Thomas Lifson, American Thinker, January 14, 2019

This story exposes multiple lies of the left about slavery, intended to aggravate race relations today.

Were it not for ideology and ignorance, this story would have featured huge headlines and prominent placement in news broadcasts. I am so old that I remember when Sékou Touré was hailed as a liberator of his people and a force for bringing the blessings of Marxism to the oppressed masses.

The U.K. Independent reports:

A couple who enslaved a West African girl at their home in Texas for 16 years have been convicted by a federal jury.

Mohamed Touré, the son of Guinea’s first president Ahmed Sékou Touré, and his wife Denise Cros-Toure arranged for the child to travel to the US when she was only five years old.

They forced her to cook, clean and look after their biological children without pay, beat and whipped her and called her a “dog” and a “slave”.

The girl eventually managed to escape from the house in Southlake with the help of concerned neighbours in 2016.

Touré and his wife now face a maximum of 20 years in prison after being found guilty of forced labour, conspiracy to commit alien harbouring and alien harbouring.

The New York Times adds a few details:

When the girl was 5, she was brought to the United States on a tourist visa and was almost immediately put to work, according to the filing. She said she spoke no English at the time.

She would start working at 6:30 a.m. or 7 a.m. every day, cleaning, making beds, vacuuming, cooking and gardening, among other chores, and would continue until the Toure children went to bed, she told the authorities. Several unidentified witnesses confirmed seeing her perform such chores at various points from 2000 to 2016.

The authorities accused Mr. Toure and Ms. Cros-Toure of denying the girl the schooling, medical care and other opportunities they afforded their five children, some of whom were older than her. When asked about the girl, the couple would say that she was a niece and had finished high school, according to the filing.

Mr. Wyatt, the lawyer for Mr. Toure, and Scott Palmer, a lawyer for Ms. Cros-Toure, said that the family had good intentions, but that their efforts to help the woman were frustrated by her status as an undocumented immigrant [sic].

Translated: They violated our immigration laws to acquire a child slave and then used that as an excuse for continuing her bondage.

Neither the NYT nor the Independent pays any attention to the towering significance of Mr. Touré’s father, Ahmed Sékou Touré. He was one of the first leaders of the African independence movements, a peer of Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, less well known here because Guinea was part of the Francophone world. But to the global left of the era, he was an equal or greater hero, because he was a Marxist. He was also a Muslim, a religion that accepts slavery as legitimate and features that “peculiar institution” in a number of Islamic countries, including Sudan, Libya, and Saudi Arabia.

Slavery still exists – even in America! – and white people generally have nothing to do with it, as inconvenient as that is to American racial victimology-mongers, who often urge African-Americans to reject Christianity as the religion of their former slavemasters. Count the Nation of Islam as among the prominent members of this movement.