Christi Elangwe must have dazzled the human-resources department at the Kmart with her brilliant smile and invincible humor - they hired her on the spot, and she started work just before Thanksgiving. "I'm the greeter," the 23-year-old says enthusiastically over popcorn shrimp at Shoney's restaurant near Washington, D.C. She has opened her first bank account and is finally saving for college. Pride is evident in the staccato of her Cameroonian accent: "It's my first job." "It's your first job for which you're paid," corrects her lawyer, Steve Smitson, who is sitting across from her.
The reminder snapped Elangewe back to a time, less than a year ago, when she says she was enduring unspeakable cruelty in one of America's wealthiest suburbs. Inside a $284,000 Germantown town house, 20 miles from the White House, Elanqwe was, literally, a slave, according to court papers filed Nov. 29. For most of her five years there, she was forbidden from venturing into the front yeard without an escort and prohibited from talking to anybody who might have crossed her path, even on family outings to church. She was kept so tightly under wraps, few of her neighbors knew she existed.
Inside the house, she says, her chores began at 6:30 a.m. and ended only once Daniel Acha-Morfaw, his wife, Vivian Satia, and their three children were in bed; she worked 16 hours a day, seven days a week, for almost 1,800 days on end. If she had been earning minimum wage, well below the going rate for live-in nannies, her accumulaed salary might have reached $175,000, says her attorney. But she was never paid.
Slavery is alive in America again. Today's slaves may not be bough, sold or tortured in the public square, like those in "Roots" or "Amistad", but experts with the Protection Project, an anti-trafficking program at Johns Hopkins University, estimate that 1 million undocuments immigrants are currently trapped here in slavelike conditions. (By way of comparison, perhaps 6 million Africans were shipped here between 1502 and 1808, when Congress outlawed the Atlantic slave trade.) "There are huge numbers, given the fact that people don't think this is going on," Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told NBC News earlier this year.
The victims are mostly women who have been tricked into bondage, ironically often by people who immigrated here from their own homelands. Most female Asian slaves are forced into prostitution rings, serving metropolitan areas with large Asian communities, says Dr. Laura J. Lederer, who directs the Protection Project and has interviewed 50 trafficking victims. Most Latin American slaves are required to work in the fields, while those from the Middle East or Africa are, like Christi Elangwe, trapped as domestic workers in affluent homes. Whatever lot they draw, they all share the defining traits of slavery through the ages: they are not paid and they cannot leave.
***
Christi Elangwe descended into slavery by stages, beginning in 1993, when she was a sixth grader in Cameroon who wished to attend high school and one day become a nurse. Her parents had little money, however, and could not pay for school. So she did what so many other ambitious young women from her country do. In exchange for tuition, she became a live-in maid for an older woman in a distant village. She was dissapointed when her employer enrolled her in a home-economics trade program, instead of regular school. Too timid to object, Elangwe stayed put anyway until she was 17, when her employer proposed a new arrangement. "She told me she had a daughter in America, and she needs someone to come and check out with the kids," says Elanqwe in her irregular English. "That's what I really wanted to do, I wanted to go to school."
But school was never apparently never a real possibility. Lynn A. Battaglia, the U.S. attorney in Maryland, contends that Daniel Acha-Morfaw, a computer consultant, and his wife, Vivian Satia, a nurse (both are U.S. citizens who had emigrated from Cameroon themselves), were looking for unpaid labor to help raise their three kids, and broke laws to get it. Less than two weeks ago they were arrested and charged with harboring an alien and focing her to work without pay. Two other families were also arrested, part of a three-year-long joint investigation by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Department of State. "These are particularly sad cases," Battaglia says. Both Acha-Morfaw and Satia plan vigorous defenses against the charges, which carry 15-year prison terms and $500,000 fines, their lawyers say.
Elangwe left Cameroon for the first time in her life in February 1995, on a flight through Paris to America. She passed through Customs smoothly, she says, fraudulently using a passport her new employers had mailed her; it belonged to a U.S. resident who barely resembled her, says her attorneys. "I was so excited," she says. But it was immediately clear she had made a mistake.
Elangwe is quick to point out that her five years of tending to the couple and their children (now ages 12, 10, and 7) were not as hideous as they might have been. She slept on a mattress in a bedroom - alongside the youngest daughter, whom she cared for day and night. She had plenty to eat. She was never beaten. But she was in now way free. She was kept inside the town house almost continually. Often she took care of children of the couple's friends and relatives, sometimes so many that the home resembled a day-care facility. She was never allowed to vist a physician or dentist. Occasionally, she begged to be taken to the mall, and reluctantly, they dropped her off there for brief, lonely strolls through its bright corridors. This happened three times - in five years.
Neither Acha-Morfaw nor his wife would talk to Newsweek, and their lawyers decline to comment on specific charges, except to deny any involvement in slavery. "It's certainly nothig more sinister than" harboring an alien, says Steven D. Kupferberg, Satia's lawyer. "This girl spoke English? She could have told somebody!"
Elangwe says she held tight to the hope that the pair would eventually loosen their grip on her. "They would say, 'You've only been here for four years, you've only been here for five years. Five years is not enough for you to start going out or working or going to school.'" Sometimes, they told her they had sent money back home to her family as payments for her labors. But this was not true, say her attorneys, who have investigated the claim.
Nobody kept a gun to Elanqwe's head. Instead of using shackles, Elangwe's alleged captors kept her locked up through fear. This is not unusual, says Cherif Bassiouni, who heads the International Human Rights Law Institute at De Paul University, says: "The weakest and most vulnerable can be too scared to leave."
"I believed America is no good," Elanqwe says. "[Vivian Satia] said I shouldn't think America is easy. It's not everybody can make it in America. It's dangerous out there. You can get killed. You could go our there and get killed." Steadily, the idea that she had any role in the larger world vanished entirely.
***
Early this year, Christi Elangwe reached a breaking point much as PB did, after her alleged captors finally capitulated and began driving her to GED classes two mornings a week. A GED was not what she had in mind. She believed she'd earned the right to attend an ordinary school with people her own age. "That's what made me come," she says.
She told everyone in class about her circumstances. Despite what her alleged captors had warned, nothing bad happened. Instead, the grapevine carried her story to Louis Etongwe, a 45-year-old Gateway Computer employee in Newport News, Va. Etongwe, a fellow Cameroonian, runs a sort of underground railroad to help free young women from peonage as domestics. Joy Zarembka, executive director of the Campaign for Migrant Domestic Workers, calls people like him "the good Samaritans who are dismantling slavery case by case in the country."
Etongwe called Elangwe one morning when she was home alone. "I asked her if she was safe," he recalls. "I asked her if she needed any help." She wouldn't say. "I was scared," Elangwe remembers. "At first, I didn't believe him."
He placed more secret calls in the next month before she spilled everything. "What she told me really created a sour, bitter feeling in my mind," says Louis Etongwe. "I couldn't believe in this day and age someone would treat someone's child that way. It made me so mad. I said, 'You have to get get out of that place.'" With prodding, she agreed. She made her move early on Feb. 10, after Vivian Satia dropped her off at GED classes. Instead of going in, she sneaked onto a city bus - her first solo bus ride - and rode a few blocks to the meeting place Etongwe selected.
As escapes go, it lacked crackling drama. But Elangwe was terrified nonetheless. It was the first time in five years she had defied her masters. "If you've ever been to a dog shelter, that's the fear that she had when I first met her," says her lawyer. "It was all so new to her that she had any rights at all and she could pursue them. And that anybody in the larger world would value her as a human being."
The INS has "paroled" her into the United States to pursue criminal litigation, and on Nov. 20, Elangwe filed a civil suit against the couple, charging they violated the 13th Ammendment of the Constitution prohibiting slavery. She seeks more than $1 million in back wages and punitive damages. She may be allowed to stay here at least through her civil suit, Smitson says, but that's not the reason they filed it. "I see it as a reaffirmation of her value as a human being."
Elangwe is somewhat more focused on the practical than that. "I'm trying to save," she says with a smile. "I still have to go to school."
-David France, Newsweek, Dec. 18th, 2000
(This is not the entire article. "PB" is an underage girl in a similar set of circumstances in Michigan. She was not as lucky, and her captors raped her.)
[This message has been edited by JeffKardde (edited December 12, 2000).]
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