In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • To Plead Our Own Cause: Personal Stories by Today's Slaves
  • Teresa Bergen, Writer/Editor/Transcriptionist
To Plead Our Own Cause: Personal Stories by Today's Slaves. By Kevin Bales and Zoe Trodd. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. 260 pp. Softbound, $18.95.

I have been reviewing books for The Oral History Review for a few years, and this was the first time the editor had to E-mail me and say, "Hey, you missed your deadline." I made predictable excuses about being busy. But on further reflection, I realize that I have been putting off finishing this book. Story after story of how people were tricked, sold, or abducted into different types of slavery can leave a reader despondent. I could only read a little at a time.

This collection of ninety-five narratives from around the world uses oral history methodology to incite readers to act. The editors, Kevin Bales and Zoe Trodd, see themselves as using the slave narrative tradition of the 1800s to further the cause of modern liberation. According to the editors, "With their calls for abolition alongside their firsthand descriptions of bondage and their assertions of humanity, the slave narratives were abolitionism's most popular and effective genre of writing" (2). And they can be again.

The editors differentiate between different roles that slaves fill, including prostitution, domestic help, war slaves, as well as agricultural, sweatshop, and prison labor. They also describe three types of slavery: chattel slavery, where a person is born, bought, or captured, then considered owned for life; debt bondage slavery, where a person pledges his or her self as collateral against a debt, although that debt usually keeps growing; and contract slavery, where a person signs a contract to work, maybe as a domestic or in a factory, but arrives at the work site (often in another country) to find him or herself enslaved. [End Page 85]

Some of these narratives were told to an individual, like a typical oral history interview. Others were told to abolitionist or human rights groups, or presented at conferences, or written down by the narrator. Peggy Callahan, co-founder of the global abolitionist group Free the Slaves, conducted many interviews in other countries.

After the explanatory introduction, the bulk of the book is the words of the slaves and ex-slaves. The editors divide the narratives into five sections: the slave experience, particularities of modern slavery for women and girls, turning point from slave to free, problems of freedom for ex-slaves, and solutions to global slavery.

While all the stories are very sad, they range from the tragically familiar to the especially bizarre. I have read a fair amount about human trafficking, especially stories of young girls from Asia and Eastern Europe tricked into lives of forced prostitution. And I have personally seen young boys in India working in the textile industry.

But I had not heard of trokosi slavery in rural Ghana, Togo, Benin, and southwestern Nigeria. "Fetish priests who run shrines insist that only by handing over a virgin daughter—typically aged between eight and fifteen—can families atone for alleged offences committed by their relatives or ancestors . . . once the girls are handed over, priests turn them into slaves and impregnate them repeatedly. . . . If they die, the family must offer another virgin daughter, and if they are ever released, trokosis are considered unmarriageable. Any children born to trokosis become slaves of the priests, and trokosis are passed on to the next priest upon one priest's death" (66-67). The number of trokosis reached about six thousand during the 1990s.

Munni Devi's story was shocking in its tedium and unfairness. Devi, an Indian woman, sees no way out of working in a rock quarry, where her job consists of breaking rocks into tiny pebbles. "I'm thirty-five to forty years old. I have four children—two boys and two girls. I've been working in the quarry a long, long time—many years. Maybe twenty years, maybe more. My husband died while working there, and now I have to work there myself. . . . I'm not really earning too much and my debt is increasing. My original...

pdf

Share