Mende Nazer

Mende Nazer (born c. 1982) is a Sudanese writer and human rights activist living in the United Kingdom. For eight years she was a slave in Sudan and London. She later co-authored the book I Was a Slave (originally Sklavin), which was published in September 2002 in Germany and became a bestseller.

Mende was born in the village of Karko in the Nuba Mountains of southern Sudan, she comes from a black Nubian tribe. She spent an idyllic childhood in a mountain village with her loving parents, two sisters and two brothers. At the age of 11, she had to undergo circumcision.

According to Mende's own account, when he was about 12 years old, pro-government militias invaded the village as part of the Sudanese civil war, killed many adults and kidnapped about 100 children, including Mende. Although her family fled from the invaders to the mountains, she was separated from the family and captured by one of the Arab slavers. She was raped during the kidnapping and then sold into slavery in Sudan. For six years, she served an Arab family in Khartoum, where she was deprived of all rights, forced to do hard labor and subjected to physical abuse. She worked as adults, ate leftover food, slept in a shed on a mattress, and was punished disproportionately every now and then. She didn't know what had happened to her family.

After six years of captivity, in 2000, Mende's family sent her to live with relatives in London, where she traveled on a false visa and worked in the household of Sudanese diplomat Abdel al-Koronky, acting chargé d'affaires at the Sudanese embassy, without any pay or time to rest. After three months, with the help of a Sudanese compatriot, she managed to escape and applied for asylum in Britain. However, the Ministry of the Interior rejected her application after two years and she was threatened with deportation back to Sudan.

A campaign in support of the campaign was launched with individuals and human rights organizations, including Anti-Slavery International.

At the time of the rejection of her asylum application, her autobiography I Was a Slave, co-authored by British journalist and Sudan expert Damien Lewis, had already been published in Germany. In November 2002, the Home Office overturned the rejection decision and granted her political asylum.

In 2005, an English edition of her autobiography was published. In 2010, her life story was dramatized in the Channel 4 film "I Am Slave" starring Wunmi Mosaku, and in 2012 it became the subject of a play called "Slave - A Question of Freedom" presented by Feelgood Theatre Productions.

Mende learned English and got involved in the UK, continues to educate herself and actively fights for human rights and against slavery. She became British citizen in 2006 and although she is single, she suffers greatly from separation from her African family. Therefore, she planned a very risky expedition to Sudan to be able to meet her loved ones after many years. In his second book, Tears of Silence (in the original Freedom), he describes not only the hardships and obstacles of this expedition, but also describes the difficult and modest life of people on the African continent.