Beyond Survival: Slavery is a matter of caste and race in Mauritania; activists say “twisted notions of Islamic scripture” have been used to justify blacks’ servitude to their Moorish masters for centuries. This Village Voice essayist interviews a Mauritanian refugee from enslavement, now in Brooklyn’s ‘Little Mauritania’, about his life there and the fight for those who remain behind. As you might expect, despite a 1996 US congressional resolution decrying the persistence of “chattel slavery, with an estimated tens of thousands of black Mauritanians considered property of their masters and performing unpaid labor, …despite its legal abolition in 1980”, the Shrub Administration has turned its back on advocacy on the issue because Mauritania’s repressive chief of state Maaouya Ould Sidi Ahmad Taya, who came to power in a coup d’etat in 1984, is an important W-o-T® ally. Taya has taken the world’s preoccupation with the terrorist attacks as an opportunity to ban the Mauritanian anti-slavery opposition party.