Former Sudanese child slave visits UCF to speak about modern day slavery - Central Florida Future

by Liset-Valle Jimenez

Contributing Writer

Published: Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Updated: Tuesday, February 1, 2011 23:02

Liset-Valle Jimenez

After 10 years of subjection and dehumanization, Francis "Piol" Bok of the Sudanese Dinka tribe finally became a free man after his relocation to North Dakota by the United Nations in 1999. On Tuesday, Bok arrived at UCF's Pegasus Ballroom to talk about the current issues facing his country and his life story as an ex-Sudanese child slave.

Mark Freeman, UCF's Global Perspectives public affairs coordinator, said the university feels passionately about human trafficking or modern day enslavement and often tries to bring speakers in to discuss the subject. Bok's last visit to UCF was on Nov. 16, 2006.

Bok, now in his early 30's, vividly remembers the Arab militia that raided his village when he was seven. After the murder of his mother, father and all but one sibling, he was forced to serve a master,Giemma Abdullah,as chattel in a blatant display of 21^st century enslavement.

Bok recalls how he witnessed genocide and how it impacted him at such a young age. He compares his life to a scene in the movie "Hotel Rwanda" and his encounters with those of Holocaust survivors.

"The bodies were on top of one another as if resting and blood ran like water in a river at my feet," said Bok.

"My age didn't allow me to comprehend what was happening in front of my eyes."

However, the tone of the forum was one of jubilation as Bok rejoiced for the future of an independent South Sudan.

Bok thanked his audience for their support and with arms raised and hands open, he expressed his appreciation of all things American and encouraged his listeners to take part in the future of a free South Sudan.

"You have to talk to your community, but first it takes education," said Bok. "They will listen because you are their future leaders."

Among the audience was Michael Fitzwater's eighth grade class from South Seminole Middle School.

"In our leadership class we learn traits and apply them to global issues," said Fitzwater.

Roughly 28 students came to hear Bok speak and learn more about human trafficking, a topic they have been focusing on in class. The group also raised a few hundred dollars for the Free the Slaves foundation.

Even though Bok is grateful, he does feel that the current U.S. government has not done enough to help the conflict between North and South Sudan.

"This is not a short term relationship," said Bok. "We need each other."

He added that it is naïve to think that what happens overseas doesn't impact you here.

Mechanical engineer major Curtis Gordon, 28, said he wanted to see Bok because after reading so much about slavery while in Jamaica, he had to see for himself someone who had actually been through it all.

The Francis Bok Foundation hopes to begin its development of new South Sudanese high schools in June of this year. Donations can also be made to the American Anti-Slavery Group's website, iabolish.org.

"After I arrived in 1999 as a refugee I said to myself that I would not live my life as an individual," said Bok. "I decided to dedicate my life's story — I will not be free until all my people are free at last."

Source:  centralfloridafuture.com
Former Sudanese child slave visits UCF to speak about modern day slavery - Central Florida Future

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Human trafficking is a problem, not just in southeastern Asia or Cambodia, but also right here in the good ole' United States of America. The US is both a destination and a source location for human trafficking victims. Join Aaron Cohen as he investigates the global problem of human trafficking and modern day slavery. See the mass reunion of slaves in Sudan and children returned to their families in Haiti.

YouTube - Abolitionist - Aaron Cohen - Human Trafficking in The United States and Around The World

Salford theatre premieres tale of modern day slavery | World news | The Guardian

Play tells story of Mende Nazer from Sudan who was abducted when she was 12, sold into slavery and then brought to Britain

• Helen Carter
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 25 November 2010 15.44 GMT
• Article history



Mende Nazer was involved in the production of Slave – A Question of Freedom, making sure it was authentic. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

A theatre in Salford is premiering a harrowing play telling the true story of a Sudanese woman who was sold into slavery at the age of 12, finally finding asylum in the UK after a long struggle.

Mende Nazer had a carefree childhood near the Nuba mountains of Sudan. It was shattered when her village was attacked and she was abducted and sold into slavery.

Her story is told at the Lowry theatre this week in the Feelgood Theatre production of Slave – A Question of Freedom. The performance ends with the actor playing Nazer crying as she receives a letter from the Home Office informing her that her asylum application has been rejected "as slavery does not constitute persecution".

Nazer's story is told through music, dance and film celebrating the Nuba culture. The production shows her challenging the horror and inhumanity of the contemporary slave trade.

Nazer served for a family in Khartoum and was eventually brought to London, where she escaped 10 years ago with the help of another Sudanese. Her family in Sudan thought she had been murdered by traffickers, but she was working 18 hours a day without payment or time off.

The Home Office turned down her initial application for asylum, but a campaign was launched to support her claim. She was finally granted asylum in November 2002, based on information provided by her supporters, including Anti-Slavery International.

Extracts from the play will be performed at the House of Lords on 30 November, supported by Lord David Alton.

Nazer said she found it difficult to watch the play and felt nervous revisiting her experiences.

"But by telling the story it is enlightening other people to what is going on," she said. "It is not like a great weight on my shoulders."

She was involved in the production process, helping to choose the actors' costumes and ensuring that it was authentic as possible.

Nazer said freedom was just the beginning of her journey. She has set up a foundation in her name that plans to raise money for a school in her village. "I hope that it can make a difference to other peoples' lives by providing education," she said.

She is now a British citizen, living and working in London as a hairdresser, and campaigns internationally against slavery.

The play's director, Caroline Clegg, said she felt a huge sense of responsibility in telling Nazer's story and it was important to get it right.

"Although it is one person's story, many people do not know that trafficking goes on because they think slavery was something that was outlawed 200 years ago," she said.

"We are taking the blinkers off and opening people's eyes to what is going on in secret. There is another world out there but you just have to dig a bit deeper."

Clegg said she had met people who had been trafficked from Darfur, forced to work in prostitution, then thrown on to the street when they were HIV positive. They had no passport and nowhere to go.

Official statistics showed millions of people were enslaved, she said.

Source: guardian.co.uk

Salford theatre premieres tale of modern day slavery | World news | The Guardian

‘Slavery’s not in the past, it’s happening here and now’ - Telegraph

I Am Slave, a new drama from Channel 4, highlights a shocking problem: slavery in modern Britain. Naomi West reports.

By Naomi West
Published: 5:50PM BST 24 Aug 2010
22 Comments

I Am Slave: Wunmi Mosaku stars as Malia in the new Channel 4 drama about a woman's fight for freedom against modern-day slavery. Photo: Channel 4

If you are of the opinion that television has exhausted its power to shock, think again. Next Monday Channel 4 will show a drama set to truly stun audiences. Part of the channel’s Slavery season, I Am Slave is the story set in the present day of a young Sudanese woman, Malia, snatched from her village in the Nuba mountains and sold into domestic servitude, first in Khartoum, then in London. While the cruel treatment of 12-year-old Malia by her female master in Khartoum is deeply unsettling, what will make viewers’ jaws drop is seeing 18-year-old Malia’s enslavement against the backdrop of a gloomy British winter in a red brick London home, “so terribly familiar and rather boringly suburban,” says the film’s writer Jeremy Brock.

 

Brock, whose screenplays include The Last King of Scotland, Charlotte Gray and Mrs Brown, had been similarly astounded to discover that slavery could still exist so close to home. “I thought of slavery as historical, or as a problem in another country,” he tells me. “But this is happening now, happening here.”
Although the numbers forced to work in this way – paid nothing or next-to-nothing, passports confiscated, forbidden to leave the house without their master – are difficult to ascertain as the practice takes place behind closed doors, the Home Office estimates that up to 5,000 people are currently working as slaves in this country.

The project was born back in 2003, when Brock’s then agent urged him to meet Mende Nazer, a Nuban woman who had been abducted, enslaved in Khartoum and later brought to work in a house in London from which she managed to escape in 2000. She had written a book about her experiences with journalist Damien Lewis. Nazer’s story – and “her dignity, the way she carried herself given what she had been through” says Brock – compelled him to take the idea to producer Andrea Calderwood with whom he had worked on The Last King of Scotland and she agreed to help him make the film.

Somewhat predictably given its difficult subject matter, bringing I Am Slave to the screen has proved a drawn-out process. One major hurdle, recalls Brock, was raising money for a film peopled by African characters (the film is getting its premiere on Channel 4 but will travel as a feature film to festivals). “American financiers are very blunt with you,” recalls Brock. “They would say, ‘We’ve crunched the numbers on this, and it just doesn’t play.’”

Then Brock had to make sure viewers would connect with the story. He strove to make Malia’s family life in Sudan before her abduction, and her father’s restless search for her thereafter, as easy to relate to as possible. “The risk is that an audience goes, ‘It’s Africa, it’s mud huts, what has it got to do with me?’ The challenge was to ensure that people didn’t have that excuse.”

Like the film’s stark title, Brock’s screenplay is strikingly uncluttered, the dialogue pared down – he felt that to put too much into words would make the film seem too worthy, too didactic.

But this sparsely scripted, atmospherically shot drama would fall down were it not for the portrayal of Malia by 24-year-old Rada graduate Wunmi Mosaku in her first film lead.

As Malia, the Nigerian-born, Manchester-raised Mosaku is heart-rendingly real: at times she appears irreversibly reduced by the grinding fear of her situation, at others we glimpse flashes of a spirited Malia, the cherished daughter of champion wrestler.

“I was so nervous and anxious about overacting, doing too much with my face,” she says. But Brock was awed by the extent to which Mosaku inhabited Malia. “You don’t feel it’s a performance,” he says. “I’ve had that with Judi Dench, Forest Whitaker,a few others, and it’s rare.”

Talking to Mosaku, there is no question of her depth of feeling about her character. “This part comes with guilt as well. It’s doing wonderful things for me personally – I’m getting praise, getting to go to the Toronto Film Festival – but Mende [Nazer] and people like her have had to live through it, for me to have this opportunity.”

Mosaku met Nazer at a screening of the film in July: “She was so brave to be there, so open, sobbing and crying. After, she said that everything ‘down to the movement of your eyebrows, Wunmi’ was true to the life she lived before she escaped. That was the biggest compliment, and I thanked God that the story that matters has been told.”
 
I Am Slave is on Monday 30 August on Channel 4 at 8.30pm

‘Slavery’s not in the past, it’s happening here and now’ - Telegraph

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