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Africa's bitter cycle of child slavery
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.