Small Wars Permitting

by Christina Lamb

  I was at the embassy the moment it opened the next morning along with Justin Sutcliffe, the photographer with whom I had gone to Lagos. You can tell a lot about a country from its London embassy – the Russian you cannot get near; at the Nigerian anything is possible with a spot of ‘dash’; the Brazilians have great parties; while the first time I went to the Afghan embassy the door handle came off in my hand. The embassy of Côte d’Ivoire was grandly situated in Belgravia but the paint was peeling and there was an air of Gallic sullenness over all the staff.

  We did not of course say we wanted to report on child slaves but muttered something about the regional situation. No one was working in our office on the Tuesday as the day before had been a holiday, so I had written my own official letter forging the foreign editor’s signature and requesting an immediate visa.

  Mrs Tuaré, the visa officer, looked at us in a way that clearly said zut alors. It would, she said, take ‘a minimum of a week’ to issue a visa. ‘Anyway, first you need an invitation from someone in Côte d’Ivoire to visit,’ she said.

  ‘But I don’t know anyone there,’ I replied.

  ‘Doesn’t the Sunday Telegraph have an office in Abidjan?’ she asked in apparent astonishment.

  Well, no.

  We were at an impasse.

  After a series of increasingly desperate phone calls to anyone I could think of who might know someone in the Ivory Coast, I finally got through to an adviser at the Information Ministry. He agreed to send an invitation letter as long as my editor sent him an explanatory fax. There was still no one in the Sunday Telegraph office so I called my long-suffering husband who faxed the ministry from home pretending to be my editor. The adviser then faxed the promised invitation but that still didn’t satisfy Mrs Tuaré.

  ‘The letter is addressed to the Ambassador, not to me,’ she said triumphantly.

  At this point I lost patience. We were booked to fly first thing the next morning. I made it clear to Mrs Tuaré that we were never going to leave her office. Finally at 4.30 p.m., just before the embassy closed, she stamped the visa angrily into our passports.

  I rushed home to pack. Paulo had picked Lourenço up from nursery. ‘God knows what kind of mum he thinks I am,’ I wrote in my diary in between mashing carrot and chicken for his tea. ‘He says “bye bye” every time I walk into the room.’

  It was Wednesday evening when Justin and I flew into Abidjan. As usual in West Africa we had to fight our way through a swarming multitude wanting to change our money, carry our cases and find us taxis before we could go through the door into the steamy African night.

  I had arranged to meet a priest involved in rescuing child slaves but had not realised how rusty my French was. I was pretty sure I could still write an essay on Marie-Claude and Philippe going shopping, but discussions about child slavery were not on my O-level syllabus. After greeting him with a breezy ‘bonsoir’, I was reduced to asking, ‘Où sont les enfants du chocolat?’

  All was not lost. By a complete fluke we woke the next morning to find that a conference on child slavery was taking place at our hotel. Mostly this seemed to involve people selling things; I bought a painted wooden picture after the man said the money would be used to buy an oven for orphaned children.

  ‘Shopping the world?’ asked Justin, raising his eyebrows. We were interrupted by a helpful man called Ackebo Felix from Unicef. Along with a mass of information, he gave me the number of a Mr Drissa who helped repatriate chocolate slaves brought from Mali and was apparently the key contact.

  We did not manage to get through to Mr Drissa but I was anxious to be on the road so we found a car and an interpreter and set off north towards Daloa, in central Ivory Coast, where he was based. The wide highway which had so impressed us quickly petered out into mud.

  About four hours later, as darkness was falling, we suddenly found ourselves on another highway – eight lanes wide and lined with hundreds of streetlights, most of which weren’t working. The only traffic was us and two other cars. Looming ahead was something that looked like a giant white boiled egg suspended in the sky. We had reached Yamoussoukro, the country’s bizarre capital. What we could see was the dome of a vast basilica; there was also a golf course, a revolving restaurant and a massive palace complex surrounded by a moat of man-eating crocodiles.

  Kamara, our driver, had got carried away by the highway and when it turned back into mud hit a pothole at such speed that the front tyre exploded. He took so long trying to change it that Justin lost patience and did it himself.

  The burst tyre meant it was almost midnight by the time we got to Daloa. Hôtel Les Ambassadeurs was less grand than it sounds. My journal notes: ‘Everything is very brown and there are ants everywhere. The staff are sulky and the restaurant very firmly fermé. I turned on the shower and the thinnest trickle of brown water came out. I’d just soaped myself when it stopped altogether.’ It was at that point that my phone beeped. It was a message from the foreign desk. ‘Slave ship docked. Not hundred of kids but twenty-seven. Maybe not slaves at all.’

  I thought nothing more could go wrong but, the following morning, Mr Drissa was still not answering his phone. Somehow by the end of that day we needed to have found children in bondage on cocoa plantations and filed the story. I couldn’t quite imagine phoning Con and telling him I had gone all that way and not managed to find any. ‘Well, it’s only Friday,’ I said to Justin.

  At least there were fresh croissants for breakfast – there is some advantage to being colonised by the French. I had almost given up on the elusive Mr Drissa. Then just after nine, as we were setting off on our own, his phone unexpectedly answered. He told me he was several hours away from us on a plantation and suggested we met up on Monday.

  ‘You don’t quite understand…’ I replied.

  This is Wambi Bakayoko, who is 15. He is a chocolate slave.Last year he was sold to a plantation owner for £37.50 – what the average Briton spends on chocolate in just seven months

  Sunday Telegraph, 22 April 2001

  HOME FOR 15-year-old Wambi Bakayoko is a small mud-walled cell with no windows. His clothes – a Bayern Munich jersey, a faded blue T-shirt, a pair of yellow trousers, some ragged brown trousers – hang on a wooden beam above the straw pallet on which he sleeps. His only other possessions are half a bar of soap, a towel, an enamel dish and mug, and an almost empty tin of Nescafé.

  As with many African children, Wambi, one of a family of fourteen from Mali, has worked since he was 8 and did not have great expectations from life. He expected more than this, however – a year ago, Wambi was tricked into becoming a child slave.

  From 6 a.m. to sundown, he labours on a small cocoa plantation in Bediala in central Ivory Coast, hacking weeds with a machete or chopping down cocoa pods, with only a short break for a lunch of yam porridge.

  The plantation is more than two hours’ drive down a muddy track from the nearest hard road, followed by a mile-long walk through knife-edged grasses which slash at the skin. We are told we must stay quiet because if the owner sees us he may turn violent.

  There are more than a hundred children working in this patchwork of plantations but, dwarfed by the cocoa bushes, they are not visible at first. The landscape is stunning: the jungle is lush, the earth rich red, and the green leaves of the cocoa bushes glint in the afternoon sun.

  Wambi notices none of this. Pulling back the leaves of the cocoa bushes and disentangling their yellow pods is an endless task. He wears a green woollen hat to keep the swarms of insects from biting his head and the relentless humidity makes his limbs slow and heavy. His hands are swollen and calloused, like those of a labourer three times his age.

  Sold to the plantation owner for 37,500 local francs (£37.50) – the amount that the average person in Britain spends on chocolate in seven months – Wambi cannot run away because he has no money, speaks Malenki not the local French patois, and the owner has his identity papers.

  Known by campaigners as ‘chocolate slaves’, the US State
Department estimates there are 15,000 child slaves on plantations in Ivory Coast. The country is the world’s biggest cocoa grower, producing 48 per cent of the global supply and much of the cocoa that ends up in British chocolate. Aged as young as 8, most of the children come from Burkina Faso and Mali, countries so incredibly poor that they view neighbouring Ivory Coast as a wealthy nation.

  Their plight was highlighted last week by the search for a suspected child slave boat heading for Benin. Although the vessel was not carrying the 250 children initially reported to be aboard, around 30 unaccompanied children were taken ashore when it docked.

  The horrifying cycle into which the children are locked is particularly shocking in West Africa, a region which saw millions of men, women and children sent from the Slave Coast to the Americas to work on plantations between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  A map produced by the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) shows a complex web of arrows depicting child-trafficking routes in the region. Most of those used in slavery or bonded labour come from Mali, Benin, Burkina Faso and Togo; the main destinations are Ivory Coast and Nigeria (both relatively richer) as well as Ghana, which both sells and receives children. Girls as young as 8 are traded to become domestic servants – in Abidjan there is still a slave market – while the boys end up in mines, on plantations and in fishing boats.

  Some are lured by false promises, some are sold by parents too poor to feed them, others are kidnapped while playing in the streets. ‘The selling of people was a scandal hundreds of years ago,’ said Mike Dottridge, president of the UK-based organisation Anti-Slavery International. ‘That it’s happening today with children, and on an even greater scale, is shocking beyond belief.’

  Wambi’s story is typical. Born in a poor village near Bamako in southern Mali, he started making bricks at an age when European children would still be doing hand paintings in nursery. At 14, he and some friends travelled for a day by bus to the town of Sikasso to seek better pay. When a Malian man ‘in a smart suit with a nice car’ approached them with tales of fortunes to be made if they went with him to Ivory Coast, it seemed the answer to their dreams. Instead, it was the start of his current ordeal.

  ‘He lied to us,’ said Wambi. ‘We believed him because we had heard that Ivory Coast is so rich it has roads as wide as seas and a church the size of a city, and I thought I would make so much money that I could buy clothes for my parents and brothers and sisters and they would be so proud. We paid him 9,000 francs [£9] each so the border police let us through. Then he sold us.’

  Once across the border, the children were surprised to discover that Ivory Coast was also poor. (The figures mean little, but the average annual income there is about £350 a year, double the level in his poverty-stricken homeland.) After travelling for a day and a night, they were split up and Wambi was taken to the town of Daloa where he was handed over to another man, a local trafficker. His next stop was the plantation that is now his home-cum-prison.

  ‘I didn’t know what to think,’ he recalled. ‘I was in the middle of nowhere, couldn’t speak the language and was expected to do work I had never done before. The first day I cut my leg badly with the machete, it was hot in the fields and insects fell on my head, and my arms were aching so much I couldn’t sleep.’

  What initially sustained Wambi was the prospect of the £130 promised as wages for the year. But, at the end of the year, the owner explained that after docking the cost of food, medicine and the amount paid for him, there was nothing left, so he must work another year.

  While in some cases the children come from homes so poor that just receiving food and shelter on the plantations makes them better off, that is not the case for Wambi. ‘My life in Mali was much better than here. My father has ten cows and some land and we ate better. I miss Mali a lot.’

  Asked why he does not simply leave, he explained, ‘I can’t because then I won’t get my money and even if I did manage to escape I have no money to get back and, if I did, how could I face my family?’ In any case, there is little chance of him raising the £17 for the bus and bribes to get home. On his Fridays off, he sometimes manages to earn 50p for a day’s work on other plantations but he uses that to buy soap and coffee. ‘If I have any extra, I buy Pecto candies which we suck as medicine for coughs,’ he said.

  ‘Wambi’s experience is typical,’ said Ackebo Felix, an expert on child trafficking with Unicef in Abidjan. ‘The children are in a trap. After the first year, the farmer will say, “I have to recoup my expenses so I can’t pay you.” Then the second year he’ll say, “I got less for the crop than I expected, so you must wait another year”; the third he says, “My wife is ill so I have no money.”

  ‘So instead of coming here for a year and going home with maybe £200, the children end up here for five or six years and go back with nothing or stay because they don’t know anything else. If they try to flee they are caught and beaten to make them understand they are slaves.’

  The use of children has increased in recent years because of the collapse in world cocoa prices which last year hit a 27-year low of £570 a tonne, leaving many plantations in financial crisis. One owner explained: ‘Children are easier to discipline than adults. They wait and wait and wait and then, at a certain stage, they get fed up and escape and we get new ones.’

  Biarra Drissa, secretary of the Mali community in Daloa, who has helped twenty children escape back to Mali, is trying to get another twelve off a cotton plantation where they labour at gunpoint under the master’s son. Some sleep in fields and are left to forage for food.

  The Ivory Coast government has so far been what one Unicef official described as ‘in denial’ over the problem. To be fair it has had its own difficulties, after its first military coup, two army mutinies and a flawed election that led to a popular uprising in which up to 400 people died. Another problem for the authorities is that the plantations are usually small, inaccessible and difficult to regulate. However, last week, after the international outcry over the Benin slave ship, Laurent Gbagbo, the Ivorian President, promised to act.

  Campaigners emphasise that child slavery is not restricted to cocoa but also exists on coffee and cotton plantations and in domestic labour. Nor do they want the West’s chocolate consumers to boycott the product as this could lower prices further.

  Guiltily, I told Wambi that I spend more on chocolate a year than his promised annual wage. ‘That’s just too big for me to imagine,’ he said.

  I was starting to find stories like this harder to write. When I met children in dire situations, I imagined my own little boy in their place. I felt guilty about all his Baby Gap clothes and cupboards of toys. I wondered if Wambi had ever had a toy or anything new. Probably not. I’d given him all the money I had on me in the hope he could buy himself out, but I knew that wasn’t the answer.

  Another thing that had changed since becoming a mother was that I wanted to rush straight home after finishing stories. But back in Abidjan on Sunday we discovered that Air Afrique had gone on strike. No one knew when there would be a flight. At the airport we met the Arsenal player, Kanu, who was on his way back from the African Cup in Sierra Leone when his plane had engine failure and had to make an emergency landing. He too was stuck in Abidjan. With no fixers around he was looking lost and meekly boarded the courtesy bus to a hotel on a flyover with no air conditioning.

  At 6.30 a.m. on Monday morning I was woken by my hotel phone ringing. It was someone from the Ministry of Information whom I couldn’t understand. At 8 a.m. when I went down for breakfast there was a man waiting in reception. ‘We have seen your story,’ he said. ‘It is interesting but it is not correct. You must make an appointment to see the Minister of Family Affairs.’ He gave me two numbers which I duly phoned. Neither worked.

  I tried to think of a story to do while we waited for Air Afrique to restart operations. I wanted to go to Niger to meet the Tuareg, who I had heard were not enjoying being nomads any more, but the foreign editor was no
t keen. Then I remembered something the priest had told me about on our first evening.

  £5 for a slave girl with a nervous smile

  Sunday Telegraph, 29 April 2001

  FOR A MOMENT, I thought that I had stepped into one of those guilt-inspiring etchings in museums all over Africa of nineteenth-century European slave-traders buying up women and children. Only this time, I was the main character. Ranged in front of me, seated on wooden benches under the baking Ivory Coast sun, were row upon row of young African women for sale, eyes lit up at the sight of a white woman, all pleading to be the one I would choose.

  This was Abidjan’s marché de jeunes filles (Market of Young Girls) and for 5,000 Central African francs – about £5 – I could take one home as my very own servant.

  Aged between 14 and 30, the girls were dressed in their Sunday best, tight-waisted, large-bottomed suits in bold printed cotton, hair tweaked and plaited into elaborate arrangements, their eyes beseeching like abandoned puppies as they each stood up to be examined. Some giggled nervously. Others simply looked desperate.

  Overseeing their sale were four men, slick characters with gold medallions flashing under open-necked shirts, tight jeans, black-and-white brogues, fake gold watches, and leather-covered mobile telephones on their belts.

  The market is in the shadow of a highway in the northern suburb of Adjame, next to the affluent residential district of Cocody, where many of the girls may end up working. Each man has about fifteen girls on his books and claims to sell at least five a week. ‘You’re lucky, madam,’ said one of the men with a simpering smile. ‘You’re a white woman so they all long to go with you because they think you’ll treat them better.’