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The Nuba Mountains of Sudan ... serve as the backdrop to the early chapters of Mende Nazer's harrowing tale, Slave. Nazer's book describes her oddly idyllic childhood; her subsequent capture and rape during an Arab raid on her village; her years of enslavement in the home of a well-to-do Arab family in the capital of Khartoum; and later, her life in London, where she served as the slave of a high-ranking Sudanese diplomat, also an Arab, before her ultimate escape, with the help of co-author Damien Lewis, a British journalist, in September 2000.
One of Britain's leading newspapers, the Sunday Telegraph, reported the story ... without speaking with Nazer. The former diplomat filed a libel suit against the paper, and even claimed to have letters written by Nazer to her family that refuted her story. The paper eventually paid damages and published an apology declaring Nazer's story false....
The Sudanese government has been extremely reluctant to investigate Nazer's claims, however, and given its obvious stake in wanting damning evidence of the country's slave trade refuted, this silence certainly lends credence to Nazer's story. If the experiences Nazer recounts here prove true, they will stand as an important reminder of the real, lived terrors of thousands of black southern Sudanese whose stories will never be told, and whose freedom may never be won.
Alex P. Kellogg - Washington Post
(Starred review.) The shock of this title is that it refers to what is happening right now, in Sudan, Africa, and also in the West.... The details are unforgettable, capturing both the innocence of the child and the world-weariness of one who has endured the worst.
Booklist
Born into the Karko tribe in the Nuba mountains of northern Sudan, Nazer has written a straightforward, harrowing memoir that's a sobering reminder that slavery still needs to be stamped out. The first, substantial section of the book concentrates on Nazer's idyllic childhood, made all the more poignant for the misery readers know is to come. Nazer is presented as intelligent and headstrong, and her people as peaceful, generous and kind. In 1994, around age 12 (the Nuba do not keep birth records), Nazer was snatched by Arab raiders, raped and shipped to the nation's capital, Khartoum, where she was installed as a maid for a wealthy suburban family. (For readers expecting her fate to include a grimy factory or barren field, the domesticity of her prison comes as a shock.) To Nazer, the modern landscape of Khartoum could not possibly have been more alien; after all, she had never seen even a spoon, a mirror or a sink, much less a telephone or television set. Nazer's urbane tormentors—mostly the pampered housewife—beat her frequently and dehumanized her in dozens of ways. They were affluent, petty and calculatedly cruel, all in the name of "keeping up appearances." The contrast between Nazer's pleasant but "primitive" early life and the horrors she experienced in Khartoum could hardly be more stark; it's an object lesson in the sometimes dehumanizing power of progress and creature comforts. After seven years, Nazer was sent to work in the U.K., where she contacted other Sudanese and eventually escaped to freedom. Her book is a profound meditation on the human ability to survive virtually any circumstances
Publishers Weekly
Nazer heart-wrenchingly describes the ragged unpredictability of beatings, the crowding thoughts of home, the repulsive food, and the drear of daily toil. Sent to London to work for her mistress's sister, the wife of a Sudanese diplomat, Nazer manages to contact a fellow Nuban who helps her to escape and gets her a lawyer.... Revelatory in the truest sense of the word told with a child-pure candor that comes like a bucket of cold water in the lap.
Kirkus Reviews