Biram Dah Abeid

Biram Dah Abeid is a Mauritanian politician and advocate for the abolition of slavery. He was listed as one of "10 People Who Changed the World You Might Not Have Heard Of" by PeaceLinkLive in 2014. He has also been called the Mauritanian Nelson Mandela by online news organisation Middleeasteye.net.

Biram was born in 1965 in a village called Jidrel Mohguen in Rosso, Trarza. Though his father Dah, who ran a small business in Mauritania and Senegal, was granted freedom from slavery as an act of benevolence, his mother remained enslaved. Dah was unable to convince his first wife's master and the Islamic judicial authority in Mauritania, to free her from slavery, due to insufficient finance. Even the French colonial governor of the time refused to interfere with matters that fell under Islamic Law.

Dah, inspired his son Biram to amend the injustice of modern slavery inflicted upon the Haratin ethnic group, to which Dah belonged.

As Biram grew up, he attended high school in the city of Rosso in 1979, where the social inequalities also present in his native village, were even more prominent. He became more aware of how the caste system, which separated the black masses from the other tribes, denying the marginalized communities access to education, employment and further impeding their ability to ever gain independence.

When he was 19 years old, Biram started a movement called 'National African Movement' to fight discrimination and slavery and often advocated against the mistreatment of black people by writing open letters to the Secretary of State. At the age of 28, he had to disrupt his studies for economic reasons and ended up participating in municipal elections during this time. But after 3 years, he decided to continue his studies and went on to obtain a master's degree in History and trained as a Lawyer in Mauritania and Senegal.

After his studies, he became an active member of the anti-slavery NGO "SOS Slaves" for which he also conducted research in the year 2002.

It was in the year 2007 that Zeine Ould Zeïdane, former presidential candidate offered Biram to work on his political program, advocating for the abolition of slavery and against discrimination. Biram accepted the offer and in the same year, following a hunger strike held by Biram and 3 other activists, the Mauritanian government officials arrested three women, accused of holding children in slavery in the capital Nouakchott. This was the first time in Mauritania that someone was charged with the crime of slavery since the practice was criminalized by law in 2007.

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Wikipedia