Word: benin
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Juliette Zinwue still remembers her excitement when the men came to her village in southern Benin, West Africa, three years ago. "They said they would take me to work in Abidjan, and they paid my parents," she says, angelic-looking in her slightly tattered, short cotton dress, which is black with bold pink and red flowers. "There were a lot of children going. I wanted to go with them. We came to Abidjan in a car. I was excited to be going somewhere in a car." But the adventure soon became a nightmare. Put to work in the home...
...year are trafficked in West and Central Africa. Girls are affected worst; most end up as domestic workers or prostitutes. Boys are forced to work on coffee or cocoa plantations or as fishermen. The problem hit the news over the past fortnight when a Nigerian-registered boat that Benin authorities and UNICEF said was carrying as many as 200 slave children was turned away from Gabon and Cameroon. When it arrived back in Benin a few days later, only 43 children and teenagers were onboard, some with their parents. "We don't have any notion of what really happened," says...
...child labor in the world: 41% of 5-to-14-year-olds work. Many kids simply help on the family farm or look after younger siblings. But some are bought or taken from their parents and forced to work. Most child slaves come from the poorest countries, such as Benin, Burkina Faso or Mali, where up to 70% of the people live on less than $1 a day. "These people are in areas where there are no options for children, no school, no jobs," says Beth Herzfeld, spokeswoman for Anti-Slavery International, a London-based advocacy group. "They...
...Chatwin, of two years ago, was as sleek and elliptical and unorthodox as its subject, and gave us the man as he looked from across an editor's desk. Shakespeare, a stylish novelist with a gift for exotic locales (in the Acknowledgments he cites sources in 22 countries, from Benin to Nepal), provides every other face. The figure who emerges was a deeply solitary soul, hiding behind his exaggerated performances but genuinely driven by a vision, and elusive, perhaps, even to himself. The hope now rises that the legend can rest in peace...
...slow, fragile, difficult changes that are giving the continent a second chance. But the description fits. Out of sight of our narrow focus on disaster, another Africa is rising, an Africa that works: the Africa of Mozambique and Mali and Eritrea and Ghana, of South Africa and Uganda, Benin and Botswana, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Tanzania...