What replaced her idyllic youth was a hell few people imagine still exists. In Slave, a new memoir written with British documentarian Damien Lewis, Nazer—now a student living in London—describes being sold into servitude in Khartoum, a fate shared by more than 11,000 people each year in Sudan alone (see box). Forced to work virtually around the clock for her mistress, a wife and mother of four who called her "yebit," meaning "girl worthy of no name," Nazer says she was routinely beaten, spent each night locked in a shed and subsisted on table scraps. "I was physically and emotionally abused," says Nazer, who considers herself lucky to have escaped the sexual abuse some other slaves suffered. She didn't try to escape during her six years in Khartoum, she says, because she didn't know if anyone in her village had survived. "Without my family to go back to," Nazer writes, "what point was there in being free?"
Yet it was the memory of her old life that kept her sane. Though decades of civil war had scarred her country, Nazer's village was peaceful when she was young. Her father, a farmer who owned 50 cows, was not rich but not poor either. The youngest of five, Mende excelled in school and dreamed of becoming a doctor. "It was a good place to grow up," she says.
In 1999, her sixth year of servitude, a chance meeting with a newly captured Nuban slave let her know her family was alive. "I got very enthusiastic about seeing them," she says. Soon after, she began working for her mistress's sister, the wife of Abdul Al Koronky, a Sudanese embassy official in London. Nazer says they threatened to kill her if she told anyone she was not getting paid. But when another embassy official inquired innocently about her salary, Nazer says she told him she didn't earn a penny. After the man explained that this was illegal, writes Nazer, "I knew I had to escape." She eventually found a stranger she identified as a fellow Sudanese; he offered to have a friend pick her up and deliver her to safety the following week when she took out the Koronky trash. On Sept. 11,2000, her heart pounding, Nazer did just that. She spent her first nights of freedom at the home of her rescuer, before moving to a hostel. "It was a relief," she says, "but I kept worrying [Koronky] would find me and I would be in great trouble."
Her new friends introduced her to Lewis, who had covered Sudan's slave trade. "I told her the police would arrest anyone who tried to recapture or punish her," Lewis says. "But it was impossible to reassure this hunched, trembling woman." Nazer agreed to share her whole story with Lewis ("It was hard to talk about—I was in tears," she says), and the publicity their book project generated in Europe helped win her political asylum in December '02.
Today Nazer lives in a flat owned by a Swiss couple who read about her and wanted to help. She's studying English and covers her minimal expenses with her book royalties. "I lead a very quiet life," she says—one that doesn't include TV ("We didn't have TV in the mountains") or violent movies. "They remind me too much of the day the raiders arrived in our village," she says.
According to the terms of her asylum, Nazer cannot return to Sudan for at least 15 months. But she has located her family. During their first phone call, she says, "my mom was crying and crying and my dad kept repeating, 'Mende, is it you?' " She hopes to see them outside Sudan later this year. Another hope: to realize her childhood goal. "My dream," Nazer says, "is to be a doctor in the Nuba mountains."
Allison Adato. Pete Norman in London
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