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Outlook: I Got a Slave for My Birthday

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Hands in chains

16/08/2018 GMT

I Got a Slave for My Birthday

BBC World Service - Outlook, I Got a Slave for My Birthday

Abdel Nasser Ould Ethmane from Mauritania went from slave owner to abolitionist

Abdel Nasser Ould Ethmane co-founded an organisation to abolish slavery and fight for the rights of enslaved people in Mauritania

Abdel Nasser Ould Ethmane is from Mauritania, a country in north-west Africa where slavery has existed for centuries. As a child he thought it was normal for a noble family like his to own slaves, but as he grew older he began to question the practice and ended up as one of the leading campaigners for abolition.  He tells Matthew about his life and the organisation he's co-founded which fights for the rights of enslaved people in Mauritania. 

Martha Hitchins who lives in Philadelphia, USA, is a leading player of the timpani- those copper drums that make that big booming sound in an orchestra, but as she tells Outlook's Tara Gadomski, she's had to fight sexism for years.

The prominent Italian anti mafia campaigner and politician Rita Borsellino died this week. She was seventy-three. In 1992, Rita's brother Paolo Borsellino, who was a leading anti mafia judge, was killed in a car bomb attack on the island of Sicily. Rita - who had been working as a pharmacist - resolved to take up her brother's anti-Mafia work. She ended up going into politics and became a member of the European Parliament. She spoke to Matthew last year about her brother.

In 2015 two photos of a very overweight man went viral. In the first, the man was dancing; in the second, he was standing still and looking glum. The person who posted the image had written a nasty comment beside it, but it prompted an online backlash in defence of the dancing man and a worldwide search for him.  We meet the Dancing Man - Sean O'Brien from Liverpool - and Elyse Berger, one of the American women who began the search for him and made a documentary about Sean's story.

Image: Hands in chains
Credit: rodjulian/Getty Images

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