«When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I want to know is what is happening in Mauritania. I love this country, but I also miss home.” Houleye Thiam, 44,’s American life began in the 2000s, when she and her family came to Ohio as political refugees. «People are leaving Mauritania because their home is like a “shark’s mouth”».
HOULEYE THIAM she is general secretary of Mauritanian Network for Human Rights in the Usa non-profit organization in Ohio that assists Afro-Mauritanians in the bureaucratic and legal processes to obtain political asylum and that informs them about their condition in their country of origin. He runs the Mauritanian Community Center which provides English and language lessons Youth and Hopean organization she founded in 2011 that supports rural Mauritanian schools by providing school supplies. In her professional life, she is a social worker at the Ohio Department of Administrative Services, in Columbus.
From his white office, Thiam talks about the migration of Mauritanians to the USA: “The phenomenon took hold starting in the 1990s, when some Afro-Mauritanians settled in the cities of New York, Memphis, Columbus and Cincinnati.” It occurred in reaction to the so-called Passif Humanitaire, a period of terror between 1989 and 1991, when the regime of Colonel Maaouya Ould Sid’ Ahmed Taya arbitrarily arrested around 3,000 Afro-Mauritanian soldiers on charges of having orchestrated a coup in 1987. state, subjected to torture estreme and summary executions of more than 500 of them and expelled 60 thousand Afro-Mauritanians – mainly ethnic Fulani – to Mali and Senegal, using as a pretext a cross-border conflict.
REPRESSION culminated with the hanging of 28 Afro-Mauritanian soldiers on 28 November 1990, the day on which independence from French colonial rule, obtained in 1960, is celebrated. Thiam recalls that “since then, power has been placed in the hands of the Beydan”, triggering deep rifts in Mauritanian society.
Samba Thiam, president of the Progressive Forces for Change
The “white Moors” or Beydan, Arab-Berbers descended from slave owners, are the demographically minority ethnic group that dominates the political, economic and social sectors, excluding: the Arabic-speaking Haratin or “black Moors” who descend from enslaved people; the Afro-Mauritanians of the Fulani, Soninke, Wolof, Bambara ethnic groups; and the Abid, who are enslaved people.
«Racial discrimination exploded in the 1960s, leading to the publication of Ithe Manifesto of the 19 in 1966», recalls Thiam. Signed by 19 Afro-Mauritanian officials, the text which opposed the Beydan system and its attempts at Arabization arose from a strike by high school students from Nouakchott, Kaédi, Boghé and Rosso against the decision to make the teaching of the Arabic language compulsory in schools .
THEN IT WAS THE TIME of the Manifesto of the oppressed Mauritanian Negro developed in 1986 by some Afro-Mauritanian intellectuals gathered in the Forces de Libération Africaines de Mauritanie (FLAM). The poster denounced «state apartheid» and at the same time called for “a true national dialogue”. Samba Thiam, Houleye’s father, collaborated on its editorial work and was arrested and imprisoned for this in the dreaded Oualata prison: «My father recounted the atrocious conditions in which he and his companions were forced in a rack-shaped cell, chained hands and feet. The water he could drink was what he had to get himself at the top of a mountain, they only provided him with white rice with sand on top. He lived in these conditions for five years. Luckily, he made it out alive. And the day after his liberation he decided to leave the country.”
SAMBA THIAM TODAY è president of the Progressive Forces for Change (FPC), was a founding member of the Mouvement populaire africain de Mauritanie (MPAM) and FLAM. Having survived one of Mauritania’s darkest periods, the symbol of Afro-Mauritanian resistance went into exile with his family in Senegal in 1990. After ten years, he fled to the USA as a political refugee, settling in Ohio. which will thus become a land of family and friendly “reunion”.
During the 2000s more and more Afro-Mauritanians will aim to reside in Cincinnati, Ohio city, Columbus. The maximum peak of arrivals was reached in 2023 – according to data from the US Customs and Border Protection – with at least 15,500 Mauritanians crossing the southern border after an itinerary of multi-route flights, arriving in Nicaragua and crossing the neighboring countries up to Mexico . Between March and June this year there were more than 8,500, an increase compared to just over a thousand people in the previous four months.
A PART IS GIVEN Trump’s racist and “migrantophobic” propaganda, combined with economic-social hardship growing, the violent ones rejoice suprematist groups whites who are at home in the Buckeye State, on the other hand Houleye Thiam believes that in general Ohioans close to the community act like “brothers and sisters”. In view of the US presidential elections, the social worker is volunteering in Kamala Harris’ electoral campaign. «I can’t say about everyone, but most of us Afro-Mauritanians (with American citizenship, ed.) will vote for her. Personally, I try to explain how Harris and his program are the best choice for us.”
In Mauritania, however, the only possible choice is often to leave. «Afro-Mauritanians don’t have a job, half of them still don’t have an identity document. If you go out at night and encounter the police, you are dragged into their station. You are basically considered a second class citizen. When you are not enslaved…”, explains Thiam.
Il Global Slavery Index 2023 estimated that in Mauritania 149 thousand people, 32 out of a thousand, were living in forms of modern slavery in 2021, employed in forced labor. All this considering that out of a population of just 4.9 million inhabitants, where 70% is represented by Haratin and Afro-Mauritanians, according to local associations the findings are low, since the Mauritanian government does not allow the census of enslaved people, concentrated above all in rural areas.
OF MAURITANIA it abolished slavery constitutionally in 1981, thus becoming the last officially abolitionist state in the world, and only adopted a law providing for its criminalization in 2007, followed by another, in 2015, which defined slavery as « crime against humanity.” Measures that are just “a way to pull the wool over the eyes of the international community”, according to Houleye, who concludes: “In the end, if you can’t change things from within, you will try to leave.”
