Trafficking of west African children spawns in Gabon
July 18, 2013 11:10 am
Terseer adamu (Review)
LIBREVILLE (AFP) – At the
sprawling Mont-Bouet
market in Libreville, dozens of children heave bags of
cement on their shoulders. Others wander around for hours, desperately trying
to sell dried fish or cakes.
Their parents are nowhere to be
seen: these children are virtual slaves illegally lured from west African
states to oil-rich, equatorial Gabon.
Lari, now 22, was only 11 when she
was taken from her native Togo by a stranger who claimed to be her uncle.
She was told that she would be
reunited with her mother, who had abandoned her at birth, and was taken by boat
to Gabon.
But Lari had been tricked, and she
was sent to work for a rich Togolese family living in Gabon, placed there by
her “uncle”.
So began her gruelling new life as a
house maid: up every day at dawn, preparing the meals, acting as a nanny for
the family’s baby, and when all that was done, shopping every evening for food.
During her time working for the
family, Lari said she never received any money. Instead it was taken by her
so-called guardian.
“I never earned a cent,” Lari told
AFP. Her guardian would visit “to take money at the end of each month, he never
told me how much”, she said.
“Wherever I worked, it was the
same.”
Lari calculated that the family owed
her 2.6 million CFA francs (almost 4,000 euros), money that she has never been
given.
In 10 years, more than 700 children
have been rescued from exploitation as virtual slaves and repatriated,
according to the UN Children’s Fund.
However, “nobody knows how many are
exploited because they have no travel papers, they don’t have formal jobs…
Everything is informal,” said UNICEF representative in Gabon, Michel Ikamba.
To bring children to Gabon, a
country of 1.6 million people seen as an El Dorado in other parts of Africa,
child traffickers use the “channels of clandestine immigration”, Ikamba
explained.
Overloaded boats full of west
Africans fleeing poverty and unemployment in Benin, Togo, Nigeria or Mali land
on beaches near the coastal capital Libreville after nightfall.
The Gabonese navy intercepted one
such vessel in 2009 which was carrying 300 illegal immigrants, including 34
children destined for exploitation who were handed over to UNICEF.
– Parents given promises and cash –
The children arriving in Gabon have
no idea what awaits them.
Young girls often end up as domestic
servants or prostitutes and the boys are given manual labour, toiling from
morning to night in sweltering heat.
Their parents back in the home
country were won over by vain promises and a fistful of money.
“They tell them that their children
will go to school and then they give them 20,000 CFA francs (30 euros, $39) to
encourage them,” said Sister Marguerite Bwandala, who runs two centres in
Libreville opened by the Roman Catholic charity Caritas.
“The networks are well organised.
The trafficker places them, often with people from their home country, to take
up jobs such as vulcanising rubber (to give it greater strength and elasticity)
or selling groundnuts, and he collects their wages,” Sister Marguerite said.
But it does not stop at financial
exploitation: according to UNICEF, children are often subject to violence,
including sexual abuse by the father in the family that takes them in.
For teenager Sonia, who was just six
years old when she arrived from Ketou, a village in southern Benin, violence
was the norm.
After each day at work, “I was
tired, the old woman beat me very hard. She hit me across the face. They said
that I was their daughter, but it wasn’t true”, said Sonia. Finally, she fled.
Rare are the children though who
manage to break free of the grip of their new families, who are their only
reference point in a nation where they are foreigners and have no papers.
As she grew up, Lari was passed from
employer to employer.
She says her final job, which lasted
eight years, was the worst. “I was made mistress of the house. I had to look
after the husband all the time, I couldn’t go to bed until he came home, even
if it was at four in the morning.”
“His wife accused me of things that
weren’t true. When she lost money, it was always my fault. She searched my things
and when she found nothing, she tortured me, she beat me to make me confess,”
she added.
Much worse was to follow.
“She accused me of sleeping with her
husband’s brother. Three times she took me to the doctor to prove that I was
still a virgin.”
Gabon has started taking steps to
crackdown on the trafficking of children. It has joined UNICEF in launching a
training programme in five towns to unite magistrates, army officers, police
and social workers in fighting against such exploitation.
Closer cooperation will also make it
easier to repatriate children, said UNICEF’s Ikamba.
Lari has at last found a way out,
with paid employment as a nanny in Gabon. She is hoping to save up enough to
open a business back home.
At a Caritas-run centre, there is
also hope. Fourteen-year-old Edith is training to be a hairdresser. The nuns
hope that she can qualify in Gabon and avoid further exploitation.
“She’s doing well,” said Sister
Marguerite. “She has even learned to read and write here.”
Source: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2013/07/trafficking-of-west-african-children/
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