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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 ]