It is not uncommon for the word to come to mind or the book Hunger, by Martín Caparrós. (It should be mandatory that, as a global society, we were accused of the greatest ignominy that we perpetrate on our planet: to allow or allow, by active or by passive, that people die for direct or indirect causes linked to hunger in any part of the world).
The memory is repetitive, among other reasons, because the Argentine journalist told there the lives of Aï and Aisha, two young people from a country, Niger, of which we now speak for a coup d’etat, for the exit of the French troops, for uranium and because I don’t know how many more things, but we almost always forget that a good part of the population goes hungry. And that these people have a name. The figures of food insecurity, the nutritional crisis or I do not know how many more forms of linguistic sweetener at the expense of hunger should not transfer the hungry to oblivion.
Hunger is not the only victim of the dictatorship of the figures. (And in this house we also usually give them). So are migrants. The refugees. The displaced. Women who suffer from gender violence. The tumult of children without school. And, much further over time, the victims of slavery.
That Africans and Western sold and bought millions of people, who were enslaved for their own benefit, is a verified reality. Who uprooted them from their land with a brutality devoid of scruples is more than known. That the industrialization of the West was based on that slave labor, too. In the same way that the European cities flourished – and continue to wear proud and bourgeois – thanks to those who embarked without a return date. Millions of them and them. In most cases without name and without any affiliation.
But now we have known the existence of Matilda McCrear. He is the last victim of transatlantic trafficking of which the name has been known. Kidnapped with just two years, he crossed the Atlantic with his mother and three older sisters. It was 1860. Destiny, Alabama (USA). The ship, the clotilda. She, her mother and a sister were bought by the same slave. Of the other two it has not been possible to collect more information. He died in 1940 or 1941.
It is not one more. It is her. Matilda.
In the upper image, engraved from a slave market. Ancient Fund of the University of Seville Library.
