| IT WAS IN Benin Republic, as if by some cruel irony of history, that the drama unfolded. On 17 April 2001, when a Nigerian-registered ship named Etireno pulled into Cotonou, the Benin port at 2 a.m., the world had been expecting it for at least a week. Rumours regarding the ship’s human cargo had been rife while it was still at sea and the interest this generated transformed it into the best known ship in the world for nearly one month. The Etireno had grabbed international headlines when Benin’s government, citing officials in Cameroon, said a ship loaded with child slaves had been turned away from two African ports and was headed back to the capital, Cotonou. With that, UNICEF raised a hoopla that made many journalists in the region to rush to Benin to see for themselves. Slave trade It did, in fact, seem remarkable that the word ‘slave trade’ – centuries after it was abolished – actually generated such a great public interest. In many newsrooms across the world, as editors noted the excitement, they too began to await the news break from Benin with bated breath. But slave trade, though regarded as a taboo in Benin now, is not exactly a new phenomenon here. This country of 6 million people, once the kingdom of Dahomey, was, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, the single biggest exporter of slaves on the west coast of Africa. For over four centuries, a great wave of human trade occurred here; and this booming commerce saw millions of Africans chained, sold and shipped like goods to Europe and America.
So, when news of the Etireno ship broke, Benin government officials, recalling their history, acted alarmed; but mostly because the story had caught world attention. For in reality, Benin, even in modern times, is still an ‘exporter’ of slaves; this time, child slaves, sold by poor parents for almost peanuts to strangers who take them as far away from home as possible, while the government look the other way. Understandably therefore, the Etireno ship generated such a wave of excitement that when it finally reached the Benin port, many people seemed to have expected to witness hundreds of kids being led out of it in chains – a picture that the world still recalls of the slave trade era.
But that was not the image Etireno’s passengers presented to onlookers that night. Out of it had emerged 43 people; of these, only 23 were children. Though sea weary, they didn’t look, at first glance, like slaves. And this image clashed violently with the expectation of many; in fact, it created a profound sense of disappointment that made some quickly lose interest in it as if their excitement had been wasted. Even government officials were equally disappointed to the point of suggesting that the Etireno might have been confused with another ship, thereby prolonging the waiting game. But many journalists, after waiting in vain for any possible mystery ship to whisk into view, dismissed the news as aid agency hype and stopped following the story. Modern slave labour Yet the Etireno drama had not, in fact, finished; for modern slaves don’t disembark from any ship in chains. Like many other things in today’s world, the slave trade too has been modernised. Those 23 children from the Etireno ship, aged under 14, most of them under 10, were indeed child slaves, bought and paid for, like any normal business transaction; and they came from five different countries – Benin, Togo, Mali, Senegal and Guinea. Their original destination was oil-rich Gabon, where they were supposed to be resold for as much as $200, because their labour is in high demand. There, they would serve as housemaids – cooking, cleaning and baby-sitting for no salary at all. As has happened to many, their names would have been changed, and with the passage of time they would forget their parents, their home, their language and their country. Most likely, they would be resold again and again until at last, they would be thrown into the street, unskilled and useless.
In Gabon, the trafficking of children is not illegal, the labour minister, Paulette Missambo is reported to have admitted. Here, even government officials have slave kids in their homes, working for nothing while their own children go to school. Which is why the government has been trying for a long time, without success, to create a law prohibiting the trade. The minister blames the children’s parents for selling their kids and also blames the traffickers for bringing them to Gabon and concludes that We are victims of this traffic too. And, like many other officials of her government, she might have forgotten that her country was a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The children’s ordeal The fate of the Etireno children, by some strange happenstance, was altered when something went wrong with their voyage. For reasons that were not explained, this routine shipment of slaves from Benin to Gabon was turned away from two ports. The children, after days at sea, were told one night to climb down the side into small boats and hide. It didn’t help; Gabonese soldiers caught them anyway, and dumped them in jail. The ship’s Nigerian captain, whose name was first given as Lawrence Onome, then Lawrence Oghototuya, who was accused in Benin of knowingly taking trafficked children without papers to Gabon, called it a frame-up. Dismissing the accusation, he said that rivals on the same route might have bribed the Gabonese to turn his ship away and blacken his good name. And what he called dirty tricks by rivals resulted in some of the children being beaten by soldiers and some others being bitten by dogs.
After this ordeal, they were reportedly put back on the ship, which, in confusion, drifted for days before finally heading back, after three weeks at sea, to Benin. And there, aid agencies, journalists, government officials and UNICEF awaited them. The children were confused and fearful, thinking they were again in jail; some even gave false names after warnings from the traffickers. It took a while for them to relax and begin to play. It was reported that those of them old enough to know what was happening to them had said they were headed to Gabon to work in commerce, agriculture or domestic service. Some told authorities that they were travelling with a person they did not know. But it was when a Swiss-run child-care organisation Terre Des Hommes, took them in, and counsellors questioned them that their real stories emerged.
Some strangers, they said, had come to their villages and paid money to their parents to take them away to work abroad. 11 year old Victoire said the man who paid his family was named Jean. He gave my father 500 CFA (equivalent to about one U.S. dollar in the Gabon currency Communauté financiére africaine) and gave my brothers 500 CFA. Another kid, Adakoun, aged 6, had refused to go but when his mother insisted, his resistance crumbled. She told me that if I refused to go, my father would not be happy and we would all die of starvation, he was reported as saying. I was scared so I agreed. But the voyage was a troubled one. When the ship began drifting after being turned away from Gabon, supplies ran low and fights broke out over food. Worse, toilets were blocked. Six year old Adakoun was quoted as saying that We had to poo in plastic bags and throw it over the side. We were thirsty. I asked for water and they told me to go away and look somewhere else. We were crying and they said if we didn’t stop crying they would throw us over the side. Who is responsible? So far, no one is taking responsibility for this behaviour. The Etireno still lies in port and authorities in Benin have not brought charges against anyone, as they are yet to officially conclude their investigations. The Etireno’s captain, since the ship docked, has been going every day to see the head of the police department in charge of the investigation. These regular visits seem to have resulted in some kind of friendship, which now makes the police chief deny what his government had previously admitted. There is no slavery, there were no trafficked children on the Etireno, he told an inquiring journalist and dismissed him with a smile. After all the hoopla over the Etireno, the case seemed to have been unceremoniously closed.
Luckily for the children, Terre Des Hommes, after six weeks, found some of their parents and began to prepare them for their return. But they were worried that their parents would send them away again. Social workers were preparing to follow them home and try to convince their parents not to sell them again. It might be a useless effort; in some villages, where illiterate parents raise more children than they can care for, this appears to be the only road to survival. Those who sell their children blame poverty, not their lack of restraint in raising too many kids, which is principally the cause of their poverty. In a reported confession, one emaciated villager said, I have had 16 or 17 children. I sold six of them and used all the money to feed myself. Still, his situation was not improved because the children later returned home, unskilled and practically useless. No matter, they too got married and raised children whom they have also sold to survive.
This phenomenon had been going on for many years. When the Nigerian local currency – the Naira – was strong, one Philomene Tegble trafficked children to Nigeria for nine profitable years. She was quoted as saying that We used to take about 80 or 100 children each year. It was, she remembered, easy to fool poor parents in villages. We would tell them that influential people in Nigeria are looking for children and they would be paid a lot of money. Of course, this was a lie. Her targets were usually younger girls because, being docile and obedient, they often fetched the most. A little girl knows nothing, she doesn’t know the way home. Older children know how to escape, but the little ones don’t run away, they don’t know their way home; they just stay there working, working, working. With the collapse of the Nigerian Naira, the cocoa and coffee plantations of Ivory Coast beckoned, and job prospects in oil-rich Gabon continue to attract both traffickers and poor villagers. But the reality is often different for the children, like 10 year old Juliette Zinwuè, who told reporters early this year that she still remembered the excitement when the traffickers came to her village in southern Benin three years ago. They said they would take me to work in Abidjan, and they paid my parents. There were a lot of children going and I wanted to go with them. And she went. We came to Abidjan in a car, I was excited to be going somewhere in a car.
But the excitement soon crystallised into a nightmare. Sold to a relatively wealthy woman from her home country, who lives in Ivory Coast’s bustling commercial capital, the reality dawned on her rather brusquely. Juliette Zinwuè is now forced to rise every morning at 6 a.m. to sweep the house and courtyard, wash dishes and clean out the garbage cans. That done, she transfers her service to the local market, where she spends the rest of the day selling trinkets and hair accessories at her boss’s stall. It is a fate that confronts at least 200,000 children, who, according to UNICEF, are being trafficked every year across west Africa.
I don’t recognise this as African, Constance Yaï, a former minister of family and social affairs in Ivory Coast, who is now president of the Ivorian Association for Women’s Rights, said furiously. Are you going to tell me that as long as we have not eliminated poverty, we’re going to keep selling children like objects and making them suffer? Poverty encourages this kind of activity, yes. But failing to put children in school encourages it too. Failing to punish those who traffic children encourages it. Not many people are listening to her, certainly not politicians and traffickers.
And, since many African governments are busy fighting wars or playing politics, some citizens have begun to react. One of them is Baba Apoudjac, a Togolese philosophy teacher in Gabon, who has been rescuing children and confronting their traffickers, demanding they provide money for the kids’ fare home. A reporter who witnessed his operation one day outside Togo’s embassy in Gabon, where he and his helpers found a little girl named Chouchou at dawn, said the girl had been there all night. They kept beating me, beating me, she said, they cut all my hair... My sister, she’s still there in that house. The helpers later found her sister and took them to a refuge run by Spanish nuns and then helped them to go home. Stark reality But the efforts of Baba Apoudjac, though plausible, cannot be enough, as long as governments fail to rise up to their responsibilities and fight the poverty that continues to ravage the continent, and as long as poor Africans continue to produce children like chickens without first thinking of how to cater for them. Indeed, a comprehensive study by the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, on whether the world will have enough to eat 20 years from now concludes that Africa probably will not. It predicts rising hunger on the continent, noting that without enormous investment in irrigation, roads to take the harvest to market and crop research, Africa might have 49 million malnourished children by 2020, a rise of 50 percent. The study, based on a computer model taking into account population, prices and production data for 16 commodities, delivers a strong message.
As many Africans are too poor to participate in the global market and as population gain continues to outpace food production, the stark reality facing Africa is that events similar to the Etireno drama is bound to be repeated on the continent again and again. And again. |
