HALIMA Ahmed, a gaunt mother of three who guesses her age at 40, sits back against the mud wall of her low hut and sighs tiredly.

It is mid-afternoon. This is the first time today she has paused in her back-breaking work, collecting water, herding cows and pounding millet with a heavy club in the fierce 40C (105F) desert heat. Halima’s labours are not for herself, but for a nomadic Tuareg chief who owns her and her children, as he owned her parents and her parent’s parents.

She is a modern-day slave, bonded to her master, who rules a swath of northwestern Niger, a West African desert state classed by the UN in 2004 as the world’s second poorest country, with the highest birth- rate. Up to 870,000 of its population of 12 million are slaves.

But today 7,000 will be freed, at a dusty ceremony besieged by the wild harmattan winds 600km northwest of the capital Niamey. It is the first time since the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade that such a number of slaves will be voluntarily given up by their master, after a change in the law to make slavery punishable by a 30-year jail term.

The 7,000 comprise 95 per cent of the population in Inates district and Halima is hoping this release will inspire her master to free his slaves.

“This is exceptional. No co-ordinated release or ceremony like this has ever happened where a single person let the 7,000 slaves under his control go free,” said Beth Herzfeld of Anti-Slavery International.

Slavery in Niger, a practice dating back centuries, was outlawed during independence from France in 1960, but the new constitution carried no penalty. Although the French had stamped out the trafficking and slave markets, they refused to class bonded workers as slaves, terming them “voluntary labourers” in a 1905 survey. Post-colonial administrations have until now turned a blind eye to the mass bondage of their people, most captured as the spoils of war, kidnapped or traded as dowry.

The practice is still widespread throughout the southern Sahara, in Mali, Mauritania and Chad. Slave masters and slaves are often from the same tribe. The chief of Inates, Tuareg Aristal, is the first to voluntarily release his slaves. He is a strict Muslim and has said that owning slaves is “incompatible with the Koran”. He will be spared prosecution, and despite intense pressure from other slave masters, he will today condemn the practice.

“My master used to treat me so badly,” said Halima. “He often raped me, he would put a scarf on my head to make me look like a proper Tuareg, it made him think I was not a slave.The masters do nothing. They do not herd, clean, move their tents to ensure they are always in shade, collect water, nothing, not even move a cup. All this is done by slaves.”

From today, these first freed few can choose whom to marry, where to live, whom to work for, and they will have the right to demand a wage for that work.

Many will stay where they are, not knowing anything but the world they have always lived in, but the biggest immediate change will be psychological, says Anti-Slavery International.

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