Generations continue to be linked by the cruelty, misery and trauma of slavery, writes ROBYN DIXONin Kpone, Ghana
REBECCA AGWU told her five-year-old son John not to cry when she sent him away to live with relatives four years ago. Mary Mootey also sent away Evans, telling him he was going off to school. The two boys, now nine, 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 (30) was a child herself when her mother sent her away to live with an aunt. “I cried,” she 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.” When Evans’s mother was eight, she was sent by her father to her uncle, a fisherman on Lake Volta, where she was forced to work from 3am 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 labour. They are given minimal food and clothing, deprived of schooling and medical care and 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 was one of the departure points for the 18th- and 19th-century slave trade to the Americas, and now draws thousands of black American visitors seeking their roots each year. “May humanity never again perpetrate such inhumanity against humanity,” reads a plaque.
But thousands of Ghanaian children are in unpaid servitude, having been sold for $30-$50. Girls often are forced to work as domestic labourers, carting water, fetching wood, sweeping, cleaning, farming, washing, cooking and, in fishing families, cutting up and smoking fish. Often, they are sexually abused.
Boys are usually 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 labour and beatings are as bitter and sharp as if they 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 master’s 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. Mary Mootey’s hands are scarred from the spines of the fish she had to gut. She worked nine years and was raped several times before she managed to escape, she said.
When her brother, a Lake Volta fisherman who had been a child slave himself, offered to send Evans to school, she says, she trusted him. “I was not working and I had a lot of children. I had no option,” said Mootey. “I never thought he’d use him on the lake.”
Evans felt betrayed when he was forced to go live with his uncle. “My mother told me I was going to attend school but when I got there, there was no school, so I thought she’d deceived me.” While working on the lake, the storms were terrifying. He saw three boys drown, he says.
“Sometimes when we were tired and hungry, we’d lie in the canoe and our master would come and beat us.”
He can’t understand why his “master” – who suffered the same torment and was his own uncle – put him through it too.
“He wasn’t educated, so he didn’t want me to be educated. I can’t understand the reason he did that.”
Isaac Saki was five when his mother sold him and his brother to a stranger. He worked on the fishing boats for two years, saw 16 boys drown, and often dreamed of his own watery death. After two years, the brothers were rescued and sent home. A month later his mother sold them to another man, Philip. “I thought my mother didn’t love me, because if she loved me, she wouldn’t send me away for money,” says Saki.
“Philip was worse. He used to beat us nearly every day.” After his older brother escaped, “That was the worst beating I ever had.”
Rescued by George Achibra, Saki (10) now lives with about 20 children in a refuge outside Accra, run by the City of Refuge Ministries, a US-based church. He is also going to school.
Cases like his have fuelled debate on whether rescued slave children are better off with their mothers or in orphanages and refuges. Gideon Degbe (12) who also lives in the refuge, remembers the day his mother sold him and his brother Geshon, then three, to a fisherman. She walked away without looking back. “I loved her when I was with her. But since she sent me to that man, I never loved her again,” said Gideon, who has scars on his head from where his master hit him with a paddle. “I’d never go back to her.”
Some organisations, such as the International Organisation for Migration, focus on reuniting children with their parents and supporting education.
John and Evans were rescued and returned to their mothers and both are now at school. It was only after Evans was rescued that Mootey discovered he hadn’t been going to school, but had been working on the lake.
“He cried when he came back,” said Mootey. “I also cried because my son had suffered the same pain I went through. That’s what hurt me most.” To break the chain, she says, one generation must be freed and get an education. “I believe my son will be the one.”