‘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 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.”