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Child slavery thriving

Phoenix Television report, n.d. [circa 1999]

V/O:

Children as young as seven are being sold into organised slavery in the former French colonies of west Africa, in many cases by their own parents, according to disturbing new research.

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The traffic in child slaves from impoverished Benin and Togo to oil-rich Gabon in central Africa is highly organised, lucrative and on the increase, witness testimony gathered by the British charity Anti-Slavery International shows.

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Most of the slaves are young girls, the children of impoverish but polygamous parents. Girls are in great demand for work as domestics and market traders, but frequently end up in prostitution or sexual slavery, often with the co-operation of their families.

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Yolande is 12 years old. Sitting at a stall outside a smart hypermarket in Libreville, the capital of Gabon, she says she has been a slave for three years.

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She gets up at 4am to prepare food, then works the whole day selling it by the road. Asked how much she makes she replied: "I don't know. Maman counts it."

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Maman is not her real mother, but the slave owner who brought her from her village in Benin. Maman has several slaves like Yolande. A child street seller in Libreville can earn £40 a month; five or six children will make Maman a tidy living.

V/O:

A Benin aid agency, Enfants Solidaires d'Afriques et du Monde (Esam) runs transit camps for rescued slave children. Many are traumatised; girls who have often been made to work as domestic servants or street sellers by day, and forced into prostitution at night.

Esma's director, Norbert Fanou-Akom, explained: "It's an organised crime. A trafficking chain serves the people who profit directly: people who need kids in Gabon.

FANOU-AKOM:

"Children are taken across the borders en masse and are forced to work beyond their capacity and the owners profit from their work."

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The report by Anti-Slavery International describes how children are piled 20 or 30 deep into tiny fishing boats, sometimes without food or water, for a journey that can last weeks. Those who die are simply tossed overboard.

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Others travel overland: the journey can last months, with working stopovers in Nigeria and Cameroon, before children finally arrive in Gabon.

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In the remote villages of Benin, which are rich recruiting grounds for the traffickers, children with distended stomachs scrabble in the dust. The village elders gather under the mango tree to shake their heads about the problem.

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One 13-year-old boy worked for two years as a slave. At the end of that time, he received a bicycle and was allowed to return to his village.

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He says it was not worth the hardship and physical punishment he endured. But the younger children cluster around, tempted by what they see as his vast wealth. "I tell them, 'don't go with the traffickers. You'll suffer like I did'," he said, "But they only reply 'You went and you came back with a bicycle'."

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It is easy to spot the slave traffickers in the villages - they are the ones with the smart houses. There is little other opportunity to make money. A boy who earned a bicycle as a slave might be offered a motorbike or cash to build a house if he recruits more children.

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A trafficker explained how the bosses move up the ladder from victims to abusers:

TRAFFICKER:

"The bosses are local people, people who were once taken to be slaves, like I was. Your eyes are opened. You want to profit too. You say: I was abused, I'll do the same as was done to me."

V/O:

The cycle of abuse may help to explain the sickening level of brutality in the trade. At the age of 14, Maimouna Traore was lured from her village in Togo by a woman who offered her work in Gabon.

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But she was part of a gang of traffickers. The journey to Gabon took seven months in total, with a stopover in Lomé during which she was starved until she agreed to become a prostitute. When she arrived in Gabon, she gave birth to a baby.

MAIMOUNA:

"I begged the traffickers to send me and the baby back to my village. My parents would pay the cost of transportation. But they refused," she said.

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One of the traffickers told her they were going to kill her baby.

MAIMOUNA:

"I thought it was a joke," she said. "But two weeks later the woman trafficker told me to put the baby to bed and sent me on an errand. When I returned, she told me to pick up the baby and give it a bath. It was stiff. Afterwards, the talk in the neighbourhood was that the traffickers had killed it. Three days later they sent me back to work."

V/O:

People of the neighbourhood point out the house of the woman who enslaved Maimouna. She has other slave children now. In Gabon, the traffickers have the protection of corrupt police officials. For all the international concern, the people who deal in slaves are untouchable.

END

Scott White
Editor, Current Affairs & Co-productions
Phoenix Television
Tel: +44-20-7907-0929
Fax: +44-20-7907-0930