Africa’s World of Forced Labor, in a Six-Year-Old’s Eyes, by Sharon LaFraniere, for the New York Times. (Be sure to watch the narrated slide show.)
Children, forced into slavery. Beaten, sometimes killed. It’s nominally illegal, but it’s illegal to drive over the speed limit here–everyone still does it.
KETE KRACHI, Ghana
— Just before 5 a.m., with the sky still dark over Lake Volta, Mark
Kwadwo was rousted from his spot on the damp dirt floor. It was time
for work.Mark Kwadwo, 6, in the small dark room, where he sleeps on the dirt
floor and rises before dawn to work on Lake Volta, a two-day trek from
his family home. “I don’t like it here,” he whispered to a visitor, out
of earshot of his employer.Poverty forced Efua Mansah to sell her son, Kwabena, when he was 7. “It
was hunger, to get a little money,” she said at home in Aboadzi.Indentured children as young as 5 and 6 sustain the fishing trade in Kete Krachi, without schools or basic necessities.
Shivering in the predawn
chill, he helped paddle a canoe a mile out from shore. For five more
hours, as his coworkers yanked up a fishing net, inch by inch, Mark
bailed water to keep the canoe from swamping.He last ate the
day before. His broken wooden paddle was so heavy he could barely lift
it. But he raptly followed each command from Kwadwo Takyi, the
powerfully built 31-year-old in the back of the canoe who freely deals
out beatings.“I don’t like it here,” he whispered, out of Mr. Takyi’s earshot.
Mark
Kwadwo is 6 years old. About 30 pounds, dressed in a pair of blue and
red underpants and a Little Mermaid T-shirt, he looks more like an
oversized toddler than a boat hand. He is too little to understand why
he has wound up in this fishing village, a two-day trek from his home.But
the three older boys who work with him know why. Like Mark, they are
indentured servants, leased by their parents to Mr. Takyi for as little
as $20 a year.Until their servitude ends in three or four
years, they are as trapped as the fish in their nets, forced to work up
to 14 hours a day, seven days a week, in a trade that even adult
fishermen here call punishing and, at times, dangerous.Mr.
Takyi’s boys — conscripts in a miniature labor camp, deprived of
schooling, basic necessities and freedom — are part of a vast traffic
in children that supports West and Central African fisheries, quarries,
cocoa and rice plantations and street markets. The girls are domestic
servants, bread bakers, prostitutes. The boys are field workers, cart
pushers, scavengers in abandoned gem and gold mines.By no means
is the child trafficking trade uniquely African. Children are forced to
race camels in the Middle East, weave carpets in India and fill
brothels all over the developing world.The International Labor Organization, a United Nations
agency, estimates that 1.2 million are sold into servitude every year
in an illicit trade that generates as much as $10 billion annually.. . .
Kofi, 10, said his mother had told him his earnings would feed their
family. But he suspects another motive. “They didn’t like me,” he said
softly.
Read the whole thing. Parent’s often sell their children because they cannot afford to feed their families. Or sometimes they believe their children will be given educations–they won’t–and that they will be able to live better lives because of it–again, they won’t.
Life isn’t supposed to be like that.
Is it wrong for me to be worked up about things that are so inconsequential? Gay marriage; Sam Alito; the dishonesty and corruption of the Bush Administration. Daily Kos wants us to care about the differences between some idiot Democrat and some idiot Republican in Pennsylvania, and we will, even though we all know they’re basically the same person, and the election of one over the other will have a negligible effect on the real lives of real human beings.
Dick Cheney. Hillary Clinton. John McCain, Condi Rice, Lincoln Chaffee and Joe Biden–who are these people, and why should we care? They’re rich (see also John Kerry), and the biggest difference we see between them is that McCain will probably support slightly lower taxes than Chaffee. George W. inherited the presidency from George H.W. Okay, so our government is incompetent, and harbors some anti-democratic tendencies. Is it really a big deal that Secretary Rice referred to some man’s boyfriend’s mother as his "mother-in-law?" That Republicans will use "marriage is between a man and a woman" rhetoric to try to win the election, and then promptly return to taking advice from their gay staffers? That Hillary Clinton is sitting on the fence about the Iraq War, but promises not to be as incompetent as President Bush? Isn’t this all kind of like where for Derek Jeter and the New York Yankees, winning (or not winning, as it were) the World Series is the biggest deal in the world, but really, it doesn’t matter, it’s just not that important?
Accidental Blogger 
3 responses to “Child Slavery in Africa (Joe)”
Joe,
So you feel heartily ashamed of the human race, that they would suffer such things to happen to young children like Mark. Perhaps, it’s time to renounce the world like Gautama Siddhartha and go out to search for the meaning behind all this suffering.
I usually spend some time ruminating over the injustice of it all, and then get caught by the glitz and glitter of the next hot story in the news cycle. The feeling of compassion and horror fades away and I come up with facile excuses not to remember.
Stories like this always act as a kind of double edged sword, engendering compassion as well as a feeling of “I’m so glad not to be in that situation”.Can we hope that Mark’s future wil be any better because it was chronicled ? Can we hope that Mr.Takyi will have a change of heart and release the children from the same fate that he himself once suffered? Can we hope that Kwabena’s mother’s tears will turn into ones of joy, rather than sorrow? Maybe it will happen. But what concrete steps can we take here to make such things happen, beyond just opening our purse strings and sending it out to worthy causes in the hopes that they will make this practice of enslaving the young and the helpless go away? I don’t really know the answer. All I know, is that by a fortunate accident of birth and circumstance, I am not that teary-eyed desperate woman weeping over having sell her child into this hellhole of bondage.
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That’s a good way of putting it, Sujatha. As for concrete steps we can take to help, that’s really the big problem, isn’t it? If they exist, they’re not apparent to me. Certainly this type of thing explains why Madonna would be adopting a child from Africa instead of a child from Oakland or Baltimore (beyond the fact that adopting third-world babies has become fashionable for celebrities).
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Joe:
The ugly truth is that we don’t care about children. Just as we don’t care about animals. Sure, we love and care for our own children and pets. But at a global level, they, the children are far lower on the totem pole than adult needs. Children’s issues are wonderful campaign slogans but in reality no one really gives a damn. Otherwise why did we wage an immoral war on a nation who had done us no harm by manufacturing spurious excuses when Darfur and Congo were raging? And now there are numerous orphans and sick children in Iraq where there were relatively few before. Ask the politicians and American adults who are so scared for their own security about that. You will see them shrug and mutter “collateral damage.”
As the article notes, it is not just Africa but also India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Phillippines and Latin America where the plight of poor children is heartbreaking. Child labor (some of it indentured), prostitution, sickness and death are rampant. Thailand and Cambodia are the destinations for pedophiles of Europe and America. Brothels in the big cities of India are staffed by girls from poor families in Nepal -usually the oldest girl sold off to feed the parents and younger siblings. Child soldiers are fighting wars in Congo. Of course the surest way to secure children’s safety and happiness is to empower the adults. But that is a long term solution. In the meanwhile children pay the price for the cruel and callous exploitation by adults.
Madonna and Angelina Jolie’s adoption of children from third world countries has been criticized by many well meaning people as publicity stunts which will have a harmful cultural effect on the children. Perhaps. But I don’t care. A full belly and a safe home supercede all questions about ego, image and culture.
What can we do except open our purse strings? I don’t really know. But at least let us do that. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have done so at a stupendous level of generosity. My purse is much smaller. But for many, many years I have divided my charitable giving solely between children’s and animal charities here and abroad. I also give to Doctors Without Borders who do heroic work in places where governments don’t dare or care to step in.
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