‘He bought me like a chicken’: the struggle to end slavery in Niger
We were treated like animals,’ says Al-Husseina Amadou said. ‘Now we are free.’ Some estimates put the number of enslaved people in Niger at 130,000. Photograph: Fred Harter
Al-Husseina Amadou was just one of thousands of girls in west Africa who are still bought cheaply as a wahaya, or ‘fifth wife’
l-Husseina Amadou never forgets the day she was sold. Like her parents, she was born into slavery in southern Niger. Forty-five years ago, when she was 15, a wealthy businessman from across the border in Nigeria arrived and bought her from her family’s master as a “fifth wife” or wahaya.
“My parents had no say,” she recalls. “I was just a girl and he bought me like a chicken in the market. When I left with him, I was crying with my mother.”
For 15 years Amadou lived with her “husband” in northern Nigeria, cooking and cleaning for his four “official” wives, whom he had married in accordance with Islamic law, and their children, while also working in their fields and tending their livestock.