Ah, Texas, land of opportunity, for good or ill:
A US federal judge sentenced a Texas couple Friday for forcing a widowed Nigerian mother of six to serve in domestic servitude, holding her as a slave for over eight years.[…]
Upon the woman’s arrival in Arlington, Texas, Emmanuel and Ngozi Nnaji allegedly confiscated her passport, isolated her in their home and forced her to work long hours with virtually no pay.
Court documents also showed that Emmanuel Nnaji, 50, sexually assaulted the victim and that the couple refused to grant her request to return to Nigeria.
This woman was saved by a Catholic priest. What I want to know is where were her neighbors and local law enforcement? These slave owners didn’t live out in the middle of nowhere, they lived in Arlington a suburb of Dallas-Ft. Worth, and famous for a baseball stadium George Bush conned his fellow Texans into building there on the taxpayer’s dime.
Didn’t anyone have a clue that something was very wrong about this “arrangement” at some point before 8 years passed? Hell I thought only organized crime, US corporations overseas and wealthy Saudis did this sort of thing.
Question for Tea Partiers: Isn’t one of the consequences of less and less government a greater risk of human rights abuses like slavery? Just asking …
Of course this is more likely to happen with less government but as any teabagger could tell you “this could never happen to me!”
Remember these are the same morons that think the only thing standing between them & prosperity are taxes and that they themselves get nothing from the government.
is also still very popular in Sudan, Niger, Muaritania and some other African countries.
This is awful. Does anyone even think a tea bagger would give a damn about this woman or the horror she lived through?
Since the owners and their slave were all Nigerian, I’m not sure how their neighbors or the local law would have known something wasn’t right. I mean, a lot of people have extended family members living with them. When I look down the road and see an “extra” woman living with a family, I think she’s a sister, aunt or cousin. If she stays inside most of the time, I’d guess she’s agoraphobic or hyper-allergic. It would never occur to me that she might be held against her will.
Steven, I’m not sure how more government would decrease the risk of this occurrence. Are you suggesting the cops should drop in on every household on their beat every month or so just to be sure they’re not breaking any laws?
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One day in 2006, the woman hid in a closet and called her niece in Nigeria. The niece relayed news of her aunt’s captivity to a Texas priest who was vacationing there. When he got back home, he arranged to meet the woman on a street corner, where he picked her up and drove her to safety.
It would be another three years before justice showed up, but now Emmanuel and Ngozi Nnaji have been indicted for rape, forced labor, harboring a domestic worker for financial gain, and a host of other charges.
The Nnaji’s are contesting the charges. Wife Ngozi says the woman, who she knew from her Nigerian village, just showed up one day with another man and ended up staying for years because the man never came back to get her. She claims the woman wasn’t forced to do housework.
Emmanuel claims the woman only stayed with them for two months in 1999, and only after a relative requested they help her get on her feet.
Emmanuel Nnaji Jr.: “My dad is a good man”.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."This is not restricted to Texas and to people from African countries. Up in the D.C. area, there have been cases of Haitian families enslaving non-related children to perform housework, cooking, etc., etc.
It’s a common practice in Haiti and, after the earthquake, I saw on the news that an organization devoted to stamping out this abominable practice was going around trying to account for children and to prevent any children from being kidnapped for this practice during the ensuing chaos.
The teabaggers might argue that this is what happens when you allow all these immigrants to bring their own habits into the United States. I’m always up for a good round of Texas-bashing on a fine Sunday morning, but this episode can be interpreted equally persuasively as as case of Texas being too tolerant of “diversity”.