Bitter Chocolate (24 page)

In the article, Finkel describes Male's life, writing as though he was speaking from the boy's own point of view. Using this emotive technique, Finkel raises doubt as to whether Male was a slave or just another victim of conventional and systemic poverty. The story strongly suggests that Male had been manipulated by NGOs such as Save the Children Canada, that, according to Finkel, used the Blewett-Woods documentary to indoctrinate the children while they were at the Horon So refuge. The boys were persuaded that they were enslaved against their will, suggests Finkel's story, even though they were probably just poor kids looking for jobs and a chance to buy American goods such as Nike running shoes, as Youssouf Male apparently did.

Finkel's piece, published in November 2001, at the height of the Big Chocolate public relations campaign, was a bonus for revisionists and a blow to the NGOs' fragile work to stop child trafficking and bonded labour. Save the Children Canada was outraged, as Finkel's story made it appear as though the organization had been coaching the children. But Anita Sheth saw something even more troubling about the article. As she read “Is Youssouf Male a Slave?” it seemed to Sheth that the details about
the boy's story didn't quite add up and she instructed her field office in Mali to find Male to ask him some questions. Sheth discovered more than she'd bargained for. Finkel's story about fabricated facts had its own fishy smell and contained numerous glaring errors—he was even wrong on the dates he said he'd been at Horon So. What was even more intriguing was that the photograph of “Youssouf Male” was really someone else, Madou Traoré, the boy from Sirkasso who had stolen his father's bike and run away to the cocoa groves with Aly Diabate.

Finkel was just returning from covering the war in Afghanistan when Anita Sheth finally tracked him down. She told him she'd found his article confusing. Could he explain some facts? Finkel complied. When his attempt to clarify his story provoked further questions from Sheth, Finkel finally admitted that he had created a composite character based on a number of the children he had interviewed. He eventually confessed, in a series of emails, that he hadn't actually seen Youssouf Male at Horon So, nor had he ever witnessed children watching the Blewett-Woods film. Male, he said, was just one of the boys he interviewed. (Sheth has Male on tape saying he never met the American journalist.) Finkel pleaded with Sheth in emails and phone calls not to expose his liberties with the truth. The
New York Times
was being rocked with scandal over other journalistic lapses. He'd surely lose his job. His small children would suffer. (Sheth would later learn he had no children.)

Sheth told him that Save the Children was interested only in the truth—his article, loaded with lies, was damaging to the organization. If the
New York Times Magazine
would simply publish a correction, including the correct name on the photo, that would be enough. Privately, she thought this would probably be sufficient to get Mr. Finkel fired.

In order to get the photo corrected, Finkel had to come clean with his editors, who quickly became suspicious: If he'd falsified the identity of his main character, what else might be fabricated?
Finkel admitted to the composite character and said he was only trying to present a realistic picture. Everything else was true, even if it never happened. But his editors didn't accept his defence of creative licence. They banished Finkel from the magazine and published a lengthy correction of the facts in the next edition. Months later, the magazine reported that it had closely double-checked all previous articles by Finkel and had found no other serious discrepancies, certainly none on the scale of the Youssouf Male story.

In a bizarre tell-all memoir that includes details of the incident, Finkel admits it was the single biggest mistake of his life. “I thought I'd get away with it,” he writes in
True Story
, a book about his troubles, for which he is purported to have received a $300,000 advance. In his account, Finkel weaves the details of his journalistic disgrace with another narrative—about a felon who stole Finkel's own identity to escape prosecution for murder. Of his article for the
New York Times Magazine
, he says, “I was writing about impoverished teenagers in the jungles of West Africa. Who would be able to determine the main character didn't exist?”

Finkel confesses that he wrote the article under a strict deadline that compelled him to stay awake for three days, high on amphetamines, and that he'd found himself short on research material for the story. He had come back from Côte d'Ivoire only with the intention of exposing the shoddy practices of other journalists and the NGOs, not the story of one boy's dilemma, as his editors subsequently requested. Finkel admits that he considered flying to Toronto to try to bribe Anita Sheth and Save the Children Canada. He thought US$10,000 in cash might be enough to buy their silence. But he still maintains that, while the narrative may have been fictive, the story itself was true.

A number of newspaper and magazine articles about the Finkel debacle, published after his book was published, supported the idea that sometimes the truth is larger than the sum of the facts—and sometimes facts get in the way of truth. Whatever
such apologies do for the state of American journalism, the labour issues of West Africa took on another layer of confusion.

The Finkel saga may seem tangential, but it reveals a number of disturbing elements that are germane to the narrative of exploitation in the world of global commerce: the tendency to manipulate facts from remote and undeveloped places to advance unrelated interests; the ripple effect of misinformation on political and corporate interests; the vulnerability of gullible victims to the polished and frequently self-interested inquiries of outsiders; the ease with which important issues can be dismissed by bad reporting and never recovered, no matter how much the dissembling is exposed.

Ultimately, in the months and years to come, the news story of “slave” children in the cocoa chain would take a back seat to the more pressing story of the “global war on terror.” A few journalists, such as Humphrey Hawksley of the BBC, continued to uncover stories about trafficking, but his was a more personal mission: “There's something about this particular story that got under my skin and stayed with me. I can't leave it,” he admits. But the journalistic pack had moved on.

Whenever there were questions about child labour in chocolate, the industry referred inquirers to the Harkin-Engel Protocol, which promised the world it would have “clean” chocolate by July 1, 2005. As part of the protocol, the corporations had started investing money in small ventures to make the lives of farmers better and to encourage them to send their kids to school.

One project that I visited in Côte d'Ivoire provides a little tree nursery so that children can cultivate their own cocoa crop. It also funds a small vegetable garden near the school where children are encouraged to grow their own food. From what I saw, the garden, at best, might feed fewer than half of the students in the school for a few days per week. Directors of the little enterprise maintain that the tree nursery will eventually generate money to pay for more food, a necessary development since the
chocolate companies have made no commitment to long-term funding of either the nursery or garden.

As for the school building itself, it was crumbling. The playground reeked with the sharp odour of urine—there was no latrine. Yet this project was offered as an example of cocoa company largesse. The school, and several others like it, is conveniently located near Abidjan's international airport. The teachers who run the little school canteen say they have a lot of visitors from abroad—people interested in seeing signs of progress. In truth, this small showcase project is an improvement over the situation in other schools only because the norm in Côte d'Ivoire farm communities is so pathetic. Compared with the massive amount of aid the oil companies pour into African countries to mollify local people and their governments, the investment from Big Chocolate in projects like this is minuscule. “I've seen some dreadful companies in dreadful places but few as stingy as these,” says the BBC's Hawksley, speaking of his own investigations.

The Harkin-Engel Protocol, endorsed by the chocolate industry in 2001, at least acknowledged the existence of a child labour issue on West African cocoa farms. But any initiatives to deal with the abuse amounted to window dressing. Ultimately, the exploitation of children on the cocoa farms of Côte d'Ivoire would be impeded not by any good intentions on the part of politicians or corporate executives but by a factor neither group could control.

War.

J
UNE IS A DISTRESSING TIME OF THE YEAR FOR THOSE
who live in the fallow farmlands of Mali. The air buzzes with heat and singed dust. Scrawny cattle nose around in the few clumps of greenery, seeking whatever is left to eat. As they await the rains that may or may not come in sufficient quantities—or at all—people take on an air of quiet desperation. Especially now, as the Sahara continues its relentless spread southward, transforming large expanses of overused and depleted soil into sandy, sterile desert.

Forlorn families sit listlessly in their yards, listening to the distant rumble of a thunderstorm that always seems to promise rain for someone else. Their fields can feed them only for about nine months of the year. By June they are reduced to eating just one meal per day. And still, in the cooler part of the morning and before the fatigue of hunger sets in, they bend once more over the exhausted earth to coax the tiny plots of land to life, just one more time, planting their meagre seed and asking Allah, please, to send the rain.

It's at this time of year that Malians of all ages abandon the parched fields, pack a few belongings and wander off to look for work. But in June 2005, more Malians were coming back than going. They returned with terror in their eyes and with stories to tell that were beyond the imaginations of the listeners.

Kader Ouattara was twenty years old, a sturdy young man with a lot of plans, when he left his village in southern Mali and headed for the Promised Land. The year was 1987, and Ouattara was responding to an appeal from the iconic African statesman Félix Houphouët-Boigny for ambitious farmers to come and put the Ivorian land to work, to turn jungles into farms. This was the West African dream, and Ouattara would be part of it.

“My father had engaged a wife for me,” he explains to me bashfully. With his willing young bride at his side, Ouattara emigrated to Côte d'Ivoire.

He learned the rules of his new country quickly. “You had to find a host who would welcome you and then would invite you to share a part of his land,” says Ouattara.

Robert Sho is the Ivorian who gave Ouattara his first break. “We were working with him at first, cutting bush and growing trees,” he explains. “And then he showed us another field to cut—one part for him and another part for me.” Ouattara insists the arrangement was always very friendly, as it was throughout the cocoa region. The indigenous farmers needed outside labour, especially the durable northerners from Mali and Burkina Faso, and there was plenty of land to share.

Ouattara worked his seven hectares while also toiling in the field of his patron. Through enormous personal effort he eventually saved enough to strike out on his own—to stop working for Sho and dedicate himself entirely to his own enterprise. That was part of the arrangement. But Ouattara was soon ready to expand even further, to grow more cocoa. By then it was the 1990s, and there were few areas in the overcultivated south-central part of the country left to develop. Cocoa was losing its value on international markets, and Ivorians were becoming less willing to share with outsiders. They cleared land for themselves and tried to stave off their creditors by producting more beans and employing the cheapest
labour possible to harvest them. Amicable arrangements between Malian immigrants and Ivorians such as Robert Sho became rare.

When Félix Houphouët-Boigny died in December 1993, Ouattara began to sense a new hostility towards the immigrants. The xenophobia became more overt as post-Houphouët governments began to preach a doctrine called Ivoirité. The term was vague, and took on many interpretations, but it came to mean that no one but those of pure Ivorian blood should enjoy full civil rights in the country. In practice, it meant that the immigrants who had been invited to take part in the economic miracle would no longer have any legal claim to the land they worked and lived on. At least, that is how Ivoirité was interpreted by people in the countryside. Ouattara says there were never any clear laws or directives, but Ivorian property owners took the racist policy as a licence to exploit their immigrant neighbours. “They would give you land,” Ouattara explains. “You would clear it and prepare the soil [for cocoa]. And then you would find someone else has claimed it and they are planting on it.”