Storytelling
Survivors’ narratives have always played a vital role in the fight against forms of enslavement – but how can we engage with survivors justly and share their stories ethically?
Ethical storytelling can deepen understanding, inform policy and shift worldviews.
Stories can have a deep power and resonance, they can radically alter perspectives and change social norms amongst those listening, and they can be cathartic, forming part of healing processes for those narrating.
Yet we need a balance of stories. The single story – with its tried and tested tropes – is dangerous. Without the involvement of survivors, stories of enslavement and exploitation can become stereotyped and instrumentalized causing harm by focusing on victims and forgetting the dignity of those they seek to empower. Recognising that survivors are diverse and have more to offer than their personal stories of pain – as experts, skilled professionals, activists and changemakers – can remind us to listen more attentively and develop storytelling practices centred in ethics.
Sharing Stories Creatively
In Uganda, the Bila pi Kuc project led by Youth Leaders for Restoration and Development (YOLRED) in partnership with University of Bristol has conducted in-depth interviews with former child soldiers, which recount survivors’ experiences of abduction, captivity, rehabilitation and the longer-term challenges of reintegration.
By amalgamating 27 of these testimonies, the team created a visually striking yet nuanced and ethically-sensitive comic. The form and content of this narrative refused the tropes of rescue and victimhood, while the creative process used to develop the comic enabled YOLRED’s members to share their stories of survival without revealing their identity.
In doing so the project employed storytelling practices that differ from those routinely used in international fundraising campaigns, which have caused much stigma and disempowerment among returnees despite the best of intentions.
In order to promote peace and reconciliation between combatants and non-combatants, YOLRED hosted a cultural festival in December 2018 in which both former child soldiers and non-former child soldiers shared their experiences through drama, song and music.
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YOLRED convened its cultural festival in December 2018 in Gulu, Northern Uganda ... [it] played a critical and essential role in putting former child soldiers at the forefront of their own restoration, whilst also encouraging commitment towards the collective responsibility of tackling child soldiery and the importance of creating peaceful and welcoming environments for returnees.
Not everyone featured in this image is a survivor/former child soldier
Viomeren
The Nigerian Literary and Arts Antislavery Collective (NLAAC), set-up through the VIOMEREN project, brought together early career artists and survivors of human trafficking or exploitative migration experiences. In collaboration, these teams created both literary and visual artworks based upon the experiences of exploitation endured by returnees to Nigeria. Among these are poetic and prose-works, as well as spoken word performances that share a real diversity of experiences including exploitation in the garment industry in Italy, sexual exploitation in South Africa and unsuccessful migration attempts to Europe.
This body of work complicates simplistic narratives of migration and return. It illuminates the chronic challenges that drive risky migration attempts as well as revealing the long-term stigmas and challenges that returnees often face: it asks us to consider what support is needed for meaningful recovery and reintegration.
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Being repatriated back to Nigeria was the greatest gift to her life, it felt as though the shards of her broken soul had been laced together by raw bliss. … There was a snag of worry as fear ate at her. She knew the process of reintegration would not wear a smile of equanimity around her ... What can I do? Things seem tougher than before, even the stigma alone can send one to an early grave.
Being repatriated back to Nigeria was the greatest gift to her life, it felt as though the shards of her broken soul had been laced together by raw bliss. … There was a snag of worry as fear ate at her. She knew the process of reintegration would not wear a smile of equanimity around her ... What can I do? Things seem tougher than before, even the stigma alone can send one to an early grave.
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Healing Spaces
BuildX Studio, in partnership with the Dream Revival Centre (DRC) in Uganda, devised the Healing Spaces project, which developed a framework for the design of purpose-built care facilities for survivors of human trafficking.
A range of creative approaches and technological tools were employed to enable survivors to inform this specialist process of design development. Audio journals, sketch interviews, drama and focus groups were all used to facilitate the sharing of survivors’ experiences of exploitation and rehabilitation.
This project demonstrates how survivor-centred storytelling cannot only be used within awareness- and fund-raising campaigns but can also be integral to the process of developing better policy and practice for rehabilitation.
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Time to listen
Two LESLAN1 researchers: Aicha Kolan Kolan (with research participant) and Oumarou Moussa
The LESLAN project, co-led by Niger’s main anti-slavery NGO Timidria, has documented the testimonies of slave descendants from across 7 of the country’s regions. A team of Nigerien researchers engaged with participants in local languages to learn more about their experiences of descent-based slavery and its legacies.
Survivor portraits and testimonies were used as the basis for an exhibition entitled, ‘The World the Slaves Built’. This event was staged on the campus of Abdou Moumouni University in Niamey, an unprecedented event in its public acknowledgement of the legacies and lived experiences of enslavement in Niger today, as well as in its aim to foreground the important contributions that enslaved persons have made to Nigerien society.
The survivor testimonies documented and shared through the activities of the LESLAN project have supported the pioneering work of Timidria in its political struggle to end the marginalization of persons of slave descent in Niger. The LESLAN project has also enabled Timidria to further inform the abolition movement across the Sahel region, facilitating landmark events such as the launch of the Appel de Niamey in December 2018: activities which have prompted notable figures in Niger to publicly recognize the existence of contemporary slavery in the country.
Launch of the Appel de Niamey, December 2018.
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You should do as I – Hadijatou – have done. If anyone out there, man or woman, wishes to obtain their freedom [from slavery], they can come to see me and I will show them how they can achieve this.
Slavery is a crime against the human person. The practice of slavery is a violation of the law; perpetrators must be punished, brought before the courts which will apply the law so that all the slavers will be arrested.
In the course of fighting slavery in Niger, I was sent to prison... I escaped death many times in my attempts to fight slavery. I am one of the original authors of the law criminalising slavery in Niger and I advocated for this law to be adopted by the National Assembly. I succeeded in sending many slavers to prison…I made sure that Hadijatou Mani was able to take her complaint to the ECOWAS court of justice...and even up to now, this continues to be my mission.
This fight, why does it have to be slave descendants that lead it? If we are human, if we are just, then anyone would put themselves in our position in order to liberate those who still suffer the conditions of slavery. Because in the 21st century, it is to nobody’s honour (to be a slave-owner) ...Our study [in the LESLAN Project] has especially focused on the work of slaves: the world was built through the work of enslaved persons. If we take the USA as an example, it’s thanks to the work of enslaved people that today they are the most powerful country in the world.
In the Sahel region, Niger is the most advanced country (in the fight against slavery) thanks to our strong commitment: Timidria is an association created in 1991 and we now have around 450,000 members... There are no pressures that we haven’t suffered from, but we have refused (to give in to them). Today the Nigerien government really takes notice of us, we have a powerful voice and extensive reach at both a sub-regional and an international level. In Niger a political declaration was delivered through two messages to the nation by the President of the Republic in 2011 and via the sponsorship of the 6th edition of the institutionalisation of the National Day of the Fight Against Slavery in June 2019 by the Prime Minister.
Seaside & Borderline Communities
In Sierra Leone, AKN supported local filmmakers at WeOwnTV – Freetown Media Centre to create the short documentary films Seaside and Borderline Communities and Kid Miners. Each documents the perspectives of children, adolescents and young people engaging in exploitative and hazardous work. Centring these perspectives offers nuanced insight into the varied causes of child labour. Kid Miners focuses on family level economic pressures and cultural factors that lead boys and girls into intense and hazardous mining work, often alongside their parents.
Seaside and Borderline communities, meanwhile points to global inequities. It focuses on the destructive environmental and economic impacts of overfishing by Chinese and Korean vessels in coastal Sierra Leone, which create the conditions for demand of a precarious child labour force. It also tracks the experience of young women working in the sex industry demonstrating how exploitation in adulthood can be an extension of forms of child labour such as domestic servitude.
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Watch Seaside and Borderline Communities
Watch Kid Miners
Watch commentary from Allen Kiconco
Children have a right to voice their views on their involvement in exploitation instead of being heard and understood through third parties’ perspectives. Listening to children is vital in addressing and comprehending child exploitation practices in African societies.
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From Hope to Despair
Working in a diversity of urban, peri-urban and rural communities across Kenya, the Anglican Development Service (ADS) has documented the voices of survivors and other community leaders to better understand the lived realities of trafficking in Kenya beyond the headlines.
Using the parish structure of the Anglican church, and in consultation with other faith leaders, ADS has reached out into communities across the country to learn more from local experts about manifestations of trafficking in their locale.
With such information ADS has been able to conduct focus groups and community sensitization meetings to raise awareness of specific trafficking risks in the local area as well as forming social media networks that allow for swift sharing of data on known traffickers that operate nearby posing as ‘employment agents’ and ‘recruiters’.
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challenging stories
Community Stories of modern slavery
In Migori County Kenya researchers from the University of Rongo and University of Brighton have been working with members of Cham gi Wadu community through the Community Media 4 Kenya (CM4K) group. Together the team documented the experiences of survivors of child marriage and child labour, as well as the views of local health workers, elders and officials.
Conversations revealed a broad base of community concern about various forms of child exploitation as well as a depth of knowledge about the causes that contribute to these phenomena from lack of livelihood options and poverty to exclusionary school fees, cultural expectations and peer pressure.
Community members have been trained in the use of recording and editing equipment to capture these stories and the content produced is being used on community radio to help empower citizens to challenge public figures, officials and wider social acceptance of exploitative practices experienced by children in their locale.
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Most of the issues we’re looking at, they’re not discussed at the community-level, they’re hush-hush stories … we’ve looked at … how community participants might become self-empowered to investigate modern day slavery, in their own community, raise public awareness through community dialogue and campaign to effect meaningful policy change through community media practices.
James Town Community Theatre (JTCT) based in Accra, Ghana has created a new production, Ode to the James Town Child, inspired by the Hidden Histories project.
A set of in-depth interviews were conducted with survivors of modern slavery living in the area which identify James Town as a recruitment and destination point for three kinds of modern slavery: young boys taken for fishing work to Volta Lake; children brought from villages to urban areas for sex work and female school-leavers taken to the Gulf States for domestic work. Survivor interviews also revealed significant challenges and stigmas faced by returnees during the processes of recovery, rehabilitation and reintegration.
Performances of JTCT’s new production create spaces of community dialogue about these taboo issues with post-performance workshops in schools and among the community asking participants to reflect on potential solutions to forms of modern slavery affecting the area.
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James Town Community Theatre (JTCT) based in Accra, Ghana has created a new production, Ode to the James Town Child, inspired by the Hidden Histories project.
A set of in-depth interviews were conducted with survivors of modern slavery living in the area which identify James Town as a recruitment and destination point for three kinds of modern slavery: young boys taken for fishing work to Volta Lake; children brought from villages to urban areas for sex work and female school-leavers taken to the Gulf States for domestic work.
Survivor interviews also revealed significant challenges and stigmas faced by returnees during the processes of recovery, rehabilitation and reintegration.
Performances of JTCT’s new production create spaces of community dialogue about these taboo issues with post-performance workshops in schools and among the community asking participants to reflect on potential solutions to forms of modern slavery affecting the area.
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Survivors Voices, Stories and Images
Credit: Khalih
In Kenya, the Survivors’ Voices project developed a survivor-led model of ethical storytelling. The project – facilitated by Azadi in partnership with Rightslab – offered a series of workshops on creative writing and photography to survivors of human trafficking.
Sharing these skills enabled the survivors to become authors of their own stories: both narrative and visual, autobiographical and fictional. This method provided a way to not only centre survivor voice but also survivor choice: choice of narrative form, of content, of visual accompaniment.
The survivor-authors were then offered opportunities to share their stories through publications and online exhibitions, including within the e-platform Worldreader. This survivor-led approach to storytelling made survivors co-creators in knowledge production challenging the routine power hierarchies within research and development through capacity-building.
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Credit: Khalih
Credit: Khalih
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