discrimination in the administration of education which the Haratin ghettos and villages
face.
And even if ghettos have several schools, these suffer from a cruel lack of
infrastructure. Even more serious is the fact that teachers, predominantly from the
dominant community, often refuse to teach in Haratin areas, both in the Adwaba (slave
villages) or in ghettos with a concentration of enslaved populations. They show their
refusals through absenteeism, which endangers children’s schooling. In addition,
teachers make children work for their own account during school hours, doing
domestic work, working in market gardens or taking care of their livestock.
But in some local areas with both Haratins and Arab-Berbers, teachers cultivate the
systematic discrimination against the Haratins whom they require to do private chores,
but also for the benefit of the school (cleaning classes for example) while exempting
the children from dominant groups from these same chores. These blatant differences
of treatment are very normal to us, but are in fact bullying of our children. The children
of the dominant groups learn from such unjust behaviors and in turn humiliate and
mock Haratin children, with all the harmful consequences it implies on the psychology
of the children and on their personality being shaped.
Another problem, and not the least, that accentuates the the gap in schooling in this
country is the total absence of any reference to human rights in school curricula.
On the contrary, slavery is still being taught in religious school programs as a normal
practice in the usual behaviour in the Muslim society. Teachers of this discipline
reiterate all day long the religious obligations of slaves which are largely separate from
those of the free man in terms of Islamic law. Clearly, students of this so-called noble
strain, by learning this, do not hesitate to disdainfully recall their Haratin classmates
their place in society anytime the smallest confrontation happens.
E. The schooling failure
All these unfortunate circumstances, together with the multidimension of poverty and
ignorance, have led to an extraordinary exacerbation of school failure among the
Haratins, in the sense that many children undertake very early on low-skilled jobs at
the expense of their education. This is a constraint for them as they need to contribute
to decrease the state of extreme poverty in which their families find themselves. All
these circumstances lead to the fact more than three quarters of Haratin
schoolchildren do not go beyond primary school.
Moreover, this phenomenon paved the way to children trafficking, including children
labour from a very early age. Those who manage to cling to school until the end of
secondary education and could attend higher education (there are not many) are
automatically blocked by the official system of grants.
This system is discriminatory in more than one way. It is an absurd and continuous
form of cooptation of children from dominant groups for educational grants and for
the access to universities around the world through quota, to the detriment of the
poorest, among which the Haratins are the first. This policy leads to the de facto