An Onymus,

Thank you for the post. But, one small, but critical typo. It should be castration OF, not BY a runaway slave.

Just today, the State Department added four Persian Gulf states to the list of those heavily involved in slave trafficking. One, but only one, of the several articles I read on their announcement mentioned the sale of boys as young as three years of age. Most of the slaves sold into the region are women and girls, but about 10% are boys. Slavery is far from dead in this world.

As indicated in some of the preambles to the story, the African background to 'Slaveboy From New York' was based on news reports such as that quoted by An Onymous. Some of these are quite old, indicating that punishment castrations of slaves in Niger and neighbouring countries have been occurring for many years, probably even many centuries.

The fact that both slavery and punishment castrations continue into the 21st century surely condemns the wider world community for either ignorance or indifference.

Given this, I'd like to relate my angry thoughts here about President Bush's selfish rejection this week of a European approach, led by the British Prime Minister, for the rich western nations to co-operate in doing much more to help resolve Africa's many problems. However, taking into account Paolo's request that political comments should be confined elsewhere, I'll refrain.

PUEROS

To clarify my earlier post--

On the Nightline show, there was an interview with a runaway slave, and, as he didn't speak English, his responses were translated. He said something to the effect that he had run away because someone had told him he would be either killed or castrated (I think--the translation left something to be desired.) There was no suggestion that the slave would have had anything to do with castrating someone else. I guess I used a poor prepositional construction.