In late 2017, the modern world reacted with horror upon discovering that African migrants trying to get to Europe by boat got kidnapped on the high seas and brought to the shores of Libya, where they were sold off as slaves to the highest bidder. When the news hit CNN, RDI and other major news outlets, a lot of people were shocked, but Alia Sammad, a woman in whose veins both Libyan and African blood flowed, wasn't one of them.
Hatred of Africans is alive and well in many parts of the Arab world, and North Africa is definitely no exception. From Morocco to Tunisia and Libya, dark-skinned people are treated poorly for no other reason than their skin color. This really shouldn't have surprised anyone. Long before Europeans began the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and forcibly brought scores of Africans into the New World, Arabs made slaves of Africans.
The African male slaves were often castrated and turned into eunuchs, and used as farm laborers, builders, and sometimes soldiers. The African female slaves were often turned into concubines, existing sorely for their Arab masters pleasure. The Afro-Arabian populations found all over the Middle East and Africa owe their existence to the dalliance of Arab masters and African female slaves. That's the ugly legacy of Arabian colonialism in Africa, and it's not exactly something that's discussed by many.
In places like Libya, Mauritania, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and a few others, people of African descent are still kept in slave-like conditions by the Arabs. When CNN exposed these barbaric practices, the Arab world got in an uproar, and this sheer hypocrisy made a certain cynical biracial Muslim woman chuckle. I wish they'd get over themselves and admit their wrongdoing, Alia thought bitterly.
Alia Sammad has met a lot of people and lived in many places in her thirty seven years upon this earth. Born in the City of Al Moukalla, Yemen, to a Yemeni Arab Muslim father and an Afro-Libyan mother, Alia learned at an early age that the world was unkind to those who were different from the majority. While Yemen was very close to the African nation of Somalia, interracial couples were still the subject of scorn, thanks to many close-minded souls.
Verily, the fact that Alia's mother Yasmin Sammad was half black and half Arab did not sit well with some of the Yemeni Arab ladies in their hometown of Al Moukalla. These ladies saw Yasmin as a half-breed foreigner who bewitched and stole one of their precious Yemeni Arab men. Alia's father Hamid tried his best to protect his wife and daughter from a hostile world, but there was only so much he could do. Anti-black racism was alive and well in all corners of the Islamic world...
Alia Sammad grew up to be six feet tall, and very voluptuous, having inherited long curly dark hair, dark bronze skin, and almond-shaped golden brown eyes from her Afro-Libyan mother and Yemeni Arab father. In the Republic of Yemen, Alia was considered exotically beautiful by some, and an anomaly by others. When her parents moved to the City of Ottawa, Ontario, Alia experienced a whole new world, one far different from anything she could have imagined...
Living in the City of Ottawa, Ontario, forever changed Alia Sammad's outlook on life. In Canada, Alia saw policewomen, and female soldiers, and female politicians, and was thrilled to be living in a world where women could do anything that men did. For a pious, Hijab-wearing young Muslim woman who grew up in a world where the sexes spent a lot of time apart, and a large number of women were housewives, this was truly a defining moment.
Alia Sammad enrolled at the University of Ottawa, where she studied business management, and after graduating she began working for KPMG. It wasn't easy for her as a Hijab-wearing Muslim gal, in a lily-white, overtly friendly and covertly hostile workplace with a lot of hidden pitfalls, but Alia persevered. That's why she rose to the level of upper management.
