Overview
According to the journalist Melanie Finn, although Zana asserts that she and her sister had no idea what would happen to them when they travelled to North Yemen, Nadia says that her father showed her a photograph of her future husband, Mohammed, in the UK, and that she knew she was going to be married.
On their arrival in Maqbanah, Zana, 15 and Nadia, 14 learned by Abdul Khada that she were the spouse of a teenage son of the father's friend. Zana lived in a town called Hockail and Nadia lived in Ashube. Their mother, Miriam Ali, an English woman, appealed unsuccessfully to the Foreign Office for assistance, but was told that the Yemeni government had stated that as they were now married to Yemeni men, they could only leave the country with their husbands' permission.
In 1987, an Observer journalist, Eileen McDonald, visited the girls and wrote a series of articles portraying the Muhsens as cruelly-treated slaves. The girls begged McDonald, and her male photographer, to help them leave the country, and the media coverage provoked an outcry in the UK. This led to the Yemeni government giving the Muhsens permission to leave the country in 1988, but forbade them from taking their children (Zana had one child, Marcus,and Nadia five, Hassan and Tina are two of them).
Zana Muhsen remained in England and in 1992, wrote Sold: Story of Modern-day Slavery with the ghostwriter Andrew Crofts, describing her experiences. It became an international bestseller and was dramatised by BBC Radio 4. The picture of a veiled woman on the cover of Sold is Nadia Muhsen. In 2001, Zana Muhsen and Crofts wrote a follow-up, A Promise to Nadia - the true story of a British slave. Nadia Muhsen gave an interview to Melanie Finn, a journalist for The Guardian, in 2002 in which she stated that she was happy with her life, saying, "It was never in my mind that I wanted to leave. It's just my sister, she wasn't comfortable."
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