‘In Kenya, I bought you. You will do what I want.’ Riyadh formally abolished slavery in 1962, but migrant workers, especially women, offer shocking testimony about what it’s like to be one of Saudi Arabia’s African ‘slaves’
“The worst was the grandmother […] She is sick, so rude and racist. She thinks I am dirty because I am black and would not let me drink from her glasses; but I washed them! It is so humiliating. I am a human being.”
Brenda Carol Adhiambo, a Kenyan citizen, worked as a maid for a Saudi household in Dammam, a coastal city on the Persian Gulf, from 2019 to 2021. Her experience of racist abuse in Saudi Arabia is far from unusual for Kenyans working in the Gulf.
Estimates vary wildly, but there are believed to be between 100,000 to 300,000 Kenyan citizens employed throughout the Gulf region.
Feith Shimila, 30, is also haunted by her Saudi employer’s words: “In Kenya, I bought you. And now that you are in my house, you will do what I want.”
For a year and half, until mid-2021, she worked as a domestic worker in a Saudi town on the border with Iraq, enduring racist and degrading comments, physical violence, including being burned with boiling water, death threats and working over 18 hours a day, all for 900 Saudi riyals ($240) a month.
“I cannot even count how many times the husband beat me, but I stayed on, like a victim of domestic violence, not knowing what could be next, scared that he could simply kill me,” Shimila recalls.
The problem is so far-reaching that Kenya’s own Foreign Ministry recommended a temporary ban on sending domestic workers to Saudi Arabia, after news broke that 41 Kenyans had died there in the first nine months of 2021, with reports of workers in distress topping 1000: the suffering of Kenyan workers had “drastically worsened” over the last few years, the ministry stated.
The Kenyan embassy in Riyadh offered little assistance. Shimila called to ask for help and was reportedly told to sleep with her employer, “like other women do,” to avoid further confrontations.
In the absence of official statistics on the issue, the gruesome testimonies of domestic workers are crucial evidence of the persistent and deeply exploitative attitudes towards African employees common in Saudi Arabia. This mindset is reminiscent of the Arab slave trade that fed Gulf economies with African slaves right up until the early 20th century.
Saudi Arabia formally abolished slavery as late as 1962, but slavery-like employment patterns and conditions remain rampant in the kingdom and across the region, already infamous for some of the worst employment laws in the world.
Nowadays, transient armies of migrant workers form the backbone of Gulf economies, making up more than 80 percent of Saudi Arabia’s private sector workforce. There are an estimated 1.4 million domestic workers in Saudi Arabia alone in 2021. Across the Gulf, Jordan and Lebanon, foreign workers constitute nearly half of these countries’ combined total population.
Migrant workers sustain Gulf cities, driving cabs, operating restaurants, cleaning houses and treating COVID-19 patients, yet, they are still victims of widespread racist abuse.
Remittances sent back home by migrant workers prop up economic development in their home countries, but for a number of domestic workers, like Adhiambo, migration was a failure. Sitting in the mud house she once dreamt of renovating, the mother of seven wearily points out that employers do not fear the law – and don’t consider their domestic workers as worthy of basic rights.
Abused by her employer’s son, Adhiambo was reportedly told: “My children can do what they want to you because the Saudi police will not take any action, the Saudi government does not recognize you, Africans, just like Kenya does not consider you to be human beings.”
One of the core institutional causes of the abuse of foreign workers in the Gulf, and the impunity for their abusive employers, is the kafala system, which is particularly merciless in Saudi Arabia.
Kafala is a private sponsorship system that allows employers to exert tight control over their employees and is described by human rights groups as a conduit to modern day slavery. Private employers exert total control over migrant workers’ ability to change jobs, leave a workplace, and to enter or exit the host country.
The kefala system is particularly prone to racist and gender-based abuse, with African migrant workers reporting being relegated to low-status, low-income jobs and women facing sexual violence.
In March 2021, Riyadh announced changes. The reformed kafala grants migrant workers the right to request an exit permit without the employer’s permission, at long last conforming to Article 13(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states “everyone has the right to leave any country.” Henceforth, workers would be able to change job after a year, once their contract has expired or if they are not paid for three consecutive months.
Right groups acknowledged progress but remained skeptical over implementation, given the country’s poor track record on putting rhetoric into practice. Notably, the reforms excluded workers not covered by the labor law, such as domestic workers, and it did not abolish what are called “absconding charges,” a legal tool used to legitimize forced labor.
Saudi employers can file charges against migrant workers who allegedly leave without consent, even when the employee is attempting to run away from modern day slavery. Some employees are also known to file false cases. Migrant workers convicted of “absconding” face imprisonment and deportation, without receiving the wages owed to them.
“As long as any sort of tool of control remains at the hands of employers, workers will continue to suffer exploitation,” said Hiba Zayadin, Gulf Researcher at Human Rights Watch.
Employers, empowered by the kafala, often feel entitled to confiscate workers’ passports to force them into working or keep a hedge against them. Saudi Arabia has made it unlawful to seize private sector workers’ passports but did not explicitly prohibit it for domestic workers.
Conditions for migrant workers in some Gulf states have deteriorated during the COVID pandemic: Kuwaiti authorities, for instance, have been slow, even reluctant, to offer vaccinations to their migrant workforces. Across the region, lockdowns, sackings and wage theft forced workers to beg for food, while being humiliated by xenophobic local news reports, at risk of contracting the virus in overcrowded labor camps to which they were confined.
Living on Kenya’s coast, Mwanza Mungiri, 51, is seated in front of the family’s mud house. He bitterly regrets letting his daughter migrate to Saudi Arabia in 2019 to take up a position as a domestic worker. Mistreated, forced to toil seven days a week (despite Saudi law mandating one day off a week and 30 days of holiday every two years), Zainab ran away, hoping to find another job.
In retaliation, her initial employer held her passport and dropped an “absconding” case against her. Mungiri said sorrowfully: “I don’t know how she will leave Saudi Arabia to come back home.”
It won’t be an easy journey: Zainab’s family cannot afford to pay for legal representation. It is likely she will go through a deportation process, which is a criminal prosecution in Saudi Arabia, involving the payment of a fine as well as perhaps visa-overstay fees, while being detained in a deportation center, where conditions, according to Human Rights Watch, are dire: Overcrowded rooms and alleged beatings and torture.
“I feel so bad about what happened to my daughter; I would never allow her to migrate again. The Saudis treat us like animals; it is similar to what occurred when they locked us up with balls and chains. They may have removed our chains, but now they confiscate our passports,” he added.
The racism faced by Kenyan domestic workers is mirrored by the experience of other African workers. “Saudi children would call me ‘the black’ when I visit shops. Their parents and big brothers taught them that black men are violent, poor, ignorant,” said Mohammed Hassan, a Sudanese citizen who worked in Saudi Arabia’s marketing industry.
“Sometimes, between returnees, we talk about it, and warn those going to the Gulf that they should not expect to be treated as human beings. Saudi citizens think that they own us, so of course we feel like modern slaves when working in the kingdom, because that is what they want us to feel like. They will never change. They will be exploiters for eternity,” Hassan added.
Saudi Arabia is not the only Gulf state where workers suffer and racism runs rampant. In Qatar, the “inequality and subordination of certain racial and ethnic groups” are “fundamentally shaped by Qatar’s history of slavery and its contemporary legacies,” a 2019 United Nations report noted. “Combatting racism and racial discrimination in Qatar, including against non-nationals, requires confronting this history of slavery.”
Slavery in Qatar was only abolished in 1952. With accusations of modern-day slavery abounding in relation to the number of foreign workers who have died constructing Qatar’s football World Cup stadiums and other infrastructure, Doha has opened the Arab world’s first museum dedicated to the slave trade.
Neither Oman, which coordinated the Arab slave trade, and therefore holds the greatest responsibility, nor any of the other GCC states, who participated in it, have ever formally apologized to African nations for the region’s role in the enslavement and exploitation of millions of Africans over the centuries.
Edward Muzungu Kiringi, chief of the Kenyan village of Sosoni, stood next to the graves of dozens of 19th and 20th slaves century who died from disease in the detention centers they were held in, after being captured but before they could be shipped off to be sold in the Gulf. He puts the blame on the agents, whether Arab or African, who exploit the desperation and naivety of young Kenyan women and arrange their passage to exploitative workplaces.
“They take our girls to the Gulf, where our ancestors were tortured, to work as maids, or I should say, as slaves,” he says. “These migration agents are the 21st-century slave traders. They are repeating history, and this is shameful.”
Quentin Müller is a journalist and author who specializes in Yemen and the Gulf Arab states. Twitter: @MllerQuentin
Sebastian Castelier is a journalist covering Gulf Arab states and labor migration. His work has appeared in several Middle Eastern and international media outlets. Twitter: @SCastelier
The article first appeared in Haaretz
