Relación entre los Hábitos de Lectura y la Comprensión Inferencial

Awad’s appearance at the French Consulate in Jeddah in October 1952 coincided with the publication in France of a remarkable investigative report titled ‘Trafic d’esclaves en plein XXe siècle’.10 _{The report was written by Jacques}

Alain, a Belgian journalist who claimed that a well-organised network of slave traders existed, extending from the Spanish Sahara, via Chad, Uganda, and Central Africa, to the Red Sea, which exported Africans to the Arabian Peninsula. The slaves were first brought to the Tibesti Mountains in Chad by various dealers, where they were sold to a network of slavers selling on to Saudi Arabia. According to Alain, the network had been active since early 1948. It was run from Cairo by three veterans of the German Afrika Korps, who bought their merchandise against payment of old stocks of Wehrmacht armaments from the North African battlefields, and who then transported their merchandise on to the Red Sea coast, where the slaves passed as pilgrims to Medina and Mecca. There they were sold to actual pilgrims with the express purpose of setting them free again, as setting a slave free is a deed of merit according to Islam. The released slaves were then left to their own devices, with many, according to Alain, dying a slow death as beggars in the streets of Mecca. This fate was avoided by younger and more attractive female slaves who ended up in a sort of boudoir run by an Armenian woman posing as the representative of a cosmetics company, but who used this cover to prepare young African women for a life in the harems of Saudi Arabia. Alain stated that he had gathered these facts himself in the Spanish West Sahara, in Cairo, and in Mecca and Medina, where he had visited the backyards where the discarded slaves gathered. He had also

8 _{CADN Commissariat de Police de Niamey, Proces verbal no223/pj. 23 April 1954.}

9 _{CADN G Soudan lettre no181 à GGAOF. 30 April 1954. The court cases that form part of Awad El}

Djouh’s story and their relevance for labour issues and the relations between former slaves and masters in French West Africa will be described in B. Lecocq, ‘Awad El Djouh and the Dynamics of Post-Slavery’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 48:2 (2015).

10 _{Jacques Alain, ‘Trafic d'Esclaves en plein XXe siècle’, La Marche du Monde no. 8 (Paris, June 1953),}

510543-L-bw-ASC 510543-L-bw-ASC 510543-L-bw-ASC 510543-L-bw-ASC Processed on: 7-6-2017 Processed on: 7-6-2017 Processed on: 7-6-2017

Processed on: 7-6-2017 PDF page: 160PDF page: 160PDF page: 160PDF page: 160

154

interviewed a retired officer of the British Navy, who had spent some years patrolling the Red Sea in search of vessels smuggling slaves, and a Saudi dissident called Ahmed Pharaon.11 _{Although we cannot immediately rule out}

Alain’s visit to Mecca, it is not very likely that he spent any time there, given that access to these cities was restricted to Muslims only at this time and Alain was not a Muslim. How a totally unknown journalist like Alain financed the rest of his extensive travels and how he managed to gain access to his interlocutors, also remains a mystery (although we will examine this presently). Nevertheless, the report was published in France Soir, then one of the most widely read French newspapers, in December 1952. More importantly, Alain had his report sent to ECOSOC, the Social and Economic Council of the United Nations, which paid some attention to his story. From there, Alain’s story reached the UN Magazine United Nations World, and soon it spread to newspapers over the globe.12

A few other publications furthered the growing global public attention to slavery. In March 1953, René Cassin, the former secretary of the commission drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, published an article on slavery in French West Africa. In May 1953, the question of the slave trade was brought before the United Nations Human Rights Committee. The debate centred around a report on slavery written by Father Tisserant, an influential French Missionary who had worked in French Central Africa in the 1920s and 1930s, who was an active member of the French Anti Slavery Society, and a brother to the influential Cardinal Eugène Tisserant. In his report to the United Nations, Father Tisserant explicitly referred to Jacques Alain’s report, published a few months earlier, as a document of importance, giving further credibility to this story.13 _{Father Tisserant’s report to the UN was published for a larger}

audience in 1955. The report mixes reminiscence of past events with suppositions that similar situations might not be excluded in the present:

Are there still such unfortunates, captured by surprise, taken far away to become slaves? It is difficult to say. Would it be possible close to the administrative posts where control is lax? I would not dare to affirm that such cases would never happen.14

Tisserant’s writing style evokes an urgent actuality that nevertheless is not substantiated. Nowhere in his report does he present concrete evidence of a continued slave trade or slavery in Central Africa or evidence that he had

11 _{Pharaon is a common family name in Lebanon, but not in Saudi Arabia. The identity of this man is}

thus unclear.

12 _{CADN Résumé d'un rapport adressé le 1er décembre 1952 au Secretariat Général de L'O.N.U. Aff.}

Pol. du GG AOF à Aff. Pol. du Min. FoM a/s rapport Jacques Alain, 19 February 1953.

13 _{CADN Conseiller diplomatique AOF au GG AOF a/s rapports esclavage à ONU, 5 May 1953.}

14 _{Charles Tisserant, Ce que j'ai connu de l'esclavage en Oubangi-Chari, Société anti-esclavagiste de}

510543-L-bw-ASC 510543-L-bw-ASC 510543-L-bw-ASC 510543-L-bw-ASC Processed on: 7-6-2017 Processed on: 7-6-2017 Processed on: 7-6-2017

Processed on: 7-6-2017 PDF page: 161PDF page: 161PDF page: 161PDF page: 161

witnessed, or even heard of, such a trade. His description of the slave trade remains a reminiscence of the still visible traces of a slave trade that went on in Central Africa prior to French conquest, but which was largely - if not entirely - a thing of the past when Tisserant arrived in Central Africa in the 1920s. Tisserant presents his experiences of (the local witnesses to a past) slave trade from the 1920s and 1930s, and not of events in the 1950s or even late 1940s. But Tisserant’s clerical authority led people to believe his insinuating style was depicting a form of the present. In fact, this ‘present’ was already a past in the 1950s. But his report and his references to Alain’s publications gave further lease of life to both Alain’s allegations and the general idea of a widespread slave trade. Both Alain’s story and Father Tisserant’s memories would, in turn, breathe new life into the media attention that erupted around Awad El Djouh. Indeed, they formed the basis of further allegations of a widespread slave trade, made by an author with even less credibility but who was nevertheless believed.

The rumour about Awad’s return to Bamako, the rumour of a man who had been sold as a slave in Saudi Arabia, quickly spread and reached the desks of the local press. The weekly Afrique Nouvelle, a Catholic newspaper run by the White Fathers from Dakar, was the first to publish Awad’s story with a lead article ‘La

route d'esclaves noirs commence à Villa Cisneros et aboutit à La Mecque’, which

centres around an interview with Awad who briefly explains his perils. The editors of Afrique Nouvelle ‘led’ Awad’s story with how they had been previously contacted by an American journalist who had asked for verification of the existence of a slavery network run from the Spanish Saharan city of Villa Cisneros, a ‘lead’ we can safely presume to have come from Alain’s report published in France Soir and in the United Nations World. Afrique Nouvelle subsequently started investigations into the matter, but with no result. Until Awad’s story reached them.

But see, there is a rumour going around: "In Bamako, there is an African, Awad El Djoud. He has recently escaped from Saudi Arabia where another Soudanais had sold him as a slave!.15

Soon after the release of Awad’s story Afrique Nouvelle printed a series of articles on the subject of the slave trade from West Africa, based on their previous dead-end research.16 _{The newspaper based its follow up articles to}

Awad’s story almost entirely on a small Dutch booklet, Er zijn nog slaven! (There

15 _{Robert Rummelhardt & David Traoré, ‘La route des esclaves noirs commence à Villa Cisneros et}

aboutit à la Mecque I’, Afrique Nouvelle, 4 August 1954.

16 _{Robert Rummelhardt, ‘La route des esclaves noirs commence à Villa Cisneros et aboutit à la Mecque}

II’, Afrique Nouvelle, 11 August 1954 ; Robert Rummelhardt, ‘La route des esclaves noirs commence à Villa Cisneros et aboutit à la Mecque (fin)’, Afrique Nouvelle, 18 August 1954.

510543-L-bw-ASC 510543-L-bw-ASC 510543-L-bw-ASC 510543-L-bw-ASC Processed on: 7-6-2017 Processed on: 7-6-2017 Processed on: 7-6-2017

Processed on: 7-6-2017 PDF page: 162PDF page: 162PDF page: 162PDF page: 162

156

still are slaves!), written by Doctoranda Greta Schenk in 1953.17 _{The booklet was}

part of the IVIO series: small cheap booklets on various subjects, which were intended to be collected in special collector folders as an encyclopaedia for the common man. There was much confusion on the qualifications of this author in the publications and debates in which this booklet played a prominent part. Greta Schenk was the editor-in-chief of the Dutch women’s magazine De Vrouw

en Haar Huis (The Woman and her Home), which reported on the latest in

fashion, cuisine and interior decoration, but not on social or political issues of any kind. Having studied Dutch literature and history at Utrecht University in the 1930s, then still a rare accomplishment for a woman in the conservative Netherlands, she proudly sported her academic degree of Doctoranda, shortened to Dra. in Dutch, which is roughly the equivalent of a Master’s degree. But many took Dra. to stand for Dr. and took her, or him, as some thought Greta Schenk to be a man, to be a professional academic researcher on the subject of slavery, something she never denied or affirmed being, but which she certainly was not.

Doctoranda Schenk based her writing largely on Jacques Alain’s report. The similarities between the two stories are so remarkable that one could safely speak of the same text, or at least the exact same tropes, reproduced in another language. When later asked about her sources, Schenk stated that she had complemented Alain’s writing with a number of Dutch newspaper articles based, in turn, on both Alain’s and Father Tisserant’s reports; a report on slavery written by Sir Harry Greenidge, the secretary of the British Anti Slavery Society; and one article published in the German magazine Der Spiegel in 1949. This last article asserted that World War Two Afrika Korps veterans, who had spent some time as British Prisoners of War in Egypt, had remained in that country and engaged in the slave trade from the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan to the Arabian Peninsula, a story we also encounter in Alain’s report.18 _{Like Alain, Schenk}

presented a slave trading network across Africa, where Africans from all over the continent were brought to ‘concentration camps’ in the Chadian Tibesti mountains, to be sold for guns and ammunition to a network of former Nazis who, after the slaves had been ‘trained’ in household duties by an Armenian woman, sold these slaves to Arabian traders on the Red Sea Coast. Thus, we see a form of frame tale reappearing, with Greta Schenk simply believing and repeating the story as Alain had told it. These, at times, outright fictional texts, which Alain had written and that Dra. Greta Schenk had largely copied, were believed to contain pure facts, especially since the international confusion

17 _{Dra. G.M. Schenk, Er zijn nog slaven! ( Amsterdam, 1953).}

18 _{‘Baumwolle mit Beinen’, Der Spiegel 26, 23 June 1949. It is very likely that Jacques Alain made use of}

510543-L-bw-ASC 510543-L-bw-ASC 510543-L-bw-ASC 510543-L-bw-ASC Processed on: 7-6-2017 Processed on: 7-6-2017 Processed on: 7-6-2017

Processed on: 7-6-2017 PDF page: 163PDF page: 163PDF page: 163PDF page: 163

surrounding the meaning of her academic title and her occupation lent the story even greater credibility.19 _{Together with Awad’s accusations, these stories}

formed the basis of a firm belief in the continued mass sales of African slaves to the Arabian Peninsula.