Article information
- Author, Florence Phiri from Lilongwe and Tamasin Ford from London
- Role, BBC Africa Eye
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March 18, 2024
About 50 women ended up in de facto slavery in Oman – without documents and no way to escape. The BBC investigated cases of human trafficking prevalent in the Gulf countries.
Warning: The details of this story may be disturbing.
A 32-year-old woman breaks down in tears as she talks about her ordeal as a maid in Oman.
Georgina, like all trafficked women interviewed by the BBC, asks to be identified only by her first name. Hoping for a better life, a resident of Malawi decided to go to Dubai to work as a driver.
She owned a small business in Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi, when she was approached by an agent who said she could make more money in the Middle East.
Only after the plane landed in Muscat, the capital of Oman, instead of Dubai, did she realize that she had been tricked. She was trapped in virtual slavery in a family that forced her to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“I got to the point where I just couldn’t stand it,” says the woman, explaining how she only slept two hours a night.
Shortly after her arrival, her boss began forcing her to have sex with him, threatening to shoot her if she said anything.
“It wasn’t just him,” says Georgina. “He brought friends, and they paid him later.”
She struggles to speak as she recounts how she was forced to engage in anal sex: “I was traumatised. I went mad with despair.”
According to estimates, about two million domestic workers work in the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf. Among the 400 women in Oman surveyed by migrant charity Do Bold, almost all were victims of human trafficking. The results of this survey were published in the 2023 Trafficking in Persons report by the US State Department.
Almost a third of those surveyed said they had been sexually abused, and half reported physical abuse and discrimination.
A few weeks later, Georgina wrote a desperate post on Facebook, pleading for help.
Thousands of kilometers away in the American state of New Hampshire, 38-year-old Malawian activist Pililani Mombe Nyoni saw her message and started an investigation.
She got in touch with the girl, convinced her to delete the Facebook post for Georgina’s safety, and gave her WhatsApp number, which women in Oman started sharing. Nyoni soon realized that this was a wider problem.
“Georgina was the first victim. Then there was another girl, two girls, three girls,” the activist told the BBC.
“Then I decided to create a WhatsApp group, because it already looked like human trafficking.”
More than 50 Malawian women working as domestic workers in Oman have joined the group.
The group was soon flooded with voice messages and videos, some of which were too gruesome to watch. They described in detail the terrible conditions in which the women were put. Many had their passports taken immediately upon arrival so that they could not escape.
Some told how they locked themselves in the toilet to secretly send messages pleading for help.
“I feel like I’m in a prison… we can never escape,” said one woman. “My life is really in danger,” said another.
Nyoni began contacting anti-trafficking charities in Malawi and met Kateryna Porras Syvolobova, founder of Do Bold, who lives in Greece.
Do Bold works with the migrant worker community in the Gulf countries, identifying victims of human trafficking or forced labor and then negotiating with their employers for their release.
“Employers pay an agent to provide a domestic worker. One of the most common problems we face is that the employer or agent says, ‘I want my money back, then she can go home,'” Syvolobova told the BBC.
“Laws in force [в Омані], forbid a domestic worker to leave her employer. She cannot change jobs and cannot leave the country – regardless of how she was treated.”
In the Middle East, this labor system is known as “kafala”, where the worker is tied to his employer for the duration of the contract.
Oman’s National Anti-Trafficking Committee told the BBC that the relationship between employer and domestic worker is contractual and unresolved disputes can be taken to court within a week.
The response also states that the employer has no right to “force an employee to any form of forced labor” and cannot take away “an employee’s passport and personal documents without his written consent.”
After spending three months in Muscat, with the help of Nioni and some people in Oman, Georgina returned to Malawi in June 2021.
“Georgina’s story made me feel so angry and so angry,” Nyoni says.
It began to sound the alarm in Malawi, and the government began to be pressured to intervene in the situation.
The Malawian charity Center for Democracy and Economic Development Initiatives (CDEDI) has launched a campaign to rescue the women from Oman, calling on the authorities to bring them home.
Blessings was another woman from Nioni’s WhatsApp group. The 39-year-old woman left for Muscat in December 2022, leaving her four children with her sister Stivelia in Lilongwe.
She was badly burned in the kitchen of the house where she worked, but her employer did not allow her to return to Malawi.
“The burns were very bad, I saw how my sister almost died,” Stivelia told the BBC.
“I remember my sister saying, ‘Sister, I came here because I needed a better life, but if I die, take care of my children.’ It hurt so much.”
Photo Caption,
Last October, Blessings was able to return to her family in Lilongwe
Stivelia began to demand that her sister be returned home. The agent initially angrily told the family that Blessings had died, but this was not true and the woman eventually returned home last October with the help of the Malawian government.
“I didn’t expect to see my family again, my children,” Blessings told the BBC shortly afterwards.
“I could not imagine that there are people on earth who treat others like slaves.”
The government of Malawi, which also worked with Do Bold, says it spent more than $160,000 to repatriate the 54 women from Oman.
But 23-year-old Aida Chivalo returned home in a coffin. There was no autopsy or inquest in Oman following her death.
Omani authorities said that in 2022, the Ministry of Labor received no complaints from domestic workers with Malawian citizenship, and in 2023 only one complaint was upheld.
“Most of these women were fired only because the employer was paid money – from 1,000 to 2,000 dollars,” says Syvolobova.
“Essentially, their freedom had to be bought. And that worries me. How can you buy someone’s freedom?”
A Malawian government official told the BBC that authorities are developing rules “to ensure safe, orderly and regular migration that will benefit migrants, their families and the country as a whole”.
Photo Caption,
Georgina finds peace in the contemplation of Lake Malawi
Nyoni, whose WhatsApp group now acts only as a support group for returnees, says the domestic worker trade in Oman highlights the wider, bigger problem of Malawi – poverty and unemployment.
“If young women had the opportunity to get a job in Malawi, they would not have fallen into the trap. We must work to ensure that young people never find themselves in such a trap.”
It was difficult for Georgina to get over the injury. She is helped by walks to Lake Malawi, one of the largest in Africa.
“When I watch the waves, it reminds me that nothing in life lasts forever. One day it will all be history,” she says.
“I find peace and cheer myself by returning to the woman I was – to the former independent Georgina.”