Image: DAVID LABRADOR ALTHOUGH ESCAPED SLAVE GIRLS are often morose and uncommunicative when they arrive at a rehabilitation center in Gabon, they quickly return to high spirits.

Two girls sat in a cloistered convent garden last April and told an inquisitive guest how they had journeyed to Gabon. "We had to do like so," said 11-year-old Soueba of Togo as she kneeled and folded her hands behind her head, "and they beat, beat, beat us. They weren't police, they were bandits, and they caned us." As proof of her own travails, eight-year-old Alice from Benin displayed a back covered with dozens of scars, each thicker than her childish fingers. Recently, with the help of their home countries¿ embassies, these girls were separated from the people who had enslaved them and then taken here to recuperate and return home.

When it comes to slavery, mental bonds are at least as strong as physical force, argues Kevin Bales, a sociologist at the University of Surrey Roehampton in London, in Scientific American [see "The Social Psychology of Modern Slavery," April 2002]. The relatively recent rise and much-anticipated fall of child slavery in Gabon provides a chilling case study in how difficult it can be to extricate a culture from those bonds.

Rise of the Slave Trade

The child-slavery industry of Gabon came into existence only a generation ago. Although estimates vary, Franck Okry of the Gabonese Religious Union, an antislavery organization, says that today there are some 5,000 to 6,000 child slaves in Gabon. Paving the way for the rise of the local slave trade were a pair of cultural and economic factors. First, in that area of West Africa exists a generations-old tradition of relatives or trusted others helping to raise the children of overburdened parents. The tradition "is a cultural fact in my land," explains M. Lassissi Adebo, the ambassador of Benin to Gabon. "If I have enough to eat, I will help my brother out, who has a lot of children." In Europe, a similar practice was called apprenticeship. Known variously among West African peoples as Mbidaan, Trocosi or Vidomegon, the custom served a valuable and healthy function for centuries. The system began to break down, however, when modern transportation allowed adults to take children far from their parents, to areas with high wages.

Per capita income in Gabon is now 10 times as high as it is in Nigeria, Togo or Benin, the main sources of Gabonese child slaves. A huge urban middle class vies with the petroleum and mining industries to attract immigrant labor. Along the way, some of those immigrants realized that they could profit by putting a child to work in Gabon and confiscating his or her wages. In five months, such a child would earn the average annual income of a person in Nigeria, Togo or Benin.

"People leave here and go to Togo," explains Apoudjac Baba, a Togolese schoolteacher and antislavery activist. "They go into the countryside and say, 'We need children to work with us.'"

But they aren't just offering to raise needy children. The slavers offer cash, usually about the equivalent of $10 or $20 dollars down. Says Baba, "They say to the parents, 'At the end of each month, I will send you 10,000 francs [about $13].¿" That sum, though only about one quarter of what the slaver will keep for himself, is about half the average annual income of a Togolese. In some cases, the slavers deceive the parents about where their child is going or even resort to abduction.

Compounding the problem is broad local acceptance of the notion of child labor. Ambassador Adebo explains: "In other countries, school is free; here it's not. So a person who can't afford school for a child teaches him to be a mechanic. It's a good decision. A trade must be learned, so they [the children] start learning. UNICEF acts as though the children are used for their labor. It's not so."