MALELANE, 24 November (IRIN) - When the governments of Mozambique and South Africa decided to revive the transport route between Maputo and Johannesburg in the mid-1990s, child slaves were not the cargo envisaged for haulage.

Yet management at the Amazing Grace Children's Home (AGCH), a grassroots child welfare organisation in Malelane, near one of the main border-crossing points to Mozambique in South Africa's northeastern Mpumalanga Province, believe child traffickers are increasingly using the highway to deliver their human merchandise to local and overseas buyers.

Every month up to 100 Mozambican and Swazi children are trafficked along the Maputo corridor to Johannesburg, South Africa's economic hub, where they are sold into the local sex industry or transported to Europe, according to AGCH's expert on child trafficking, Vusi Ndukuya.

"Around 15 new children who have either escaped or been dumped by the traffickers along the Maputo corridor are placed in our care every month. So, if that is the number falling through the cracks, then many, many more are being trafficked," he reasoned.

Ndukuya has been coordinating the AGCH anti-child trafficking programme, launched in 2003 with funding from international child-welfare agency Terre des Hommes, for the past 18 months, and says he has learned a lot about the illegal trade and those involved in it during that time.

He alleges that the human trafficking syndicates operating along the Maputo corridor include policemen, immigration officials, truck-drivers, taxi-drivers and people connected to local communities from which the children are sourced.

"The AGCH is close to the Lebombo border post between South Africa and Mozambique, where much of the business of child trafficking goes on. It is complex and involves all sorts of people: officials to get people across the borders and drivers to transport them.

"Once the trafficked children who arrive here trust us, and they are not too traumatised, they open up and reveal stories that are awful in most cases. Some of them had been forced into labour, while others were used as sex slaves," he explained at his Malelane office.

The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) child protection advisor, Margie de Monchy, told IRIN that one of the difficulties of getting to grips with the issue of human trafficking was its secrecy.

"From what I know of the problem in South Africa, slave traders use the country's cities as a transit point to Europe, or as a marketplace. Often the rural kids who are taken advantage of are offered the chance of an education, or a shot at a better life, so ... they willingly go with the traffickers, but once they get to South Africa they become bonded. I know of instances in which they have been told they need up to US$14,000 to buy their freedom, which they never have, so they are forced into labour or the sex industry," she said.

"The problem with tackling human trafficking is that once authorities become aware of it in one region and try to deal with it, the traffickers move to another region that has little experience of it and carry on there."

Although concrete data is scarce, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) produced a report in 2003, which stated that Lesotho, Mozambique and Malawi, as well as refugee-producing areas in Africa, were key source-countries for women and children trafficked to South Africa.

Some of the victims interviewed as part of the study had been smuggled to European destinations. The report also claimed that women from Thailand, China and Russia were being trafficked to Southern Africa.

A year later IOM confirmed that trans-national criminal syndicates were also trafficking South African women to East Asia for sexual exploitation.

Little Cebile Dlamini is one of the unfortunate children to have experienced what it is like to have been enslaved. Her experiences have left her untrusting and cause frequent nightmares.

As she sat in the AGCH courtyard she explained that a female family acquaintance had come to her home in Swaziland while her father and brothers were at work. "She said come, let's go to my house; but she never said when I would be going back home. After that I do not remember a lot about the journey," recalled Cebile.

The 10-year-old was taken across the Swazi border into Mpumalanga by her abductor who brought the girl to her home in Barberton, where she was forced to work for two years.

Cebile did the household chores and laboured in the fields. In return, she was mentally and physically abused - during her second year of captivity she was repeatedly raped by a man who came to the house while her captor was at work.

"I was given food, but life was not good - my mistress often liked to beat me. Things got worse during the second year because a man would come to the house and hurt me when my mistress was away; so I ran away and met a woman who helped me contact my family."

Cebile, now 12, has been at the AGCH since the authorities were informed of her ordeal, but has to stay in South Africa until the court proceedings in connection with her abduction have been concluded.

Ndukuya became so disturbed by the number of similar accounts he heard from children staying at the AGCH that he decided to carry out his own research along the Maputo corridor.

After months of discreet investigation, he and a colleague went to the border town of Lebombo in October 2006, where they pretended to be Johannesburg bar-owners looking for young girls to work as dancers and prostitutes on their premises.

After spending 12 hours hanging around two well-known bars in the town, he was approached by a young woman who inquired why they had come all the way to Lebombo. After he told her, she said she could get him the girls he wanted.

"I gave her my number and we left. That was over a weekend, and by the following Wednesday she rang me and said she had young girls ready to send to Johannesburg, and that I could have them for R390 [$55] each. When I asked her if they knew what was going on, she said they were very young and didn't know anything, so they should be easy to handle."

According to Ndukuya, child traffickers in South Africa can be divided into three categories: individuals who abduct a child for their own needs; impoverished communities that unwittingly send their children into bondage out of desperation, and child-trafficking syndicates that abduct children or acquire them to order.

"As part of our programme we try to educate people that the best thing a child can do is to stay in school and work hard. We try to make them aware, but when people are very poor they become desperate," he said.

The main reason child trafficking is so prevalent along the border between Mozambique and South Africa is because the immigration officials are lax when it comes to implementing immigration control, Ndukuya alleged. "Women bring the children through the border post without a passport for them - they just pay the officials to let them through ... If the traffickers do not have the connection, they just cross the border illegally, away from the border post - it is not hard."

After his undercover investigation Ndukuya went to the police with the evidence he had uncovered and told them everything.

No police spokesperson was unavailable to comment on child trafficking in South Africa, or the allegation that members of the police and immigration services were involved in the illegal trade.

bc/oa/he

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