ET

Meanwhile, in west Africa girls are on sale - just £5 each (Filed: 09/09/2001)

Despite all the hypocrisy and demands for reparations spouted at the conference, the trade in slaves still flourishes on the continent, as Christina Lamb found in an Ivory Coast market

FOR only £5 - the cost of two tall cappuccinos and a life-long guilty conscience - I could have bought my own slave. I would have had someone to do my washing, cleaning, ironing and look after a demanding two-year-old.

Le Marche de Jeunes Filles (the Market of Young Girls), on a dusty piece of land under a busy fly-over in Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast, is a salutary place. There was something indefinably appalling about those 30 or so girls ranged on wooden benches under the hot sun, dressed in their gaudy Sunday best, preening ironed and plaited hair, beseeching me to buy them.

There was no sign saying "People for Sale". The tragedy was in their faces. Had anyone sketched the scene, it would have been an exact 21st century representation of engravings from two or three centuries ago of white slave-traders examining the wares. It would also have made a complete mockery of African attempts at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban to demand apologies and reparations for the transatlantic slave trade from Britain and other nations.

For, here in the 21st century, Africans are still trading their own people. At the Abidjan market, Ivorian traders in white trousers sit in a small office, shirts open to reveal thick yellow gold chains, fake Rolexes on thick wrists and mobile phones at the ready for new deliveries.

At the sight of a prospective customer, they emerge, standing the girls up and emphasising their good points - "clean, from a good family, God-fearing". If I had wanted to poke one of the girls, I have no doubt they would have agreed. "Take this one, Auntie," wheedled a particularly greasy character, adding: "You will not regret it".

The sale price may be low but the turnover is high. The girls come from rural areas, lured by traders promising them work in shops in the city. Friends and family arrange their hair and help them make smart clothes. Arriving in the capital to find the jobs non-existent, they have little option but to stay with the trader to be sold as domestic servants.

If I decided to pay a salary, the trader would get a percentage and the girl would use the rest to pay off money owed for transport and shelter - all at exorbitant rates. This may be a modern-day variant on the raiding parties of old, but those demanding apologies for the past cannot even claim that slavery was a concept learnt from the white man.

When the Portuguese - the first Europeans to arrive in Africa - travelled down the Senegal river south of Mauritania in 1444, they reported a flourishing sale of slaves to the Moors at the exchange rate of nine to 12 per horse. It was common practice for African kings to take captives from other tribes and use them as slaves or to sell them in exchange for goods and arms.

This, of course, is no justification for the European role in shipping millions of people to work as plantation slaves in the Americas. Anyone who has visited the slave-forts along the Ghanaian coast - and seen the desperate scratchings on the dungeon walls where thousands were held before being shipped - cannot fail to be horrified. Rather than arguing who was to blame, however, it would surely make more sense to devote the time and energy - and considerable money involved in holding such a conference - to try to stamp out what is happening now.

The week before visiting the Abidjan market, I interviewed child slaves on up-country cocoa plantations where children as young as nine work for pitiful wages that they never receive because the patron deducts food and transport. Most were from neighbouring Mali, one of the world's poorest countries.

Some had been sold by their parents, unable to feed them, while others had been tricked by Malinese traders who turn up in smart cars full of promises of a better life.

Modern-day slavery is not restricted to west Africa. One of the worst offenders is Sudan, where paramilitaries and government forces alike raid and trade for slaves. In Mozambique, many families remain separated because their children were captured and used as slaves by guerrillas during the long civil war.

It is paradoxical that one of the loudest voices behind the demands for apologies was that of Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe is treating his people like chattels in his cynical mission to stay in power. Thousands have been tortured, hundreds killed, and he has brought farming to such a standstill that what was once a rich country is facing famine. A senior government official told a British diplomat last month: "You rebuilt us before and you will do it again."

-- Anonymous, September 08, 2001