledge of Islam is a form of power. As Salem's book shows, many haratin after the abolition of slavery were unsurprisingly eager to receive religious training, build their own mosques, and have their own haratin imams. Haratin women did not traditionally cover their heads, since they were workers and not granted the protection and respect traditionally accorded women in Muslim society; now, most do. But many Salafist preachers consider the haratin community's expressions of freedom—including its rich musical tradition, in which men and women played music and danced together—impure and corrupt.
Abeid is anticlerical: he points out that until very recently, the country's religious authorities have been almost entirely of Arab-Berber origin, many of them major land and slave owners. "They have made slavery the sixth pillar of Islam," he said during a recent interview. But he is careful to show that he is not anti-Islam. At a certain point, he paused our interview and explained that he and his followers needed to pray. I waited for several minutes while he and a dozen or so IRA members gathered in the middle of their meeting room.
When we resumed our talk, I asked Abeid if his battle with the Muslim clerics had changed his view of religion. "Not at all," he answered. It is not clear what separation of church and state would look like in a society as religiously conservative as Mauritania. But it is precisely this kind of separation that Abeid wants to establish. "The book burning was an affirmation of our form of Islam, a democratic, egalitarian Islam, the Islam of the Prophet Muhammad—peace be upon him—and of the Koran. It is an Islam laïque," he said, using the French word for "secular."
About Alexander Stille
Professor Stille graduated with a B.A. from Yale University and earned an M.S. at Columbia. He has worked as a contributor to The New York Times, La Repubblica, The New Yorker magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Correspondent, U.S. News & World Report, The Boston Globe, and The Toronto Globe and Mail. View all posts by Alexander Stille →
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Articles, Italy, The New York Review of Books
Not So Funny: The Italian Elections of 2018 and the rise of the 5 Star Movement
Articles, France, The New Yorker
The French Obsession with National Suicide, The New Yorker, Dec. 11, 2014
2014, Blog, La Repubblica
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