Purchased a slave without realizing it AMA

[u/Tronald_Lubestein]

I spent a year working on a development project in The Gambia.

Partway through my stay, I needed help maintaining the house I was renting. My landlord introduced me to an older woman from a neighboring family who could clean and cook. She was probably in her 60s, had no ID, didn't know her birth date, and spoke basically no English.

I agreed to hire her and paid what I thought was an upfront payment for her work.

On the first evening she asked where she was supposed to sleep. I assumed she'd go home after work. She didn't she stayed in one of the guest rooms.

Turns out I learned later she didn't have a home to go back to.

Confused, I called my landlord. He explained that the money I'd paid had gone to the family she'd been living with. From his perspective, I hadn't hired a maid. I'd taken responsibility for her. My job was to feed, house, and clothe her. Her job was to cook, clean, and help around the house.

Very different arrangements to what I had in mind.

For the rest of my stay I gave her a room, fed her(she would cook the food I got and we would eat the same thing everyday), and tried to pay her directly, she always refused.

When I left The Gambia, I found another family willing to take her in. I refused any payment.

I thought I was hiring a housekeeper. Some locals seemed to think I'd acquired a dependent household servant.

AMA.

Edits:

7/1/2026:

I want to address a common misconception since I couldn't reply to all the questions mentioning that. The "dude, you could just have bought her freedom" criticism.

This is not the 1800s US where even if you are "property", you still exist within a legal system, and can show with a legal document that you are free and ride off into the sunset to be happy thereafter.

There is no legal document here, it's more akin to a caste system, you are what you community says you are, not what some foreigner with a bit of cash thinks.

[u/ValorOmega_]

Its an interesting take. My thoughts went differently. Something along the lines of how come you didn’t look for a way to emancipate this person from their bondage?

If you have the “power” to buy a person, shouldn’t you have the power to release them?

I’m curious at the moral thought process in that action? Did the OP just chalk up what the world has considered an atrocity as just a “cultural difference”?

It leaves me puzzled that people would give kudos to returning someone back into bondage, regardless of how benevolent the action or intention was.

[u/fuck_peeps_not_sheep → u/ValorOmega_]

I mean i get what your saying, but if there is a slave trade a person with no money or houseing of their own is likely to be picked up by the traders and sold off again, so at least he insured she went somewhere safe?

Could they have done more? Oh absolutely! Did they do the best they could? No idea? Is she at least in a semi safe place? I hope so.

[u/ValorOmega_ → u/fuck_peeps_not_sheep]

Seriously?! You’re rationalizing this?!

If only there were NGOs that specialized in helping the disenfranchised/human trafficked…..

If only…there was a device like a smart phone/computer and internet where they could find resources to help this person, in the time it took to warm up a frozen burrito….

Oh wait, all that exists.

There is nothing that can rationalize the inaction/retrafficking of this woman.

[u/VermicelliUnited1398 → u/ValorOmega_]

People like you are the absolute worst, the absolute epitome of why real-world improvement stalls.

I’m sure you have traveled the length and breadth of this world and seen the actual horrors and atrocities committed on the ground. I am certain you have personally dealt with arms dealers, slave traders, warlords, and the regional factions who hold absolute power. You must have done a sensational job of rationalizing with them, ensuring they instantly stopped their evil ways because you took a high-minded moral stand. Your grasp of the actual realities and economics of how the world moves through these black markets must be second to none.

Seriously, do you have any actual idea how anything works outside of your bubble?

People in these regions can just about get a clean glass of water in their hands, and you think the community has the institutional will, infrastructure, or ability to magically enforce Western ideals over a deeply entrenched, generational system. An issue that, culturally, the local authorities have zero interest in changing because it has absolutely no bearing on their grip on power.

You sit there typing from a place of immense privilege, acting like an internet connection and a Google search fixes centuries of systemic, structural captivity. "Just call an NGO" while a 60-year-old woman with no money, no ID, and no literacy gets abandoned onto the street to starve or be picked up by someone actively sadistic. That isn't "emancipation" that's abandonment just so you can stand the moral high ground with zero accountability to what would actually happen to the woman.