 |
International trafficking in Black women "La africana" and "la mulata" out in the world: African women and women of African descent
Marian Douglas
What happens all too often to African and Black, brown, tan women and girls when they venture away from home and out into the world? How and why do domestic servitude and prostitution (always) seem to be the preponderant "overseas work opportunities" for so many African women and women of African descent?
Not long ago I was talking with a man who works in international development. He is white and from a well-known western country. As we talked he too named domestic work and prostitution as the two "lines of work" facing most women from a certain Spanish-speaking Caribbean country whose population is mostly of African descent.
How did the situation get this way? It goes to the root of our "gendered, raced and colored" experience in the Americas and elsewhere, especially Europe, and EU member countries in western Europe. Most of us - at least from the Americas - know something of this history, so the more important question becomes what are international women's and other organizations doing to address this problem? And in the face of a known, continuing disaster, what coping, survival - and support - strategies are working for Black women and girls, and how might we replicate successful strategies?
In 1995 I worked in South America, in Peru. On the street one day in the capital, Lima, as I shopped at her stand I chatted with an Afro-Peruvian woman street vendor about her life. This lady told me her "dream" was to become "nanny" to a family in the USA. From that conversation until today, I continue to ponder the "Black women's predicament". Whether by now Black women and women of African descent - especially those of us from the Americas, after 500 years of enslavement and (sexual) servitude - are or are not entitled to have aspirations beyond becoming an un/der/paid house cleaner or nanny, or a "sex worker".
Beyond our right as human beings to hold "new" aspirations for our life's work, how do we manage to achieve the better life we deserve?
On 6 June 2000, the International Herald Tribune newspaper, based in Paris, published my letter to the editor on trafficking in women, responding to Anita Botti's article published June first. The Herald Tribune published my letter but omitted an important part of my original comment. My letter described my horror at seeing Black women working as prostitutes on the streets of Rome, Italy. I wrote to the IHT: "Here in Europe, I have seen Nigerian women from West Africa and women from eastern European countries working as prostitutes, usually in very sad situations. I will never forget seeing African women in western Europe, lined up on roadsides, standing, and sitting on chairs, waiting for hours for "clients", and even waiting by the road in the rain." Unfortunately this was removed, and IHT titled my piece, "The Human Trade in Kosovo".
What I first saw in Italy in 1999 still haunts me. There along a major boulevard leading to Rome were ten to twenty women lining each side. All the women were Black. As a human being, experienced traveller, and as a Black woman, I was shocked and saddened. Over the previous two years in Europe I had never seen that many Black people gathered in one place, for one purpose, anywhere I'd been in Europe.
Why does the migration door seem to open wider for a seemingly disproportionate number of Black women to become involved in prostitution in modern-day western Europe? Are "streetwalking" and housecleaning the sole "economic opportunities" Europe chooses to offer Black women, particularly in certain regions? For me this question raises haunting memories of Ousmane Sembene's powerful 1966 film, BLACK GIRL ("LA NOIRE DE."). Sub-Saharan Africa's first full-length feature film, Black Girl/La noire de. starred Mbissine Therese Diop as DIOUANA, a young African (Senegalese) woman who goes to work as a domestic servant for a French couple in Senegal. The young woman then moves to France with the family where she encounters problems and abuse and finally takes her own life. The plot came from one of Sembene's own published stories, and the film was produced by Andre Zwoboda and edited by Andre Gaudier.
In his article about Black Girl for Chicago Reader magazine, film reviewer Dave Kehr writes: "A girl from a lower-class district in Dakar goes to work as a maid for a French couple and accompanies them on a vacation to France, where her newfound sense of freedom gradually turns into feelings of isolation and invisibility." I saw Sembene's Black Girl not long after I returned from my own brief, mostly positive work experience in France. But in the end of the film Diouana killed herself in the bathtub.
An irony for me is that it seems now, many years later, I am finding more people with whom to share and examine these real and vicarious "gendered, raced, colored" experiences, and also our collective tragedies. Since the film Black Girl was made, how much has really changed for the better for Black women working in Europe and elsewhere? African and other Black women snared in European trafficking remain in European and African news.
In early April 2001 Temitope Ogunjinmi's in-depth article, Girls for Sale, was published in the Nigerian press and on the website of AllAfrica.com. Ogunjinmi's article examines trafficking in Nigerian women to Europe and in particular to Italy. What I found interesting in reading Ogunjimni's article was the fact that a certain number of Africans - including women - are "business partners" in trafficking and prostitution. In the article, one fortunate young woman recounts how, due to financial pressure in her family, she took leave from school in Nigeria "for a short period", and consented to work in Europe for the relative of one of her school friends. She was informed she would be working "in a grocery store" either in Paris or in Italy. Arriving in Europe this is not what the young woman found. The purported wife of one of the African "business partners" confiscated the woman's identity papers and told her her "work assignment" had been changed and that she'd been 're-assigned' to do "street business". Even without her passport and other papers, this educated young woman remained confident and resourceful enough to get out early, although like thousands of Nigerian women each year, this meant deportation by Italian authorities.
In other such news reports from Italy, in 2000 was the story of an African woman who managed to escape her captors and flee to local police. Partially blind, she'd been working as a prostitute to earn money for an eye operation. More recently "Italy Daily" (the Herald Tribune's Italian supplement) reports that in 1999 almost 200 mostly Nigerian and Albanian women and girls were assassinated while they tried to get off the streets and out of organized prostitution.
A few years ago at a women's leadership conference in Europe, I listened to Italian political leader Emma Bonino remind a group of Europeans and Americans (mostly white) that a focus on making progress for European women must reach beyond, to women in Africa and other parts of the world. Black women's issues such as these must be part of discussions and planning before, during and after the governmental and NGO conferences of the UN World Conference against Racism in South Africa, August 2001.
Marian Douglas,
April 2001.
The author currently is based in Skopje, Macedonia and Rome, Italy. Some
of her work may be read on her website on AuthorsDen.com:
www.authorsden.com/visit/author.asp?id=2361
Or: www.authorsden.com