Mende Nazer tells her story worldwide, hoping to put an end to slavery and not wanting her personal experience with it to have been in vain.“I understand that some people believe that their religions have made slavery seem more humane,” Nazer said. “But I don’t think that any form of slavery is humane. I have read some of these religious texts. They are shocking and sometimes even outrageous.”
This fall, Nazer will speak during a public conference (Oct. 15–16) organized by the Feminist Sexual Ethics Project (FSEP) at Brandeis University. The conference is called “Beyond Slavery: Overcoming its Religious and Sexual Legacy.” Conference participants will learn about traditional religious support for slavery and the sexual dynamics of slavery. They will also discuss how religious and lay people can abolish the remnants of institutional slavery and move beyond racial stereotypes concerning sexuality.
“I’m hoping people will take historical, religious, theological and legal knowledge from the conference and carry it further,” said Bernadette Brooten, Kraft-Hiatt Professor of Christian Studies at Brandeis and FSEP director.
Raiders captured Nazer when she was a young girl in the Sudan and sold her into slavery in Khartoum. She was forced to work unlimited hours every day. She worked when she was sick and suffered from sleep-deprivation. Her “masters,” as she says she was forced to call them, refused to use her name and chose to address her by a curse word. The torture, she says, continued for six years.
Her owners eventually sent her to work for another family in London. She escaped in 2000 and was granted asylum in the U.K., where she presently lives. She believes religion can play a crucial role in bringing slavery to an end.
“I’m very disturbed that religious texts enable slavery,” she said, adding that scholars of religion should find “solutions to religious texts that contain toleration of slavery.”
Brooten agrees. Even though slavery as an institution has long been outlawed in the United States and in other parts of the world, Brooten says historical slave-holding values are hindering the end of modern slavery as well as feminist sexual ethics. She would like to see the creation of religious sexual ethics that are free of slave-holding values and ethics in which “sexual intimacy is based on meaningful consent and mutuality.”
“Traditional religious toleration of slavery is intertwined with the requirement that free wives obey their husbands and with the strict subordination of children, even when they are abused,” Brooten said. “We need to imagine a world in which owning or ruling over another person’s body is impossible. Stopping all forms of slavery, spousal abuse, and sexual abuse should be top religious priorities.”
About two-dozen scholars and activists will speak at the conference. Participants include Nancy Rawles, a playwright and author of a novel on slavery called “My Jim,” and Dorothy Roberts, a professor at Northwestern University School of Law. Roberts will talk about how the sexual violation of enslaved women and girls set a long lasting foundation for contemporary notions about black female sexuality that plays out in our legal system today.
Adrienne Davis, University of North Carolina research professor of law, will speak about miscegenation and marriage.
“I want people to walk away with a new vocabulary for thinking about gender and sexuality in their own lives and how something as seemingly remote as slavery might be affecting them today,” Davis said.
Some of the scholars and activists are calling for reparations for slavery.
“I believe in reparations,” Jennifer Glancy, Le Moyne College professor of religious studies, said. “I think the wrong that was done in the past has to be acknowledged because it continues to shape who we are in the present.”
The conference will also feature music and dance performances that are related to the topic of slavery. Also, more than 20 of the main conference speakers are working in collaboration to write a book about historical slavery’s affect on societal and religious values.
The conference will be held on the Brandeis campus at 415 South St. in Waltham, Mass. The event is free and open to the public. To register, call 781-736-3228 or visit http://www.brandeis.edu/projects/fse/form/.