NIAMEY (Niger): He wore a flowing black turban that revealed only his eyes, but Mariama Oumarou recognised him at once — it could only be her master. Riding up to her mother’s hut on a camel, he bound her hand and foot, slung her over his saddle and carried her back to his farm where he locked her in a hut and flayed her with a leather cosh. The teenage girl’s crime? Trying to escape.

Describing scenes that sound like horror stories from past centuries, the testimonies of women once trapped in lives of servitude suggest slavery is thriving in the West African country of Niger despite the government’s denials.

“My master kept me as a slave,” said Oumarou, 20, wiping away tears as she described what happened before she eventually ran away for good several years ago. “I’m lucky to have escaped, I wish everyone in that situation could do the same.”

London-based human rights group Anti-Slavery International says 43,000 people live as slaves in Niger, a vast country on the southern fringe of the Sahara where nomads wander the desert on camels and donkeys as they have done for generations.

Sensitive to accusations their nation indulges in a practice popularly associated with slave markets and manacles, the government claims activists in Niger have tricked foreigners into giving them funds to fight a largely “non-existent problem.”

What does seem clear is that a combination of age-old prejudice, abuse and poverty in one of the world’s poorest nations reduce women like Oumarou to the status of objects to be used by their “masters”, whatever the law says about equality.

“I was given to a man in Nigeria to be his wife,” she explained, continuing her story. “After 11 months I realised I was not a wife, like his other four women, but that I had been brought just to work. A few days later, I ran away.”

The government dismisses stories from women like Oumarou as make-believe scripted by the human rights group Timidria — who present her to journalists as an example of a former slave — but the association’s leaders make a coherent-sounding case.

A different phenomenon to the slave trade that flourished from the mid-17th century to early 19th century when Europeans exported millions across the Atlantic to tend plantations, they say Niger’s slavery is effectively a caste system.

Descendants of slaves seized as war booty by feuding kings, modern-day “slaves” in the former French colony suffer a social stigma that campaigners say indoctrinates them with a sense of inferiority.

Kept as unpaid servants by landowners or nomads who set them to work tending goats, collecting water or looking after children from dawn to midnight, these people have virtually no choices, often denied rights to inherit property.

Many live as serfs, paying tithes of their harvests to their masters who claim rights to their land like feudal barons. As Tamazret Gousmane — another example presented by Timidria — explains, masters do not take kindly to runaways.

“When everyone was asleep I fled. My master chased after me with his dogs,” said Gousmane, 30. “Luckily, I escaped.”

While some descendants of slaves build new lives in cities like the capital Niamey, prejudice often persists — barring some from marrying non-slaves, or from certain jobs.

Heavily dependent on donors for support in return for improvements in its democratic and economic record since it held multi-party polls in 1999 after years of instability, Niger’s government could do without awkward questions about slavery.

President Tandja Mamadou is keen to show Niger’s weight with its current presidency of the Economic Community of West African States, while the country is hosting the latest games Francophone countries hold every four years in December.

Anxious to defend Niger’s image, ministers say describing its social system as “slavery” is a misnomer used for shock value by Timidria’s activists to win funds from abroad.

“There’s no slavery in the form known in the West, that’s to say somebody treating someone else like his personal property,” Justice Minister Maty El Hadj Moussa told Reuters.

“What we do recognise is that there are certain ancestral practices that have categorised parts of our society into a class of people who are noble, and non-noble,” he said.

The government passed laws in April 2004 that set sentences of up to 30 years and heavy fines for people convicted of keeping slaves, but very few cases have come before the courts.

The argument came to a head in March, when Timidria said it had organised what was to be the public release of 7,000 slaves by a tribal leader in the desert near the Mali border.

Instead, the organisation says the government panicked at the prospect of the bad publicity and warned anyone releasing slaves they would be prosecuted under the new laws.

Timidria’s President Weila Ilguilas was charged with attempting to swindle funds from foreign benefactors — Anti-Slavery International — and was only released last month, although the London-based group says he did nothing wrong.

Timidria says the government can only enforce its writ over its enormous territory with the support of traditional chiefs, themselves the very class of people likely to keep slaves.

“The government doesn’t want to recognise the problem because it’s held hostage by the traditional chiefs,” Ilguilas said. “They need the support of the chiefs to be re-elected.”

—Reuters