THE MASKED SLAVE AT THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING

They led her into the conference room on the 29th floor of the Empire State Building, the supreme symbol of America 's splendor, wearing a mask that showed only her nose. She was a 67 year old modern slave, who had recently escaped from her captors. It happened on February 18, 2006 at the Community Awareness and Empowerment Forum organized by Africans In America, Inc. and ChatAfrik.com.

In a voice laden with rue, anger, and frustration, the enslaved lady, who had recently found a temporary refuge in a church, expressed fear that she would be further victimized by her well-heeled, powerful, and vicious tormentors who had enslaved her for twelve years, forcing her to take care of eight children, including three foster children; cook their choice meals; clean their accursed mansion; garden; and perform other demeaning drudgery. All that work without the $300 monthly salary promised her before she agreed to come. From her accent, it was clear that she was from Africa .

Outrage filled the conference room. There, before our eyes, was a modern slave: a supreme victim of debilitating historical, cultural, and social vices and forces: a 'commoditified', tormented, persecuted, depersonalized, alienated and terrified person, who had become a veritable magnet for afflictions like anxiety, depression, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. A victim, not of some foreign slave raiders, but of a Mephistophelean couple from her own village.

Speaker after speaker decried the trafficking and exploitation of humans, and promised to collaborate to combat the evil. These included Professor Adebayo Williams, Professor Harris Enabulele, and Professor Leah Blumberg Lapidus of Columbia University . Others were Sowore Omoyele of SaharaReporters.com, Sunday Dare of Voice of America, Milton Allimadi, the publisher of The Black Star Newspaper, Benjamin Afrifa of the Ford Foundation, Afi-Sarah Okon of African Women Alliance For Progress, Akinwale Ojomo of Continental African Networks. I had represented the Nigerian Social Workers Association, Inc at the forum.

It was a really enlightening forum for me. I met Africans and Americans who appeared genuine in their collective condemnation of the exploitation and dehumanization of others. It was also an opportunity for me to meet my erstwhile teacher at Obafemi Awolowo University , Professor Adebayo Williams, after seventeen years. He was one of those who had accurately predicted the destruction of Nigeria by Babangida's autarchy while some people were then hailing him as 'Maradona'. He has also been participating in the struggle for the restoration of normalcy in Nigeria . I must add that Professor Williams was one of those visionaries whose apocalyptic sermons had engendered my summary exit from the military cauldron that Nigeria had been turned in the late 80's.

More importantly, the forum showed that a lot of work needed to be done to inform our people both here and back home about the inhumane treatments often meted to the likes of the masked slave.

As I thought more about what could be done to combat the evil of human servitude, often disingenuously presented as normal African cultural practices, or criminally packaged as opportunity for the victims, I began to see that it was more widespread than I had thought. In fact, a significant number of people may actually be enslaving their own parents under the guise of taking care of them in their old age; or by using sentiments or threats to make them stay longer in America to take care of their grandchildren, while neglecting their psychological needs.

How did a respectable widow in Africa turn into a masked slave in America ? Abraham Maslow's 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation provides us with the theoretical framework to understand victims of human trafficking. He presents a hierarchy of needs, describing from the bottom up, physiological needs, safety needs, belongingness and love needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization needs. At the top of the triangle is self-transcendence. The higher needs do not come into focus until the lower needs are met. For instance, an individual would have to be able to breathe, eat, drink water, sleep and eliminate bodily wastes to some extent before he starts to worry about the search for a stable, orderly and predictable environment. The former and latter needs would also have to be satisfied to some extent before an individual can start to worry about belongingness and love needs like creating and sustaining affectionate relationships with friends, a sweetheart or spouse, and or offspring; or seeking to fulfill esteem needs like respect, recognition and appreciation from others. It is only after achieving the above that an individual can then start to worry about self-actualization needs like making the best of their unique abilities, love of beauty, truth, goodness, justice, and usefulness.

The victims of human trafficking want out of their homelands because it is difficult for them to satisfy their basic physiological and safety needs. They are hungry and they live in squalor and disease. These make them to be especially vulnerable to the deceit of the decoys of the barons that traffic in humans, who prey on them, leading to their eventual commoditization and exploitation as prostitutes, servants, unpaid or underpaid day laborers, and peons, mainly in large African and Western cities, where the victims discover that, while they can fulfill their physiological needs, (the trafficker actually helps them to fulfill these to some extent to protect his investment) they cannot fulfill their safety needs. This is because the trafficker needs to keep them in constant check through force and intimidation.

The enslaved also cannot fulfill their love and belongingness needs since they literally belong to their masters and mistresses. This is compounded by the fact that they are taken mainly to impersonal settings where most people mind their own business. That is why these hapless souls become isolated and alienated. The compromised position of the victims is to the utmost advantage of their oppressors because it is very difficult to break the chains of isolation and abysmal alienation.

The victims' esteem needs are even more difficult to meet as they search mostly fruitlessly for self confidence and mastery, and fail to obtain recognition and appreciation from others. It is axiomatic to say that enslavement and positive self esteem are conflicting phenomena.

Let's face it; most Africans who come to the "United States of Answers" on their own and work for decent wages never really go far beyond achieving their basic needs. The most accomplished of them may never achieve self-actualization or self transcendence. The higher they go, the clearer how things work in America becomes to them. Even if they ever reach anything close to self actualization, they may start to examine the nature of the base of America 's superstructure of splendor. Angst may set in as they begin to see how the cultural invigoration of America results in the enervation of umpteen cultures around the world. How the brain gain for America results from the brain drain of their developing countries. How the well-being of we the inhabitants of America depends largely on the exploitation of others, especially by the multinational corporations. How the Manichaeism of racism seals them into demoralizing object hood, splitting them into good and evil, documented and undocumented, deserving and non-deserving, the beautiful and the ugly, the haves and have-nots; the pious and impious, and the sane and insane.

Living in America may fill the African immigrant's stomach but carries a heavy psychological toll. As he satisfies his basic needs, the African starts to see that he is just one among many and that he is interchangeable with anyone else. He also sees that he is invisible, inaudible, and nameless or is only a truncated name among umpteen names. From the public quality of his existence, what Heidegger called "the one", which is the impersonal and public creature that precedes the "I", he sees his inexorable serialization. He gets important numbers (e.g., alien and social security numbers) that become more important than his name and follow him to his death.

So long as this stranger remains in the womb of this serialized and externalized public existence, he is spared the terror and dignity of becoming the self. However, if he stays long enough, the American system destroys his sheltered position of just being "the one" among many, and reveals to him his existence -in all its sordidness-. With that revelation, he feels tormented and criminalized by his second class status. He gradually becomes a stranger even to himself. He carries many unnecessary burdens and becomes adept at rationalizing his compromised position. He starts to hold himself responsible, not just for his own actions, but also for the actions of his fellow countrymen and countrywomen here and back home. The essentially invisible, inaudible, and nameless being suffers from the pangs of alienation and concomitant diminutive ego, or is struck by what I would call the 'Ota Benga Complex'. He may react to his condition by trying to assimilate to the system; engage in efforts to reclaim his culture; or become radicalized.

As Africans, we unwittingly acknowledge our depersonalization, serialization, and alienation by calling ourselves names. For instance, from being an Egba man, I am now called a "Naijah," a term pregnant with meanings. We the "Naijahs" in the Diaspora are neither here nor there. Unlike the Jews, the Chinese, and the Japanese, we have become active participants in the arrant assault on our own culture and the extolling of the Western culture. In the process, we have become horrid hybrids of two cultures constantly at loggerheads -with ours now completely routed and comatose-. Our stomachs may be full, but our psyches are battered and fragmented. Now the social and cultural milieus in both America and Nigeria are ego dystonic to us. We can not function effectively here or there. We are essentially finished. Fela would say "our own don spoil patapata".

As shown by the story of the masked slave at the Empire State Building, what makes the injustice done to the victims of human trafficking worse is the fact that, while most immigrants are able to fulfill their physiological and safety needs, the enslaved have to constantly worry about their safety. Instead of finding solace and succor, they find themselves in a fix abroad, where they realize that the human traffickers (the ghouls rigged out in rolled gold) are as atrocious as barracudas. It soon dawns on the enslaved and the marooned that they are in worse logjams than they were in their homelands. With that reality dawning on them, they become magnets for human psychopathology in all their malignancies. Franz Fanon, the revolutionary humanist, would say that they have become "abnormal" because they have abdicated their liberty or have been robbed of it.

Can we really blame those who are still desperate to come here? It is difficult for someone looking from the outside to know the fact that the logic of the American system, with all its vagaries and paradoxes, is essentially haunted by Nietzschean nihilism. Here, we are perpetually hurrying through a paradise where the angels have perfected the art of dancing with relish to the requiem to mourn the death of God while carrying banners that proclaim His existence. In Africa, our people have perfected the art of singing, clapping, and dancing to cacophonous drumbeats meant to revive God who is comatose in the hearts of their rulers, imploring Him to extricate them from the sordid realities of their existence; and the rulers grovel to the same God that they have rendered comatose, imploring Him to maintain the status quo.

Jean Paul Sartre teaches us that a man has the right to make the liberty of choice, which is the liberty of conscious action, total and absolute, no matter how small is the area of his power. In choosing, a person has to say 'no' somewhere, and this 'no', which is total and totally exclusive of other alternatives, is dreadful, but only by shutting oneself up in it is any resoluteness of action possible.

What can we do? Can we rise up to face the evil of human trafficking at home and here in the West? Let us start by looking at ourselves: the average African immigrant in America is cowardly, complacent, and selfish. Those who can meet their own physiological and safety needs often care rather less about the fate of their fellow human beings who are in bondage here or back home. Yet social and economic justice can never be achieved through complacency, cowardice, or crocodile tears of outrage by those who are ahead socially and economically: it requires altruistic actions that can be achieved through collective efforts. America can only work best for those ahead if it works better for those in the rear.

As Africans in America, we must seek creative and courageous ways to deal effectively with those who are hell bent on perpetuating the conditions that have engendered the existence and burgeoning of the ranks of desperate people in Africa willing or beguiled to trade their freedom and dignity for crumbs in foreign lands. We must be willing to speak out against and sensitize those dangerous human traffickers that oppress their fellow humans, including their own parents, and report them to the authorities when necessary. We must never condone inhumanity such that has been perpetrated against the masked modern slave at the Empire State Building. As Karl Jasper averred, "There exists among men, because they are men, a solidarity through which each shares responsibility for every injustice and every wrong committed in the world, and especially for crimes that are committed in his presence or of which he cannot be ignorant. If I do not do whatever I can to prevent them, I am an accomplice in them".

Whether it is by creating awareness back home about the true situations of things in America (that the streets of America are laden with dog dung and not gold) so as to prevent people from falling prey to human exploiters; or donating generously to worthwhile causes or organizations; or running for political offices; or mobilizing the youth, we must heed Franz Fanon's call from his deathbed that a person should "become a slave to a cause: the cause of truth, liberty and justice". Becoming slaves to worthwhile causes that are larger than us mitigates our execrable enslavement to material things, and remains the only viable route to our self-actualization and self-transcendence in this society, if those wonderful things ever exist.

Fanon, not given to meaningless abstract postulations with no utilitarian value, has given us the specific tasks to pursue in Africa:

"There are houses to be built, schools to be opened, roads to be laid out, slums to be torn down, cities to be made to spring from the earth, men and women and children to be adorned with smiles. This means that there is work to be done over there, human work. That is, work which is the meaning of a home… There are tears to be wiped away, inhuman attitudes to be fought, condescending ways of speech to be ruled out, men to be humanized." (Fanon, Frantz (1976) Towards the African Revolution. Grove Press, New York, p. 84).

We must act now! Beko Kuti's recent demise has shown us that we do not have eternity to fiddle like Nero while all is burning around us, or sit on the fence. The truth is that humans die. Even God dies in the hearts of humans. With the hitherto comatose God now confirmed dead in the hearts of human traffickers and most African rulers, it is the historic duty of all right thinking men and women to start playing God in the lives of their hapless fellow humans.

 

The Masked Slave at the Empire State Building:
Olatunde Olusesi

Into this florid space
In this dizzying edifice flanked by glistering obelisks of concrete, glass and steel
Cynosure of this bejeweled island glowing with grimy greed
Is led the petered-out soul, running from grisly ghouls
Her vigor already filched, together with her shield…

A spent-naked, armor-less, sword-less, humorless, masked slave
Haunted by memories of her fruitless toils
Hunted by demented hounds craving more pounds of her flesh
Her cracked voice and tottery steps trumpeted her lot in life
Not even the cacophonous din from feral vehicular gymnasts in the gaudy streets below
Can drown her tale of woes

What a strange soul! What a strange land!

A long time ago, the hounds had come to her abode
Draped in velvet, n' dazzling like diamond
Bringing good tidings, peddling a dream of gold
Blinded by their glitter, her head had spun like a wobbly kite in a whirlwind
"I'll share in the dream of which you speak
I hereby forswear want
Now I make a covenant with you rescuers of the impecunious,
Bringers of tidings of hope"

And so, rolled in their guile
On their wings of wiles, she came

Not too long after
Their tinsel velvet were ditched for togas of torture
Wielding their furious fists
The gloating ghouls tightly pinioned her legs and tongue
For dark dozen years -from dawn to dawn, from dusk to dusk-
She toiled in their gargantuan gilded cage.
They distilled her sweat
Turning it into balm for their scions to bathe.

Even now that she's left in the lurch, tarry here she will
To mend her dream smashed by guile n' greed
How far can this masked slave run?
How far? With the smithereens her dream had turned;
With the implacable hounds on her chase;
And you and I continuing to revel in reveries of our own?
How far? How far? How far?

New York, New York.
February 19, 2006

Olatunde Olusesi is the Secretary General of the Nigerian Social Workers Association, Inc. For more information about the enslaved lady and other victims of human traffickers, please contact:
Bonaventure Ezekwenna
Africans In America, Inc.,
P. O. Box 812, New York, NY 10039