Africa's bitter cycle of child slavery

KPONE, GHANA — Rebecca Agwu told her 5-year-old son, John, not to cry when she sent him away to live with relatives four years ago. Mary Mootey sent away her 4-year-old son, Evans, telling him he was going off to school. The two boys, now 9, 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 Agwu was a child herself when her mother sent her away to live with an aunt.

"I cried," Agwu, 30, 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."

Evans' mother, when she was 8, was sent by her father to her uncle, a fisherman on Lake Volta, where she was forced to work from 3 a.m. 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 labor. They are given minimal food and clothing, are deprived of schooling and medical care and are 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, one of the departure points for the 18th and 19th century slave trade to the Americas, each year draws thousands of African American visitors seeking their roots.

Elmina's dank, black dungeons lead to the "room of no return," with its moldy green walls and oppressive atmosphere. "May humanity never again perpetrate such inhumanity against humanity," reads a plaque at the fortress.

'I was afraid they would kill me'

But today, thousands of Ghanaian children are in unpaid servitude, having been sold for $30 to $50, nongovernmental groups say. Girls are often forced to work as domestic laborers, carting water, fetching wood, sweeping, cleaning, farming, washing, cooking, and in fishing families, cutting up fish and smoking it. They are often sexually abused.

Boys are mostly 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.