Bitter Chocolate

by Carol Off

  The tribes of what is now called Mali have a long, even ancient, history of itinerant labour, and stories of migration are embedded in their history and their mythology. At the end of each domestic harvest period, after new seed is planted on their own farms, it’s traditionally time to leave home and look for work elsewhere for a period of a few months. Malians often call the workers “sequoias,” referring to a migrant bird that heads south at the same time. It’s so common for people to move around looking for work that most families are not surprised when even the youngest declare they are leaving in order to make some money. People presume that other Malians will keep an eye on them. It’s the Malian way to look after one other, whether they are travelling to the next village or a neighbouring country or, in modern times, seeking new lives in Europe or North America. Children and teenagers have, for ages, commuted safely within this custom-sanctioned system, often watched by uncles, aunts and cousins of their extended families

  But Macko heard about child labour that didn’t fit this traditional pattern. It certainly had similarities, but these were stories of boys, some as young as nine, who were working on farms where they had no relatives. This information alone was enough to trigger alarm bells for a Malian. Macko also heard they weren’t being paid. The witnesses, Malian men employed as transporters for the cocoa beans, came to tell the diplomat they were witnessing situations in which very young boys worked at gunpoint. It was difficult to obtain details—they weren’t encouraged to pry into what seemed to be a clandestine system. But the pisteurs managed to talk to some of the young people and learned details of their plight.

  The farmers, or their supervisors, were working the young people almost to death. The boys had little to eat, slept in bunkhouses that were locked during the night, and were frequently beaten. They had horrible sores on their backs and shoulders, some as a result of carrying the heavy bags of cocoa, but some likely the effects of physical abuse.

  There was also evidence of more sinister activity. The pisteurs were convinced that the farmers were paying organized groups of smugglers to deliver the children to their cocoa groves, and they told Macko that the Côte d’Ivoire police were being bribed to look the other way. The child traffickers worked in teams: a Malian man along with one from Côte d’Ivoire, and often a third from Burkina Faso, a country that was also a source of child workers.

  Macko could have ignored what he heard, or passed on the information to the authorities and washed his hands of the whole affair. After all, it was probably only a small number of boys. Malians are survivors. Eventually, they’d solve this on their own. And most of the complaints were likely just exaggerations. Who would dare use slave children in the 1990s? Instead, Macko became deeply preoccupied with what he heard and, in time, obsessed with rescuing the boys.

  As a diplomat, his own activities were circumscribed, so he commissioned Malians in the region to investigate the allegations and eventually he had a network of spies that included pisteurs, shepherds, sharecroppers and farmers, some Malian, others Burkinabè. From his network, Macko learned that many people were aware of what was going on; some of his informants had even seen the abuse first-hand. As the investigation deepened, more and more people came forward with distressing stories. Macko was convinced there was a substantial contingent of child labourers, all working under horrendous conditions.

  He invented reasons to visit cocoa farmers and, while among them, made casual inquiries about the itinerant Malian workers. How were they performing? Were they well? All normal concerns of their government’s representative. Some of the farmers told the consul general that the child workers on their farms were members of their own families, or that they were relatives. It was plausible, since children of extended families in agricultural communities frequently work alongside the adults. Then there were farmers who admitted openly that they had paid money for the children—and what of it? The farmer would compensate whoever delivered the labour force. He’d get his money back through their labour. He’d pay them wages once those original costs were recovered—if there was enough money to go around after the harvest and the systemic manipulations of cocoa traders. But Macko knew that, without family members looking after their interests, the children were at the mercy of the farmers. Given what he knew of human nature and the cocoa business, it was highly probable that few of the young workers, if any, were being paid at all.

  Macko asked if he could visit with the children. When permission was denied, he invoked diplomatic privilege and asked the Côte d’Ivoire police for an escort. At first, the authorities were reluctant. Macko suspected that many of the cops were on the take, but after a few unannounced visits to the farms, even the police were seeing the sordid picture. Sometimes the children ran away when they saw the police arriving. They’d been warned in advance that the police might show up to arrest them and that they should flee to avoid the terrors of detention. Eventually word spread among the children that there was a brave Malian official who was trying to help them. Gradually, the children started talking.

  Many of the details of this story have been related to me by Macko, but they are more than confirmed by other accounts, including those of the police. At our meeting at the Grand Hotel, Macko pulled out a heavy sack from beside his chair. He had brought photo albums, all meticulously organized and labelled. It might have been a family memoir, but his folders contained documentary evidence of what he discovered on the farms.

  The photographs are startling. Page after page reveals groups of dusty, frightened children, without footwear, dressed in scanty clothing, unsmiling faces revealing poignant details that illustrate the story the former diplomat is telling. There are scores of boys in the pictures, ranging in age from about ten to eighteen; dozens of the photos show the shoulders and backsides of the youths with their open sores and cuts. It’s difficult to know which wounds were from beatings and which were from carrying the heavy sacks, but the sores were all untreated. Most of the boys had been on these farms for months or even years before Macko found them. His most depressing discovery was of a boy who was nearly dead. “I saw something hidden under a pile of leaves. At first I couldn’t believe it, but it was a child. He was sick, his pants were covered in his excrement, and they had left him out in the field to die.”

  Macko says he liberated only a portion of the young workers, and he believes there were many more he was unable to reach, probably there to this day. But the ones he did reach are home now. Their harrowing stories are seared into their memories, and his.

  Malick Doumbia tells me he was fourteen years old when he decided he would take control of his own destiny. The cotton and corn were planted, and the rains were yet to begin. But the village food supply was already depleted and there would be little to eat until the next harvest. The sub-Saharan climate had been changing for about a decade, and now, in the first months of the twenty-first century, environmental conditions were deteriorating rapidly. Even the more humid and verdant parts of southern Mali, where Malick was growing up, recorded some of the lowest rainfalls in memory.

  Malick was hungry. He wanted more in his life. He had seen other children from his region go away to work and come back later with money in their pockets and Malick was determined that he would do the same. One afternoon, without telling his parents, he simply walked away, heading to the main road that led to the market and hitching rides all the way to the teeming city of Sikasso.

  Sikasso is a major crossroads of the sub-Sahara. One way leads towards Guinea, Sierra Leone and the huge port cities of Monrovia, Freetown and Dakar on the Atlantic Ocean. In the other direction, towards the east, Burkina Faso is only ten kilometres away; southeast leads to the prosperous farms and industries of Ghana. Directly south of Sikasso is the road to Côte d’Ivoire, the African miracle—for decades regarded as El Dorado, the most prosperous and promising nation in West Africa.

  Malick loved Sikasso, bustling with noise, people, odours both familiar and foreign, multi-storey buildings, cars and mi
nivans going in every direction. The bus station kiosks were crammed with riches such as he had never seen: beautiful cloth sarongs; colourful shirts and pants; mangoes, bananas and oranges piled high on the heads of women hawking their wares; pens, pencils and books; newspapers covered in words he could not read; and delicious food he could not afford—delicate little fried donuts, cashew nuts, candies and bags of brightly coloured sugar water. Malick had no money, only the few clothes he was wearing, and he had no idea what to do next. Then a man from a car rental shop at the bus station approached him with an offer too tempting to refuse. Malick followed him.

  Travelling by night, they meandered by car through the back roads and pathways of southern Mali. Malick and other boys travelling in the same vehicle were told to stay very quiet until they arrived in Korhogo, a city in another country. This was the promised place Malick had heard about. This was Côte d’Ivoire.

  The tropical air became thick and humid; the vegetation around him dense and impenetrable. They had nothing to eat—in fact, Malick realized he had consumed almost nothing since he left home. Finally, a stranger came for him. Money changed hands between the man who had taken him from the bus station and the stranger. The transaction completed, Malick and another boy were told to leave with this individual. They had jobs now and would be paid. The bus station man told the boys they should work hard.

  For the next several years (he’s unclear how many), Malick slaved on a cocoa plantation. He had never seen a cocoa tree before, nor its strange green, yellow and red pods that sprout directly off the tree trunk. With a machete-like tool, hooked on the end, he lopped off the fruity gourds. He then hacked through the thick rind to expose the pulpy, pale seeds inside. He scooped them out and piled them on a rack to ferment and dry. This was the essence of chocolate destined for the pleasure of young boys and girls in another distant world.

  Malick had no idea what the beans were or why anybody wanted them. He only knew that, if his keeper wasn’t looking, he could scoop a handful of the slippery, raw bitter-tasting seeds with their mild-flavoured pulp from the pods right into his mouth and chew quickly. The beans and the juice refreshed him and gave him energy to complete the day’s work. He was never paid and rarely fed, living on a diet of green bananas and yams, which the boys would grill for themselves on a fire. At night, he was locked up with the others. The children and teenagers became ill; some of them died. After many months, Malick asked to be paid, and he was beaten. He never asked again.

  One day while clearing land in the forest, Malick saw his chance to flee. Côte d’Ivoire’s rainy season often produces violent storms—heavy clouds cover the sky, blocking out the sun almost completely. Malick and some other boys waited for their chance. They had heard about a man from Mali who might help them. He worked in something called a consulate, and it wasn’t far away—if they could only get there. As the storm turned the day almost as dark as night, the children ran for their lives, eventually making contact with Macko’s network. In time, they joined others liberated by the consul general, who transported them all back to Sikasso, in southern Mali. It took weeks for Macko to sort through all the names of the boys; some children could no longer remember where they were from. Some had been away from home for years, while others had joined the labour pool in more recent years. None of them had ever been paid for their work.

  Broken, sickly, confused and poor, Malick returned to his village years after he had left. He tells me his parents were glad to see him, but unhappy that he had come back with nothing, except diseases they would have to pay to treat. Malick learned that Macko had returned to Mali hundreds of children who had suffered his fate, but that an unknown number—possibly thousands—were still working on the plantations in Côte d’Ivoire.

  In the village of Sirkasso—about thirty kilometres of rough back roads from Sikasso—Aly Diabate and Madou Traoré were making plans for their futures when I went to find them in 2005. They are young men now, lean and muscular, but their families remember when they disappeared in the late 1990s and then returned years later, sad and broken.

  They explained to me their decision to go. Everyone had known about a boy from the village who had gone to Côte d’Ivoire to work on a cocoa farm and had returned with a bicycle. Diabate remembers that he and Traoré were extremely covetous. (The two learned only later, when they were home again after their ordeal, that the boy with the bike had gone to work for a relative who had guaranteed his safety.) Diabate and Traoré concluded that if they could get to Côte d’Ivoire, wherever it was, they would come back with money.

  Diabate and Traoré were fourteen and fifteen years old respectively when they left during the night. They commandeered Traoré’s father’s bicycle, believing he would forgive them when they returned with an even better machine, and peddled the stolen bike all the way to Sikasso. They had a few West African francs between them, but they quickly realized their stash wouldn’t last long. “In the city, you need money for everything,” says Diabate with a world-weary air. “In the city, you have to pay money to pee, and you pay a fine if you do it in the wrong place. In the countryside, you pee wherever you want.”

  A man the boys came to know only as Solo approached them in the bus station and asked where they were going. “‘I can’t hire you, but my older brother can get you jobs,’” Diabate recalls the man told the two boys. “He said we could make as much as 150,000 [West African francs—about US$140] in Côte d’Ivoire if we went with him.” It was a staggering sum of money for the boys, and they were more than interested. They opted to go with Solo, travelling by night to Korhogo, where they were installed in a stranger’s house that already had many children. The boys don’t remember who was in charge at the place, but the next day, Solo came back with another stranger.

  “He gave us to the man,” says Traoré sadly.

  “No!” Diabate corrects him sternly: “He sold us to the man.”

  The fact that the two young teenagers were sold is something Diabate and Traoré understand only in retrospect. At the time, they had no concept of what was normal or fair in the world outside their village of Sirkasso. Their only objective was to get jobs and make money. They were accustomed to grown-ups making decisions and had no real reason—yet—to suspect that these men were any different than others they had encountered in the course of their short lives. They followed their “owner” because they simply thought that this was how people got work.

  For two days they travelled on a bus with other boys and some girls before arriving at the farm. People called their new boss Le Gros (the Big Man), referring to his paunch, but the boys remember only his cruelty. Le Gros had paid 50,000 West African francs for the two of them, and he wanted his money back—in labour. The boys from Sirkasso met about twenty others in the same predicament and learned that no one was ever paid. They slept in a rectangle-shaped mud hut that initially had windows but when some boys found they could escape during the night, the windows were sealed shut. Diabate and Traoré remember eating mostly bananas, though they would gobble up the cocoa beans, as the others did, whenever they got the chance.

  Many months passed, and the boys forgot what the purpose had once been for this adventure. Le Gros’s own children went to school, while the slave boys rummaged in the garbage for clothes and footwear and ate what they could scrounge. Life became a struggle to exist, then hardened to despair. They gave up thinking of escape. Though they were under constant threat of beatings if they were caught trying to flee—and they had seen boys treated savagely—they were actually spooked by a belief that they were under a spell. The farm managers told the boys they were held in place by magic and they could not break the enchantment. When a boy was caught trying to leave, his tormentors would demand to know how he had learned the secret of the incantation. The psychological torture was almost as effective as the physical abuse.

  The boys suspect they would still be there—or more likely they would have died by now—if it hadn’t been for Abdoulaye Macko. Rumours of the
consul general’s investigation had spread over a large area of western Côte d’Ivoire, where the cocoa farms are concentrated. One of the boys managed to get word of their plight to Macko’s office in Bouaké, probably through one of the diplomat’s many spies. “Macko came with the police,” recalls Diabate. “The boss told us to run away, and we went and hid in the forest.” The boys had been convinced that if the police found them they would be punished. “But a week later, Macko came back alone,” says Diabate. “Kids were sick. We were really tired. He told us he was there to help us escape and not to hurt us.”

  The boys were so completely unaware of their own condition that they had no idea how they must have appeared to an outsider. “Macko cried when he saw us,” Traoré remembers.

  Macko tells me he eventually learned that the farmers had deals with an elaborate network of traffickers, and he began to understand that the real villains in the story were not the farmers but the crime rings who brought the children to the farms. The boys may have left their family farms voluntarily and even joined up with the smuggler of their own volition. “They were just kids who needed money for their families,” says Macko. They didn’t bargain for the kind of exploitation they experienced. He believes many of the cocoa farmers were also caught in an unbearable squeeze. Though some of the farmers were surely taking advantage of the desperation of the poor, most of those who were buying the children had been driven to do so by their dire economic straits. Preying on the hopelessness and needs of both groups, the middlemen were the ones making the profits.