An author who now works in Boston and will speak at Eckerd College bears witness to the fact that slavery still exists.
By WAVENEY ANN MOORE
Published February 22, 2004
Francis Bok will talk about his 10 years as a slave in his native Sudan as part of Eckerd College's celebration this week of receiving a Phi Beta Kappa chapter.
Bok, 24, who has met with President Bush and testified before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, spoke briefly about his experience during a recent telephone interview.
His nightmare began in 1986 at age 7 when he was seized by Arab militia in a southern Sudanese market.
"It was one evening that I get asked by my mother to go to the local market," he said.
"It was a 5 miles trip to walk. I didn't really know what was going to happen to me. I didn't know that my life was going to change forever."
The men were from northern Sudan, with whom the people in the south have been fighting for two decades. They went on a killing spree, said Bok, who is from the Dinka tribe.
"I had never witnessed a dead person before," he said.
The little boy tried to escape, but was captured with other children and women.
"One of the horsemen came and grabbed my hand and he was speaking a strange language, Arabic," said Bok, who became fluent in Arabic during his decade of captivity.
A Catholic, he was taken to the Muslim north and became the slave of a man named Giema Abdullah.
"He called the whole family to meet me, and he sent the children to beat me. That was my welcome," Bok recalled, adding that the family called him abeed or "black slave."
"For 10 years, they beat me every morning. They made me sleep with the animals, and they gave me very bad food. They said I was an animal. For 10 years, I had no one to laugh with. For 10 years, nobody loved me. But every day, I prayed to God," Bok said in his September 2000 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
He first tried to escape when he was 14, but was recaptured and beaten.
"In my heart, I didn't give up," he said.
He eventually escaped in 1996 at age 17 and arrived in the United States in 1999. He has since learned that his parents and two sisters were slaughtered by the same men who captured him. They had burned families in their huts, Bok said.
Despite his experience, Bok said, he does not hate.
"I am a person that doesn't have a hatred toward anybody. I do not have hatred against Arabs. I am not anti-Islam," he said.
But he hopes his former captor hears about him.
"I hope that he can hear about me and that this is the little boy who he called an animal. ... I know that I am not an animal. I am human. I hope that he would find my book someday - or one of his sons or his relatives," Bok told Neighborhood Times.
Today he works for the American Anti-Slavery Group in Boston. Though he had never gone to school before, he learned to speak English in an evening high school program and plans to attend Tufts University in the fall. But his most important mission is to tell the world that slavery still exists, Bok said.
"I know how those people feel," he said.
"I was there for 10 years. I used to lie awake at night and wonder who would come and free me, and no one came. ... I am a voice for the voiceless."
If you go
Elaine Pagels, professor of religion, Princeton University, and author of the bestselling The Gnostic Gospels and Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, will talk at 7:30 p.m. Thursday in the Raymond James Room, Fox Hall.
Francis Bok, who wrote about his ordeal in Escape from Slavery: The True Story of my Ten Years in Captivity - and My Journey to Freedom in America, will talk at 7 p.m. Tuesday in the Dendy-McNair Auditorium.
Eckerd College is at 4200 54th Ave. S, St. Petersburg. Eckerd.edu or 727-864-7979 for information about the week's other events.
