What Comes Next for Freed Slaves in Mauritania?
One day a driver saw Mbarka Mint Essatim doing heavy lifting and asked if she was being paid. When she responded no, the man told her the truth about her situation — she was enslaved by the very family she had considered her own. She was 23, and despite neither looking like her "masters" — members of the light-skinned elite known as white Moors — or being treated like them, she said "I knew no one else and thought they were my family." "I did