Francis Bok

Francis Piol Bol Bok (born February 1979), a Dinka tribesman and citizen of South Sudan, was a slave for ten years and later became an abolitionist and author living in the United States.

Biography On May 15, 1986, he was captured and enslaved at the age of seven during an Arab militia raid on the village of Nyamlell in southern Sudan during the Second Sudanese Civil War.

Bok was captured after his mother, Adut Al Akok, had sent him to the village of Nyamlell to sell eggs and peanuts in the village market with some older siblings and neighbors. This was Bok's first trip to the village without his mother, and it was the first time he was allowed to sell some of the family's goods at the market. The raiders were part of an Islamic militia from the northern part of Sudan that conducted periodic raids on the villages of their Dinka neighbors, who were Christians or animists of Sub-Saharan African descent. Bok was given quarters in a hovel near the pens of Giemma's livestock.

Bok began a ten-year period of slavery at the hands of Giemma and his son Hamid. He was forced to tend the family's herds of livestock. He had to take them to pastures in the area and to local watering holes, where he saw other Dinka boys who were also forced to tend herds of livestock. Bok settled among people who were from the Aweil area of North Bahr al Ghazal and began using his Christian name of Francis once again. Bok was quickly arrested by the Sudanese police for telling his friends and neighbors that he was a slave. Slavery in Sudan is a subject that was largely denied by the government in Khartoum and anybody that spoke of it could be arrested or even killed. Bok was interrogated numerous times while he was imprisoned and each time he denied that he was a slave. He was finally released from prison after seven months. He returned to Washington on September 28, 2000, and became the first escaped slave to speak before the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Bok was invited to Washington again in 2002 for the signing of the Sudan Peace Act and met with President George W. Bush. It was during this trip to the White House that Bok became the first former slave to meet with a U.S. President since the 19th century.

In popular culture Francis Bok's voice is heard on Zero Church, a 2002 album by Suzzy and Maggie Roche.