Mende Nazer grew up in the remote Nuba Mountains of Sudan. Her happy childhood was cruelly cut short when raiders on horseback swept into her village. The Mujahedin hacked down terrified villagers, raped the women and abducted the children. Twelve-year-old Mende was one of them.

Sold to an Arab lady in Khartoum, she was stripped of her name and her freedom. Called ‘abid’ or ‘black slave’ Mende was kept prisoner in the house where she had to carry out domestic duties without pay or any days off. Her bed was the garden shed floor and family leftovers provided her meals. For seven years she endured this harsh and lonely life without knowing whether her family were alive or dead.
In the spring of 2000, Mende was passed on to a relative in London and eventually she managed to make contact with other Nuba exiles who, with British journalist and filmmaker, Damien Lewis, helped her escape to freedom.

Slave is a fascinating memoir of an African childhood and a moving testimony to a young girl’s indomitable spirit in the face of adversity and shattered dreams.

After dinner, I sat around the fire with my mother, my brother Babo, Ali and our uncles. It was a cloudless sky and a cold night. My father was telling the story of why the Nuba never hunt monkeys. Although I had heard it many times before, my father never failed to make each retelling very funny. Lots of black, hairy monkeys lived in the forest around our village, but we never hunted them. My father said that the reason they looked so human was that they had once really been people, but they had been bad during their lives and so Allah decided to turn them into monkeys. And that’s why we never killed them and ate them. After the story, Babo and Ali disappeared into the men’s house to sleep, and we retired to our hut. We talked for a little while, but it was already past eight and my parents had had a hard day in the fields. So I got up onto my father’s bed and soon we were all fast asleep.

Deep in the night, I woke up with a start. I sat bolt upright in bed and I could see that my father and my mother were awake too. We were all straining our ears, trying to work out what had woken us. We could hear the faint, muffled noise of shouting in the distance. My father got up quietly and went to the door. He unlocked the wooden latch and stuck his head outside. My mother and I crept over to join him. We could see flames and hear frightened shouting. The far end of the village was on fire.

Often during harvest time, the fires people kept inside their huts would catch the dry thatch and set it alight. Harvest time was called Karangit - the cold time: it was the chilliest, most windy time of the year. Whenever there was a fire, everyone in the village would run to help. Now, as we hurried into the yard, we caught sight of people running away from the fire towards us. Immediately, my father knew that something was wrong. They were still a long way off and we couldn’t make sense of what they were shouting. Then we caught sight of people dashing through the village with flaming torches in their hands. I watched as one of them thrust a firebrand into the thatched roof of a hut and it burst into flames. As the people inside came rushing out, these men pounced on them, dragged them to the ground and stabbed them with their knives.

‘Mujahidin!’ my father yelled. ‘Arab raiders! The Mujahidin are in the village!’

I still didn’t really understand what was happening, but my father grabbed me by the arm, and we started to run. As we did so, my father suddenly remembered Babo and Ali. ‘Babo! Ali!’ he cried, as he looked over at the men’s house and back at the fast-approaching raiding party. I could see he was torn between his desire to warn them and the need to escape. Then he made up his mind. ‘Come on! Run! Run!’ he shouted, as he urged us on. ‘They’ll have to save themselves.’

My mother had started to cry and I was sobbing violently. Yet we had no choice but to flee. I clutched onto my parents’ hands and started running, but the raiders were everywhere, dragging people from their huts. There was no sound of gunfire yet; the raiders were just quietly killing people as if they were animals, with a knife across the throat. I saw one father try to save his daughter, but a raider grabbed him from behind and stabbed him. I could feel my father’s grip tighten on my hand as he urged me to run faster.

Through the smoke and the flames, I could see that my father was trying to make a dash for the nearest mountains. It felt as though we had been running for a lifetime when, at last, the line of trees at the base of the hills came into sight. If we could just get there, we’d be able to escape into the forest. But suddenly, my father stopped dead in his tracks. ‘Mujahidin!’ he yelled, pointing towards the hills. ‘Mujahidin!’ Up ahead, on the edge of the forest, there was a long line of raiders on horseback blocking our escape route. People from the village were running towards their trap. ‘Mujahidin!’ my father screamed, trying to warn them. ‘Mujahidin!’ And then the long line of ragged men on horseback let out a chilling battle cry and charged towards us.

We turned and ran in the opposite direction, as the deafening sound of gunfire broke out behind us. There was complete panic and terror as the crowd fought to escape and take cover. In all the chaos, I suddenly lost hold of my mother’s hand. For a few seconds, my father was calling desperately for her: ‘Amnur! Amnur! Amnur!’ But there was no reply. ‘There’s nothing we can do,’ he yelled. ‘Come on, Mende! Run! Run! We have to keep running!’

So we ran back into the village, along the way we had just come. I could feel waves of exhaustion washing over me now. My legs were growing tired and heavy. My lungs were gasping at the cold night air. Then my father caught sight of a herd of stampeding cattle bearing down on us. He tried to lead us safely through the fear-crazed, charging herd, but suddenly one of them barrelled right into me and I went sprawling to the ground. I lay curled up in a ball, feeling hooves pounding over me. Now I’d lost my father as well and I thought I was going to die.

After what seemed like an age, the stampede passed, and somehow I was still alive. I lay there in the dust, whimpering and petrified, with tears streaming down my face. I prayed that somehow my father would find me but, instead, a man grabbed me from behind and pinned me down to the ground.

A group of Mujahidin raiders had come to steal our stampeding cattle, and one of these men had now captured me.

I kept trying to shout for my father, who I knew must be somewhere nearby, but the man clamped his grubby hand tightly over my mouth. I was expecting to be beaten or worse, but instead he picked me up off the ground. I looked around at him. ‘Come on,’ he hissed. ‘I want to help you. Come with me and I’ll keep you safe and return you to your family. Otherwise, the others will find you and kill you. Now come on.’

I saw him turn and whisper to one of the other men with him, close in his ear. Then the two of them started laughing. They were Arabs and they wore dirty clothing. I could see by the light of the flames that they each had a curved dagger and a pistol tucked into the belt at their waist. Then I was marched away through the burning village. After what seemed like an eternity, we reached the forest. Around thirty other boys and girls were sitting there under the trees. Despite the fact that they looked so shocked and so traumatised, I was so happy to see them. I recognised many of the boys and girls from my village. At least I was no longer alone.

‘Stay here until the other raiders have all gone,’ the man said to me. ‘You’ll be safe here.’

I sat down and looked around me. There were horses tethered in the forest nearby, and four men were standing guard over us. They looked similar to the man who had brought me here. I kept thinking about my father and my mother and Babo. I wondered if I would ever see them again. More and more children kept being brought to join us. Many were beside themselves, sobbing with grief. Others sat silently, with big, haunted eyes. The youngest were around eight years old and the oldest, like me, were around twelve. The sound of fighting still filtered through the trees, but it sounded far away and muted now.

We waited there until it was almost morning. There was a girl I knew well who lived near me in the village. Her name was Sharan and she was only about eight. She was wailing loudly, and I was scared that the guards would get angry. So I made her come and sit beside me to quieten her down. I tried to comfort her as she kept crying for her mother. A little boy started to sob out his story. His whole family had fled to escape the flames, but in the confusion, his little sister of eighteen months was left behind in the burning hut.

The first another boy knew of the raid was when the Mujahidin threw open the door of his hut. He saw his mother try to hide his twin baby sisters, but the raiders grabbed her and cut her throat. Then they killed the two babies. The boy was hiding under his bed. Those were the last things he saw before the raiders dragged him out and took him away.

By the end of the night, I had listened to so many terrible stories. I thought back over the story that my father had told me about the attack on the Shimii tribe. During the raid on our village, I had seen girls pinned to the ground with the raiders on top of them. I knew that these girls were being raped. I tried to curl up into a ball and make myself look as small as possible, so as to avoid the attention of the guards.
But, thinking back on it now, if they had just raped me that night and left me behind in the forest, that would have been a good thing compared to what really happened to me.

Just as dawn began to light the sky above the trees, a long line of men came marching out of the gloom from the direction of the village. As they went past, I could see that all of them were carrying knives. Some had small pistols and others had bigger guns. Many had blood all up their wrists, others blood smeared around their belts where they carried their daggers. And others had blood all over their loins. They looked crazed with violence and evil.

I searched the long line of faces for the man who had brought me here. When I finally saw him, I looked him directly in the eye. But he just looked back at me and I could see that he was laughing. He lifted his hand and gave me a small, cruel wave.

The men filed past into the forest behind us. There must have been around one hundred or so. They formed into ranks five-deep, facing back down the hill towards us. I prayed that the mountain would collapse and kill them all. The man who had been leading now stood in front of them and began to bark orders. I could not hear exactly what he said, but they all replied in a thunderous chant, ‘Allahu Akhbar! Allahu Akhbar! Allahu Akhbar! ’ - ‘God is Great! God is Great! God is Great!’ Over and over they shouted this, the chant echoing around the valley.

I was surprised and I was scared. My father used to say ‘Allahu Akhbar’ when he killed a goat or a chicken in the village. If you did not commend the animal to Allah by saying this, it would not be halal, or holy to eat. But why were these men now shouting, ‘Allahu Akhbar’, after burning our village, raping and killing? Did they think it was halal to do this? We were Muslims, just like them. So how could they think this?

For around one hour we sat, waiting in the dawn shadows as they chanted their victory cries. When they had finished, they came charging back down the hill towards us. Those who were the quickest seized the oldest girls in the group. Then they started to take the younger girls and then, finally, the boys. A man came and grabbed Sharan. She cried out that she wanted to stay with me, but the man just slung her up onto his horse like a sack and rode off with her into the forest.