Bitter Chocolate (20 page)

Macko tells me he eventually learned that the farmers had deals with an elaborate network of traffickers, and he began to understand that the real villains in the story were not the farmers but the crime rings who brought the children to the farms. The boys may have left their family farms voluntarily and even joined up
with the smuggler of their own volition. “They were just kids who needed money for their families,” says Macko. They didn't bargain for the kind of exploitation they experienced. He believes many of the cocoa farmers were also caught in an unbearable squeeze. Though some of the farmers were surely taking advantage of the desperation of the poor, most of those who were buying the children had been driven to do so by their dire economic straits. Preying on the hopelessness and needs of both groups, the middlemen were the ones making the profits.

These “job brokers,” as they called themselves to the authorities, took advantage of a system of trust that had existed among Malians for generations. Many of the farmers may have genuinely believed (or wanted to believe) that they had a fair deal and that the boys were to be paid by the brokers. And certainly not all the farmers abused their workers to the degree that the vicious Le Gros did. But the sale of these children and their inability to leave the farm until they had recovered the fee paid to the brokers amounted to conscripted labour, no different than the notorious coolie system of another century.

By the time Macko was repatriating children, the system of child trafficking in the region was well established and actually known to international agencies. In a 1998 report, UNICEF describes in exact detail how the transactions are worked out. “Recruiters,” as the United Nations calls them, seek out children at the bus station and on the busy roads leading out of Sikasso, gathering as many as possible, often using minibuses to transport them to Côte d'Ivoire. The recruiters prefer to perform their dirty work on market days, when traffic is dense and no one asks too many questions at the border.

In what the report calls the “arrive and pay system,” the recruiter and the transporter split a fee of about 50,000 West African francs for each child while the farmer openly commits to pay the child 80,000 for his labour, hence making the system quasi-legal. But the child must first of all reimburse the recruiters'
commission and then he's charged a daily fee for room and board. Most often, there's nothing left at the end of the year to pay the child, after all the hidden costs are cut from his wages.

UNICEF and others knew of the system for years, but had not been able to stop it. Local authorities were rarely interested in getting involved, with the bold exception of Macko. He pursued these middlemen tirelessly, harassing authorities on both sides of the border to investigate the networks. He learned even more about the elaborate trafficking operations: a Malian member of the team would recruit the children while Ivorians with the right papers would take the boys over the border at night and install them in safe houses, first in Korhogo and then further south in Bouaké—right under the consul general's nose.

What was most interesting for Macko about the smuggling rings was the women who were involved. In fact, they were probably the ones who initiated the organizations in the first place. Malian women often went to Côte d'Ivoire to buy goods that were not available in their own markets. They would transport their wares, mostly food but also some textiles, back to their shops and stalls over the border. But the vehicles they used, rented cars or minivans, travelled empty on the trip to Côte d'Ivoire. Mali has nothing of interest to sell to Côte d'Ivoire—except cheap labour. The women saw a chance to make some extra cash: They would gather up children along the route. There never seemed to be a shortage. Border guards weren't suspicious; it appeared to be normal traffic, young boys travelling with mothers and aunties, and if questions were asked, everyone understood that a little baksheesh—a small bribe—would see them through. In Korhogo, the Malian women found houses where they could warehouse the boys (and some girls, who would be sold in the larger cities as domestics and prostitutes, as well as cocoa workers) until the traffickers came to get them. The business started informally, but blossomed into a full-scale enterprise supplying workers not just for coffee but also cotton. New “specializations”
developed in the world of crime. Middlemen began to transport the children in larger numbers, while the women specialized in temporary lodgings.

As he learned more, Macko became more and more aggressive in his pursuit of the people smugglers. And they became more devious. They operated at night, and moved the children in smaller groups, sometimes using motorbikes and transporting children a few at a time through the backwoods. Macko initiated many arrests of smugglers, and a few high-profile cases were actually prosecuted by Ivorian courts.

Aly Diabate and Madou Traoré finally made their way back to Sirkasso, with Macko's help. They had earned no money and had even lost the bicycle Traoré had taken from his father for their adventure; they were ecstatic when Macko gave them money to buy another one. Even more rewarding, they saw Le Gros, whose real name they learned is Lenikpo Yeo, taken away in chains by the police. The farmer was charged with assault and was convicted, but he spent less than a month in jail. The witnesses who could have testified against Le Gros—all children—were not around. They had gone back to Mali.

For three years, from 1997 to early 2000, Abdoulaye Macko continued his mission to locate and liberate children who had straggled into bondage. NGOs set up safe havens for those who returned. But the circle of concern was limited in scope. Authorities with more clout than Macko were reluctant to acknowledge the extent of the problem he was helping to expose and Malian authorities in Bamako were almost as uncomfortable about the situation as the Ivorians were. Almost all of Mali's trade and commerce came from its association with Côte d'Ivoire. The money sent home to Mali by immigrants who had gone to work in Ivorian cocoa was substantial. Mali didn't want to disturb a
mutually beneficial arrangement, but it was becoming difficult to ignore the dark side of the deal.

In a 2000 report on human rights in Côte d'Ivoire, the U.S. State Department estimated, with startling candour, “that 15,000 Malian children work on Ivorian cocoa and coffee plantations… Many are under 12 years of age, sold into indentured servitude for US$140 and work 12-hour days for $135 to $189 a year.” This was the strongest and most authoritative public statement yet. According to the State Department, during 2000 alone (and probably thanks to Macko), approximately 270 children were repatriated to Mali from Côte d'Ivoire. How many others were still working on the cocoa farms, not being paid for their efforts?

Under pressure from the United States and the United Nations, the governments of Mali and Côte d'Ivoire signed an accord called the Bouaké Agreement, in which Côte d'Ivoire grudgingly agreed to be more vigilant in watching the border and to help repatriate the remaining children on its cocoa farms. But Ivorian officials were reluctant to concede that the problem was as widespread as the reports suggested and argued that child trafficking, if it existed at all, was the work of foreigners, specifically, Malians and Burkinabès. Ivorians, the government claimed, were not involved. Declaring the problem under control, the governments of Mali and Côte d'Ivoire moved on to silence their critics and prevent any further aggravation. Abdoulaye Macko was removed from his post and ordered to return to Mali but he wouldn't stop campaigning on behalf of the children. Soon afterwards, he lost his job. “The economy of Mali depends on Côte d'Ivoire for its survival,” Macko explained to me. “Côte d'Ivoire has us by the throat. And I was making too much trouble.”

Brian Woods and Kate Blewett are self-described “advocacy” journalists, and they unapologetically claim that their ambition
is to change the world through their TV documentary reporting. In the late 1990s, Blewett and Woods teamed up with the American activist Kevin Bales, head of Free the Slaves in the United States, a sister organization to Anti-Slavery International in Great Britain. Their objective was to make a film that would expose abusive child labour in three sectors: the rug-making industry in India; the domestic workers employed by the diplomatic missions of the United Nations in New York City; and the cotton industry in West Africa. The third part of the assignment changed after the film crew arrived in Côte d'Ivoire in 2000 and found themselves in the midst of cocoa season and a swirl of NGO reports on the existence of child trafficking for cocoa farms.

The film they produced,
Slavery: A Global Investigation
, was sensational in all respects. “We literally walked onto plantations and found slave after slave after slave,” Blewett explained in an interview. They encountered teenagers and boys who told them they had not been paid even after a year's work. The young people described beatings, starvation diets and foul living conditions, and they revealed their lacerated backsides. In the most controversial and effective moment of the documentary, a young cocoa worker tells the interviewer, “When people eat chocolate, they are eating my flesh.” To make sure the viewer hasn't missed the point, there is the background sound effect of a whip cracking.

One of the people they interviewed for the film, Diabe Demeble, president of the Malian Association of Daloa, a major city in western Côte d'Ivoire in the heart of cocoa land, made the controversial (though not provable) statement that ninety per cent of the cocoa farms probably used bonded child labour or slaves.

The filmmakers also talked to farmers who readily admitted that they had paid money for the boys but saw nothing wrong with what they regarded as a business arrangement. They presumed that a deal had been struck between the “job broker” and
children. The wounds on the boys' bodies, said the farmers, were the results of fighting among themselves. As for the locked bunkhouses—well, that was necessary only to protect the boys from outside dangers.

While the original plan had been to uncover the indentured servitude of children in the cotton industry, the documentary's cocoa farm revelations likely had far more impact when the film was presented to the British public on Channel 4 in September 2000. In the apathetic, often cynical court of public opinion, it's difficult to move people with stories of tragedy from Africa anymore. Famine; AIDS; child soldiers trained to maim, mutilate and kill—all combine to numb the sensibilities of comfortable television viewers. But children being exploited and abused for
chocolate
, enslaved to produce the primary ingredient of a luxury for children of the developed world—the story packed a punch even the filmmakers could not have predicted.

The public was stirred. The British media covered the story of the film and its findings extensively. Outraged viewers and readers inundated the British chocolate industry with complaints and a threat of a boycott. The United Kingdom Biscuit, Cake, Chocolate and Confectionery Alliance (BCCCA), for its part, released a careful statement: “We do not believe that the farms visited by the programme are in the least representative of cocoa farming in Côte d'Ivoire although the claims cannot be ignored.” Ivorian government officials dismissed the documentary as rubbish.