Student filmmaker Jigar Mehta documents slavery's persistence in West Africa
/This summer, UC Berkeley journalism student
Jigar Mehta snuck across West African borders on an unusual assignment:
to find and talk to Moorish people who had been enslaved in Mauritania.
Traveling on a tourist visa, with video and sound equipment in tow,
Mehta and a translator spent five weeks documenting oral histories.
"Slavery -- in the form of manual labor, sheep herding, cattle herding,
construction, and domestic work -- has been going on for over 800 years
since the Arabs came down," said Mehta. Mauritania's population is a
mixture of indigenous West Africans (also called "Black Moors" and
"Afro-Mauritanians") and Arabs from North Africa, or "White Moors."
Everyone is Muslim but slavery persists despite the Mauritanian
government's legal ban on slavery. [more 
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