Francis Bok stood nervously at the side of the room, hands clasped behind his back and eyes surveying the nearly 200 students in the crowd. When he stood behind the podium to tell his story, however, he began to relax.
Bok, an escaped slave from Sudan, was abducted from a Sudanese marketplace when he was seven. He said hundreds of Arabs came with horses, camels and machine guns, killing many of the people and taking women and children to the north of the country and into slavery. For the next 10 years, he said, Bok worked as a slave for a livestock owner named Giema Abdullah.
"I used to cry each morning and each night," he told the crowd gathered in the Bryan Center's Von Canon room Sunday. "I learned to be quiet. I learned because it was not only dangerous for adults but for women and children."
When he arrived at Abdullah's house, there were two children in the front with large sticks. They beat him as part of what he described as his welcome.
Bok said he realized quickly that he needed to escape from slavery, but he was afraid to run away because, at only seven years old, he did not want to be eaten by animals on his way to freedom. He spent the next seven years tending goats and cows and sleeping with the livestock.
When he was 14, Bok asked his owner three questions: Why was he called a slave, why was he forced to sleep with animals and why did no one love him? Abdullah beat him in response and told him never to ask such questions again.
Bok said that Abdullah later told him, "You sleep with the animals because you are an animal."
Bok ran away several days later. "I am not an animal. I'm a human being," he remembered thinking at the time. "I would rather die than be a slave."
Bok was caught, returned to Abdullah and beaten. He stayed and worked until he finally escaped to Egypt in 1996. With help from international relief organizations, Bok eventually settled in the United States. He taught himself English by watching television and worked briefly in a meatpacking plant in Iowa.
Now he tours the country as a spokesperson for the American Anti-Slavery Group and Christian Solidarity International, organizations working to abolish slavery. He tells his story and answers whatever questions he can about how people in the United States can alleviate ongoing slavery.
"When I first started to speak, I would tear up because I don't like to remember," Bok said. "I'm not a slave anymore. But what good is my freedom if my people are still dying? What good is my freedom if my people are still enslaved?"
He challenged students to acknowledge slavery's continued existence in many parts of the world--part of the reason an Ethics and International Relations seminar taught by Associate Professor of Political Science Peter Feaver invited Bok to speak at Duke.
"The biggest point is that no one really knows about [slavery]," said John Solomon, a senior in Feaver's class.
Many students asked Bok how to get involved. Organizers urged people to visit a website, www.iabolish.com, for more information. Although the two organizations Bok works with both advocate buying slaves their freedom by purchasing them from their owners, he was not enthusiastic about the idea because it pays the slave-owners. "But if someone had offered to buy my freedom in 1996, before I knew I would be free, I would have gone with him," he added.
Bok instead encouraged students to increase awareness of international slavery and to put pressure on government leaders to end the problem. But he admitted that he did not have the answers.
"I only know what I have witnessed with my own eyes," he said.
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