An Awful Human Trade

By Simon Robinson/Nairobi and Nancy Palus/Abidjan

Juliette Zinwue still remembers her excitement when the men came to her village in southern Benin, West Africa, three years ago. "They said they would take me to work in Abidjan, and they paid my parents," she says, angelic-looking in her slightly tattered, short cotton dress, which is black with bold pink and red flowers. "There were a lot of children going. I wanted to go with them. We came to Abidjan in a car. I was excited to be going somewhere in a car." But the adventure soon became a nightmare. Put to work in the home of a relatively wealthy Beninese woman who lives in the Ivory Coast's bustling commercial capital, Zinwue now rises at 6 a.m. to sweep the house and courtyard, wash dishes and clean out the garbage cans. She spends the rest of the day at a local market selling trinkets and hair accessories at her boss's stall. She is 10 years old.

Zinwue's story is not an unusual one in West Africa. The U.N. Children's Fund estimates that some 200,000 children a year are trafficked in West and Central Africa. Girls are affected worst; most end up as domestic workers or prostitutes. Boys are forced to work on coffee or cocoa plantations or as fishermen. The problem hit the news over the past fortnight when a Nigerian-registered boat that Benin authorities and UNICEF said was carrying as many as 200 slave children was turned away from Gabon and Cameroon. When it arrived back in Benin a few days later, only 43 children and teenagers were onboard, some with their parents. "We don't have any notion of what really happened," says Alfred Ironside, a UNICEF spokesman. "Were the kids unloaded somewhere else? Were the authorities in Benin wrong? Is there another boat? The confusion itself is symbolic of the trafficking, the secretive way it is carried out."

Africa has the highest rate of child labor in the world: 41% of 5-to-14-year-olds work. Many kids simply help on the family farm or look after younger siblings. But some are bought or taken from their parents and forced to work. Most child slaves come from the poorest countries, such as Benin, Burkina Faso or Mali, where up to 70% of the people live on less than $1 a day. "These people are in areas where there are no options for children, no school, no jobs," says Beth Herzfeld, spokeswoman for Anti-Slavery International, a London-based advocacy group. "They don't have the belief that they can build a life for their families." And so parents sell their children to traders for as little as $15, in the hope that the children will find a better life in a relatively affluent neighboring country such as Ivory Coast or oil-rich Gabon.

Local traditions fuel the problem. In the past, it was normal for West African families to send a child to stay with richer relatives in the city and for newlyweds to hire a young village girl to cook and clean for them. But with "the fabric of the extended family breaking down, things have become distorted," says Lisa Kurbiel, a child-protection officer with UNICEF. What was a custom has become an organized trade, with children being taken as far away as South Africa and the Middle East. Closer to home, they end up in such places as the labor depot in central Abidjan, which offers young girls--most of them from villages in the north of the country--as servants for a few dollars a day. One morning last week, 30 girls in dresses or skirts and freshly laundered shirts sat chatting on two wooden benches in front of the building. Next to them a young man held a laminated charter of "rules" for hiring the girls. "I don't recognize this as African," says Constance Yai, a former Ivory Coast minister of family and social affairs who is now president of the private Ivorian Association for Women's Rights. "It's commerce pure and simple."

West African countries are taking steps to stop the trade. Most have signed the International Labour Organization's Convention 182 against the Worst Forms of Child Labour, which went into effect last November. Last year Ivory Coast and Mali agreed to crack down on the trade between the two countries and announced a range of rehabilitation efforts to help children who return home. But the region's porous borders and ill-equipped police forces make it easy for smuggling to continue. Yai says it's time for West Africa to get tough: "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."

At the end of another long day, Zinwue hands the few francs she has earned to her "tante"--the common term of respect for older women in Francophone Africa. But because she has never been to school, her French is halting and basic. "I don't care that I have not been to school," she says firmly, "but I would like to go to church." Even that small dream remains impossible. She has to work on Sundays.