The Joyful mysteries

AGED two and barely able to walk, Joy Ngozi Ezeilo was on the run.

In 1968, civil war had plunged Nigeria into chaos. Ngozi Ezeilo has no memory of then, but her parents told her that she knew the sounds of shells and bombs and would scream when she heard incoming ones.

Ezeilo is one of her country’s most forceful advocates for the rights of women. At 47, she’s the mother of three children, a woman with a big, contagious laugh, but no time for nonsense: she looks at problems — and the people who create them — straight on. As the United Nations special rapporteur on trafficking in persons, with a focus on women and children, she has global reach in the fight against slavery. She’s a distinguished academic, but her firsthand experiences of suffering fuel her passion.

The turning point was when she was 15, a precocious student in secondary school. She had not thought much about her gender. Then her father, a civil servant, died suddenly. When the family went to their ancestral village for the burial, Ezeilo’s life changed. “That was where I learned what women had to go through as women,” she says. “That was my first recognition that, well, ‘you are different’.”

In eastern Nigeria, the ritual mourning imposed on widows is brutal. The wife is presumed guilty of her husband’s death. Many widows are forced to drink the water used to bathe the corpse. The husband’s relatives judge their cries of grief, finding fault. The humiliations are many, petty, and painful, and often the inheritance that ought to be a widow’s is taken from her.

“I was watching my mom being forced to cry,” Ezeilo says. “They say, ‘OK, you want to cry like this to show, really, that you are mourning, and you sit down here; you cannot take any food; you cannot shower; your hair has to be shaved’.”

Ezeilo, the oldest of six children, was carrying her infant baby brother in her arms and looking on, appalled at all that was done to her mother: “I was, like, ‘why would she do this’? And so, from there and then, I told my mom, I am going to be a lawyer, because I want to advocate the rights of women ... And I became one.”

Slavery is a thriving $32bn criminal commerce that sucks in just about every country — Ireland and the US included. According to a report published by the FBI, millions of people in the US, many of them children, “are trapped in lives of misery — often beaten, starved, and forced to work as prostitutes or to take gruelling jobs as migrant, domestic, restaurant, or factory workers, with little or no pay.” Elsewhere, the traffic is crueller still.

Ezeilo first got involved with the issue through WomenAid Collective, the organisation she founded to defend women’s rights in Nigeria. An organisation in Germany had rescued several Nigerian women and asked Ezeilo’s group “to help rehabilitate and reintegrate them”, she says. She also began to investigate the way the traffic works inside Nigeria, and discovered that children sent by their families to live with distant relatives, so they can get a better education, were often forced to work as hawkers, or prostitutes, out on the street.

As Ezeilo travels the world, she sees this enormous slave trade, in some respects as ancient as the Bible, being transformed by modern technology.

Today, traders do not conquer lands and cities, so much as they conquer minds, playing on poverty and desperation, or just naivete, to lure people into the commerce of human chattel.

Promises are made of a better life in a richer place. Typically, once the victims are hooked, their passports are taken, and they’re told they owe huge amounts of money that they have to work off. They never again get their heads above water.

And yet, by the tens of millions, people travel dangerous smuggling routes across Latin America and Africa; they sail on derelict boats, packed to the gunwales with other slaves-to-be, and, in some cases, fly thousands of miles, believing the lies that give them hope.

In the United Arab Emirates, Ezeilo talked to a young woman from Colombia, who was persuaded over the internet that a good job awaited her in the UAE.

She was sent the ticket and some money to travel, all on the computer. She never met any living, breathing human being until she got through immigration and met the men who enslaved her.

Such stories are familiar to Ezeilo now.

Too familiar. When she was 15 and watching the humiliation of her mother, Ezeilo asked the fundamental question, ‘why do you have to treat women this way’? She’s still demanding to know the answer.

* Newsweek/Daily Beast