Nigerian Mother Kept Enslaved By Texas Family?

The slave next door: husband and wife Emmanuel and Ngozi Nnaji have been charged by Federal authorities with keeping a Nigerian woman in domestic servitude against her will for the last nine years.

Their Arlington, Texas neighbors were shocked to learn that within their neighborhood, there lived a slave: a widowed, semi-literate Nigerian woman, with six children left behind in Africa, is alleged to have been held against her will from 1997 until being rescued in February 2006.

It is alleged that the Nigerian woman's passport and visa were taken from her by the couple, who also threatened her into working 15-16 hour days, seven days a week. She had been lured into her inescapable servitude with false promises that the Nnaji's would support her six children back in Nigeria, one of whom had been suffering from sickle cell anemia, and in desperate need of regular doses of medication. This payment was only done infrequently when at all, according to the woman's relatives in her African home town.

A video report on the story can be seen here.

The criminal complaint introduced by an agent of the FBI's Human Trafficking division alleges that the woman "cared for [the Texas family's] baby day and night, cooked, and cleaned. [She] washed all the dishes by hand because she was not allowed to use the dishwasher. The Nnajis did not allow [her] to use the vacuum cleaner and required [her] to clean the carpet with a broom... The Nnajis had two more children. [She] then cared for all three children, cooked, cleaned, laundered the clothes, and performed yard work. [She] slept very little because she was always required to work...

"Emmanuel forced [her] to engage in sexual acts which Emmanuel told [her] she could never report because she would get into trouble..."

"[She] reported her situation, including the sexual abuse, to a niece in Nigeria in a phone conversation during which [she] hid in a closet. Not long after this conversation, [she] was contacted by a Nigerian priest residing in Texas. [She] and the priest planned her escape and in February 2006, [she] met the priest on a street corner with a bad filled with personal belongings."

The CBS news site suggests that the incident took place somewhere in the 1500 block of Green Hill Drive, a seemingly quiet, restful neighborhood that looks like this (courtesy of googlemaps):

Who could imagine that the spectre of slavery could haunt such a place?? If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere.