AFRICA’S BITTER CYCLE OF CHILD SLAVERY:
About 200,000 children in West and Central Africa are slaves, sold by their parents or duped. The children are starved, abused and beaten. But some get their own slaves when they grow up.
by Robyn Dixon / Los Angeles Times
July 12, 2009
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-fg-ghana-slavery12-2009jul12,0,7595455.story
Reporting from Kpone, Ghana — Rebecca Agwu told her 5-year-old son, John, not to cry when she sent him away to live with relatives four years ago. Mary Mootey sent away her 4-year-old son, Evans, telling him he was going off to school. The two boys, now 9, from the same town in Ghana, ended up being forced to work 14 hours a day fishing on Lake Volta and being beaten for the smallest lapse.
Rewind about two decades: Rebecca Agwu was a child herself when her mother sent her away to live with an aunt.
“I cried,” Agwu, 30, recalls. “I didn’t want to go, but my mother deceived me that when I went, my aunt would teach me a trade.” Instead she was forced to be a domestic worker.
“I never trusted her again. I felt very betrayed.”
Evans’ mother, when she was 8, was sent by her father to her uncle, a fisherman on Lake Volta, where she was forced to work from 3 a.m. until dark — cleaning, carting water, cooking and gutting fish.
“My father never loved me when I was young,” says Mootey, 35. “I hate him, because he caused all the pain and suffering I went through. I hate him.”
For generations, Ghana and other West African nations have served as a hub for child trafficking and slavery. An estimated 200,000 children in West and Central Africa perform unpaid labor. They are given minimal food and clothing, are deprived of schooling and medical care and are often subjected to physical abuse. Recent laws outlawing slavery in many African countries have had limited effect.
Slavery has a long history in these parts. The Elmina Castle on Ghana’s Cape Coast, one of the departure points for the 18th and 19th century slave trade to the Americas, each year draws thousands of African American visitors seeking their roots.
Elmina’s dank, black dungeons lead to the “room of no return,” with its moldy green walls and oppressive atmosphere. “May humanity never again perpetrate such inhumanity against humanity,” reads a plaque at the fortress.
‘I was afraid they would kill me’
But today, thousands of Ghanaian children are in unpaid servitude, having been sold for $30 to $50, nongovernmental groups say. Girls are often forced to work as domestic laborers, carting water, fetching wood, sweeping, cleaning, farming, washing, cooking, and in fishing families, cutting up fish and smoking it. They are often sexually abused.
Boys are mostly sent to fish on Lake Volta, where they are taught to swim by being repeatedly thrown off a boat with a rope tied around their waist.
The stories of two mothers and two sons, forced into servitude two decades apart, are equally painful. Agwu’s memories of 13 years of domestic labor and beatings are as bitter and sharp as if they had happened yesterday.
“I was afraid all the time. I felt I was nobody. I used to cry myself to sleep.”
Her son’s words evoke similar pain. Sent to work for a fisherman, he had to bail out his boat, pull in heavy nets and dive to free snagged ones.
“I always thought I would die in the water, because I was afraid,” the mother said. “My master used to beat me and his wife did too. I cried morning and night. I was afraid they would kill me.”
Mary Mootey’s hands are scarred from the spines of the fish she gutted.
“I always used to cry when I was forced to do something and I was tired and I couldn’t do it quickly so they’d beat me. I used to cry a lot.”
She worked nine years and was raped several times before she managed to escape, she said. Thinking about the past still hurts.
When her brother, a Lake Volta fisherman who also had been a child slave, offered to send Evans to school, she says, she trusted him.