The 150th anniversary of France’s abolition of slavery was the occasion for many events marking the 19th century black slave trade. But the enslavement of human beings is just as much a reality today, affecting millions of women and children across the globe. As this exploitation starts to reach the heart of Western Europe, awareness of the phenomenon is slowly growing. The children’s march was the first public demonstration

Safia Kharun has managed - just - to celebrate her twentieth birthday a free woman. When she arrived in Paris from Mogadiscio, Somalia, via Djibouti in 1991, she was just in her teens. She then underwent four years of slavery under a cruel mistress. In 1995, after a number of failed attempts, she managed to escape. She was found on the pavement by the police, her face bleeding. They took her to hospital, where she was found to be bruised, undernourished and suffering from tuberculosis. Safia is now recovering, living in a hostel and going to a special day centre. She is learning French and dressmaking. But she is lonely, with few friends in France and no family left in Somalia. Every night, she has the same nightmare: “I see ‘her’ at my bedroom window; she is beating me again. I wake with a start and say ’Lord God, deliver me from the demon’.” Safia Kharun has lived a new chapter in the contemporary history of slavery

“The thinkers of the Enlightenment were quick to condemn Greek and Roman slavery. But they said nothing against the black slave trade at the height of their golden age. Things are much the same today. We condemn the slave trade but say nothing about what is happening before our very eyes.” Louis Sala-Molins, professor of political philosophy at the university of Toulouse-Le Mirail, wants none of the fairy tale that has history stop on 27 April 1848, the date when the young Second Republic signed the decree emancipating black slaves. “In its classical form, there were five main aspects to slavery: brutalisation, the absence of any legal rights, buying and selling, specific networks and the fact that this was the norm. All these characteristics can be found in quite a number of present-day situations.”

The United Nations cannot argue with that. In 1974 it set up a working party on contemporary (...)