Sold by Her Mother for £10
Source: The London Daily Mail | Saturday April 21st 2001
Sold by her Mother for £10
When slavery was abolished in 1833, this little girl’s homeland was trading 10,000 people a year.
Today [In Africa] the figure is 100,000. How long can this traffic in human souls go on?
by Ross Benson in Contonou
THE afternoon sun broke through the drenching rain-clouds and shone on the Village. Its light struck the eleven-year- old girl like a ray of hope and a smile illuminated her face.
`I am so happy to be home,’ Rosalie Boko said. She looked around at the scattering of grass huts set in the jungle clearing. There is little to see and less to rejoice in. A group of old ladies talking and laughing under a shelter of palm fronds. A few pigs truffling amongst the naked toddlers playing in the red soil. This is Africa at its poorest. But it is everything this little girl spent three wretched months wishing for. It is what she cried herself to sleep at night thinking about. As she said, it is her `home’, and rarely can such a simple word come weighted with such poignant meaning. For until just two weeks ago, Rosalie Boko was a slave. It is only by good fortune that she managed to escape and make her way back to Sessivali in Benin. And if it isn’t much to come home to, it is far better than what she endured after she was sold into bondage in Nigeria.
There, she was beaten and half- starved and made to cook and clean from dawn until long after nightfall. Sleep, when it came, was on a sack stuffed with damp straw. ‘I cried every night,’ she recounted through an interpreter. And when she did, the man who had bought her and his wife would beat her again, sometimes with a stick.
DRIVEN to desperation, she ran away. Unable to speak any language but her native tongue, she could not ask for help and spent three nights sleeping rough on the streets of Lagos, the most dangerous city in this dangerous continent. But the sun must have shone on her there too, for on the third morning she met a man who also came from Benin. He took pity on her and brought her home on his motorcycle. The runaway slave had made her getaway.
A few others have also managed to evade similarly appalling fates.
This week, the so-called `slave ship’, MV Etireno, limped back into the port of Cotonou and discharged its human cargo back on to the same quay it set out from three weeks ago.
The police had feared that they would find 250 children bound for the slave markets of Gabon aboard. Instead, they discovered a huddle of illegal immigrants in search of a better life than Benin can offer. `So what’s the problem?’ the Nigerian captain Lawrence Onome asked, shrugging his powerful shoulders. `I’m a sailor, a civilised man. I’m not a slave trader. This was a bad mistake, a misunderstanding.’
The authorities are not convinced and with good reason. Child trafficking is endemic along this coastline. There were 23 children aged between six and 13 crammed into the hold of the rusting ferry. The captain says they were in the care of parents `or maybe relatives’.
According to officials of the UN Children’s Fund, however, as many as half of them were `almost certainly’ being transported into slavery in the coffee fiel an brothels of West Africa.
They were saved, UNICEF believes, only because the Etireno was forced to return to Benin after being turned away from Cameroon and Gabon when the immigrants’ papers were found to be forged.
The children are now being cared for at the Terre des Hommes orphanage in Cotonou, where they are being fed and washed and given clean clothes to wear while UNICEF tries to track down their families.
Even if they find them, however, the future remains frighteningly uncertain for these youngsters.
For it is no dreadful mischance that young girls such as Rosalie end up in Nigeria or a shipload of innocents was on its way to Gabon. This is a well-organised business and the export of young slaves is Benin’s major invisible export earner.
The statistics are horrifying. In 1833, when Britain abolished slavery and enforced its will with a naval blockade, Dahomey, as it was then called, was selling 10,000 human beings every year. Today the figure stands at close to 100,000. Add in the children from Mali and Burkina Faso and the number soars to 200,000. Put a few years together and its adds up to several million. And all of them slaves.
It is a trade that flourishes in a climate of corruption, poverty and ignorance and it starts in remote hamlets such as Sessivali. Its wickedness is made doubly so by the fact that in its early stages it depends for its success not on force but on the willing participation of the victims’ own families.
One day in January, two well dressed young men arrived on foot at Rosalie’s hut and spoke to her mother, Celestine. `They promised me money if they could take my daughter away to be educated,’ Celestine recalled. `They said that she would have to work as well, but that she would earn good money, enough to send some back to me.’ Incredibly, Celestine accepted.
Nicholas Pron, one of UNICEF’S Benin representatives, tried to defend her decision. `They have a custom here called vidomegon, whereby children are given into the care of richer relatives to be educated,’ he said. `She was only doing what she thought was right for her child.’ Western eyes, blue-red by post-colonial guilt, now refuse to see evil in the rites and traditions of the people they once ruled.
Vidomegon UNICEF’s head of mission Esther Guluma insisted `is an honourable Africa custom’. As an explanation for what happened in Sessivali, however, this one stank higher than the open drain running through the village. The men who came for Rosalie were not relations — they were strangers. Yet Celestine still allowed her daughter to be marched away. Was it money that really persuaded her? Rosalie is the eldest child of a mother who says she is in her twenties (in Benin years are counted by the season and the measure is imprecise).
She has a sister aged about eight and a brother named Pierre of about two. Of their father there was no sign and no one could remember when they last saw him. There is a school two hours’ walk away but Celestine’s daughters rarely attended. Instead, they were expected to labour in the fields alongside their mother. Clothes are worn until they fall apart and Rosalie and her sister do not even possess a doll.
The spectre of further impoverishment looms as large as the shadows cast by the giant hardwood trees and that creates its own heinous temptations. The slave traders use them to bait their trap. Celestine took it. On the promise of about £10 which she claims she never received, she accepted their offer and watched as Rosalie disappeared into the rainforest holding the hands of her grinning abductors. She then went back to work.
The heart chills at the thought. In Benin, however, such scenes have become the norm. This is a country where life has never been held in high regard. A century and a half ago, the King of Dahomey sat on a throne of human skulls. Voodoo, despite its live sacrifices of chickens and goats and, so it is whispered, humans too, has been an officially recognised religion since 1996. The traffic in youngsters is but another manifestation.
The 11-year-old boy called Eric I met in the Terre des Hommes orphanage was taken west in a rickety old car to work in an illegal cane distillery in the Ivory Coast.
Rosalie was made to walk for a day to the township of Pjonou, a major slave clearing centre in the east of the country. On their separate ways they were passed from collector to middle man, the main dealer, and then on to smugglers. At each halt the price goes up. Eric, whose father did get his £10 (and gave his son 30p as a parting gift) was rescued by police at the Ghanaian border a week ago.
For once, the bribes which are an integral part of this trade did not work and he was sent back to Cotonou. Had he reached the distillery, he would have been worth anything up to £300.
Even in prosperous countries such as the Ivory Coast and Nigeria, that represents a great deal of money and by the perverted logic of this trade it is the slaves who are responsible for that `debt’. It is one they can never repay. Rosalie certainly couldn’t. She was taken by the traders to a yellow painted house in Lagos and handed over to a `big man’ and his even bigger wife.
She was made to sleep on the floor beside their bed and they were determined to extract every ounce of labour from their investment. They would literally have worked her to death if she hadn’t run away. Most don’t, of course. They are children in strange lands, without rights or friends, with only their terrors for company.
YOU could see in Eric’s eyes the effect just a few days of captivity can have on a child. They were as unseeing as one of the voodoo zombies his parents worship. It will take a long time to draw him out of himself again. It may take forever.
The government of this former French colony, which for five centuries has been a byword for savagery, has at last been persuaded to recognise the social and moral havoc wrought by this evil trade.
After years of official indifference, it is setting up committees of village elders to warn the gullible of the dangers awaiting their children if they are greedy or stupid enough to hand them over to strangers.
It is a small beginning but at least it is a beginning. Even Rosalie’s mother claims to have grasped the message. I want to believe her. I want to remember the smile that broke on Rosalie’s face when she said how happy she was to be home again. But this is the old Slave Coast and it is going to take more than simple belief to end this modern traffic in human souls.
