|
5 Pounds for a slave girl with a nervous smile
http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=003864436460684&rtmo=lvHzwAnt&atmo=rrrrr rrq&pg=/et/01/4/29/wlamb29.html At an Abidjan market in West Africa young girls and women are sold for a few thousand francs. Christina Lamb witnesses the 'marche de jeune filles' April 29, 2001 FOR a moment, I thought that I had stepped into one of those guilt-inspiring etchings in museums all over Africa, of 19th-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 marche de jeune 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 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 northerfwest suburb of Adjame, next to the affluent residential district of Cocody, home to the only hotel in Africa with an ice-rink (no longer working), and the area to which the men hope to sell the girls. Each man has about 15 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." That a white master or mistress would be preferable seemed a sickening irony. Over the years reporting from Africa, I have visited the slave forts on the Ghana coast and seen the desperate scratchings on the walls of the cells where thousands of men, women and children were jammed before being shipped to the Americas; the steamy jungle port of Calabar, one of the principal trading posts; and the large tree at Zanzibar where the slave market was held which inspired David Livingstone to fight against slavery. You get used to feeling shame. But, until going to this market last week, I think I had never appreciated just how humiliating it is for people to be on sale, and my stomach turned as the girls all tried to catch my eye or touch my hand. In theory, the women are not slaves. "We're agencies," insisted one of the traders. "You pay us to have them but, once you've taken them home, it's up to you if you pay them." How much would a decent wage be, I asked? "Obviously, you would want an experienced one," he replied. "She could do all your washing, cleaning, cooking and look after your baby. If you paid her £20 a month, she would be extremely happy." He claimed that he would not take a cut of the wages but anti-slavery campaigners, who would like to see the market closed down, insist that this is not true. "The traders make the girls believe they are their property and, even if you buy one, they are only on loan and must pay the traders to cover their costs," explained Desire Kuikui, from the Catholic Children's Fund. "There is little difference from slave-trading of old." In fact, the Ivorian authorities are so sensitive about the market amid the current international focus on child-slavery in West Africa, after the docking in Benin of a boat suspected to have a cargo of child slaves, that when my colleague Justin Sutcliffe started photographing the girls, we were arrested. Surrounded by shouting and drunken police, we were manhandled into a police car and held for five hours in the nearby 27th precinct police station, accused of being spies. Sutcliffe's film was confiscated and destroyed, apart from one that he had managed to hide, and we were interrogated by a series of officers who kept demanding: "What is the tenure of your mission?" Describing what had happened as "a serious incident", they harangued our poor, terrified interpreter for letting us go into "sensitive areas". It was an uncomfortable, if not particularly threatening, experience and, as we sweated it out in the oven-like police station with not even a warm Coca-Cola to quench our parched lips, it was hard to get the picture of all those women on the benches out of my head. Before our arrest, one of the traders had insisted that "the girls are free to leave here any time". That may be true but, according to Apolle, a girl with whom I had a snatched conversation, they have nowhere to go. Claiming to be 17, but looking more like 14, she said she had travelled several days to get to Abidjan from the east of the country. "I was told by a man that he would employ me in a big department store and train me, but when I got here he left me," she said. "Now I have no money to get home and know no one here. My only hope is some nice lady like you buys me." More women end up on display at the market every week, coming from all over the country as well as neighbouring Mali, to the city that styles itself as the Paris of West Africa. At first sight, particularly by night with the glittering lights of the high-rise buildings reflected in the lagoon, Abidjan does look affluent. But, during the past few years, it has become as riddled with unemployment and crime as any West African city and, in the heat of the day, the lagoon stinks. "This market is a function of the socio-political situation of the country," said the youngest of the traders. And perhaps more than anything that is a function of the megalomania of African leaders. Nowhere illustrates that more vividly than Yamoussoukro, the surreal capital of Ivory Coast, created by the late President Felix Houphouet Boigny out of his home village and renamed after his mother. This city in the middle of nowhere has eight-lane highways but no cars and motorway lights which long ago lost their bulbs. Oddest of all, though, is the world's tallest church - 170 metres high with 30-metre foundations. Built in just three years between 1986 and 1989, compared with more than a century for St Peter's in Rome - on which it is modelled - the Basilica de Notre Dame de la Paix cost £200 million and uses marble from Italy and Spain and stained-glass windows from France, as well as French-made lifts to whizz visitors to the top of the dome. It seats 18,000 people but, on a good Sunday, draws just 500 and has absolutely nothing to do with Africa. At the Abidjan slave market, I recalled the words of the church guide. "It is nice to have something stunning in our country," he said. "But maybe it would be nicer if we didn't have ugly things, too." =================================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT FROM
THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends ================================================================= |
