Nightmare Conditions- Life as a Child Slave in the Ivory Coast
An Exerpt from CORP WATCH- Holding Corporations Accountable
Aly Diabate and 18 other boys labored on a 494-acre farm, very large by Ivory Coast standards. Their workdays began when the sun rose and ended just before nightfall. They trudged home to a dinner of burned bananas. If they were lucky, they were treated to yams seasoned with saltwater "gravy."
After dinner, the boys were ordered into a 24- by 20-foot room, where they slept on wooden planks without mattresses. The only window was covered with hardened mud except for a baseball-size hole to let some air in.
"Once we entered the room, nobody was allowed to go out," said Mamadou Traore, a thin, frail youth with serious brown eyes who is 19 now. "Le Gros gave us cans to urinate. He locked the door and kept the key."
"We didn't cry, we didn't scream," Aly said. "We thought we had been sold, but we weren't sure."
The boys became sure one day when Le Gros walked up to Mamadou and ordered him to work harder. "I bought each of you for 25,000 francs (about $35)," the farmer said, according to Mamadou. "So you have to work harder to reimburse me."
Aly was barely 4 feet tall when he was sold into slavery, and he had a hard time carrying the heavy bags of cocoa beans.
"Some of the bags were taller than me," he said. "It took two people to put the bag on my head. And when you didn't hurry, you were beaten."
You can still see the faint scars on his back, right shoulder and left arm.
"The beatings were a part of my life," Aly said. "Anytime they loaded you with bags and you fell while carrying them, nobody helped you. Instead, they beat you and beat you until you picked it up again."
At night, Aly had nightmares about working forever in the fields, about dying and nobody noticing. "I was always thinking about my parents and how I could get back to my country," he said.
But he didn't think about trying to escape.
"I was afraid," he said, his voice as faint as the scars on his skinny body. "I had seen others who tried to escape. When they tried, they were severely beaten."
