Theirs is a life devoid of any joy. People see them but never see the tragic lives they are trapped in. Day and night, many Nigerian children used as house helps labour and suffer in silence. They are locked in domestic servitude while their lucky peers go to school and live normal lives. KUNLE FALAYI, takes a look at the lives of such children, whose very existence are controlled by their bosses. They sometimes endure unimaginable trauma that changes their lives forever
Tosin Adeyanju rocked the six-month-old baby she was carrying gently to keep the child quiet. As the girl spoke, with a voice that belied the suffering and agony she had endured since she was a child, she looked around in fear.
“Please, help me, I don’t want to go back to that woman. She would take my child away from me and sell me again,” she said.
For many days, before that encounter, Tosin had slept on street corners in Mushin area of Lagos – Nigeria’s biggest commercial city – with her baby before a woman, who had known her since she was a child, took her in temporarily.
The girl said she did not know her real age, but our correspondent estimated that she could not be more than 18. Tosin has been a domestic servant for the past 13 years. A neighbour of her ‘madam’ whom our correspondent interviewed remembered the first time the girl was brought to Lagos in 2001.
Tosin never had a reason to state her age. She never attended school for a day. All she has known is the life of servitude as housemaid. She’s one of the child slaves that shared their experiences of sexual molestation and physical abuse by either their bosses or their bosses’ children with our correspondent.
Life, for many domestic servants in Nigeria, is cruel, brutal and sometimes traumatic. Many children who end up as domestic servants in Nigerian cities, especially Lagos, which is said to be home to more than 70 per cent of the country’s child slaves, are taken from their rural villages with promises of better life, as their indigent parents hand them over with high hopes.
But many of the children turn out to become slaves in the homes of their masters, who may even be relations.
The 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery which is still in operation has extended the meaning of slavery to include “any practice whereby a child or young person under the age of 18 years, is delivered by either or both of his natural parents or by his guardian to another person, whether for reward or not, with a view to the exploitation of the child or young person or of his labour.”
Child domestic labour or exploitative domestic servitude is a problem that continues to plague Nigeria despite legislations that seek to stop the trend.
According to statistics released by the Walk Free Foundation about two weeks ago, there are an estimated 834,200 modern slaves in Nigeria – about 0.4805 per cent of the country’s population.
But data from the International Labour Organisation gave a more frightening image. The ILO estimated few years ago that 15 million Nigerian children under the age of 14 are trapped in exploitative servitude. The United Nations Children Education Fund refers to them as the ‘invisible children.’ To the society, they are just like other children – they are seen but essentially invisible, because the society fails to see the brutal fate which they are subjected to.
UNICEF also estimates that about 1.2 million Nigerian children are trafficked every year to be used as domestic servants and sex slaves among many other things.
Out of this lot, children like Tosin experience hardship and abuse that simply call to question the effectiveness of laws meant to protect children in the country.
“When I was a child,” the girl began, “my mother brought me from Ekiti State. I was around five years old at the time. She said I was going to live with her sister, a woman I had never seen before that time.”
The woman Tosin was talking about is Alhaja Bola Akintunde, a trader in whose house the girl had spent at least the 11 years out of the last 13 years serving as a domestic servant.
“I have been living with Alhaja ever since that time. But I have turned to a mere property used anyhow because my mother died many years ago. Before my mother died, she told me that my father left while I was little. So, I cannot even recognise him if I see him on the street,” she said.
The girl gave a summary of the daily routine of her life for about a decade. The day began at 5am for Tosin. Her domestic chores ended by 6am. After that, she loaded up Alhaja’s wares of used clothes on her head. Trekking, she transported the wares to Mushin Market where she sold the clothes till she’s worn out and came back home by 10pm when the woman closed up shop.
“When I got home after work, I was always afraid of the sexual abuse that had become part of my life,” Tosin said.
It is hard to determine the hardship that forced Tosin’s mother to transfer her daughter to Alhaja’s custody since the girl’s mother is now dead. But the terrible fate which befell her in the house put her in the category of 35.8 million modern slaves which Walk Free Foundation says currently exist in the world today.
Madam’s son invited friends to gang-rape me – Victim
“Madam’s youngest son (Dapo) started raping me since I barely had breasts,” she said. “There was no point in reporting him to Madam (Afolabi) because she knew all about it. In fact, she used to say that whatever she owned also belonged to her son. So, he could do whatever he liked with me.”
Tosin spoke in Yoruba, coherently and with resolve, as soon as she was assured that she would never return to her aunt’s house again.
She said, “I endured the rapes anytime he chose to take me until one afternoon when his mother was not at home and his friends came over to the house.
“All of them took turns on me. Some fondled my breasts as others waited for their turns. This happened many times over the years. Sometimes, friends who came were three, sometimes four.”
The girl’s experience bears a striking resemblance to the explanation UNICEF gives on the lives of children trapped in domestic labour in Nigeria.
UNICEF said in a 2006 report on this subject, “Child labour does mostly occur in semi-formal and informal businesses with hundreds of thousands young domestic servants, mainly working for prosperous urban families.
“Domestic servants are the least visible category and often sexually harassed. Among young domestic workers, one half of those employed in Lagos said they knew of sexually molested domestic servants.”
For a teenager, who had known no other life outside servitude in her aunty’s house, Tosin told our correspondent that she could tell no one. Her madam threatened to beat her if she dared tell anybody of what went on in her house, she said.
Asked if she ever thought about running away, “I thought about running away every single night. But I had no family expect my brother and sister.”
Our correspondent later learnt that Tosin’s siblings, a 14-year-old boy and 12-year-old girl, are currently living with Alhaja Akintunde, as domestic servants, having been brought there to join Tosin before their mother died.
“I could not leave them in that house. At least we still got food and a place to sleep there.
Three pregnancies, two abortions
While the serial gang-rape of Tosin went on over the years, she became pregnant three times.
“I became pregnant twice in Akintunde’s house and once in the house of her friend whom she gave me to as a sign of goodwill. The two times I got pregnant in Alhaja’s house, she brought a nurse to the house to abort the pregnancies, it was always in the house. She never took me anywhere,” she said.
Every night, Tosin would pray that what she was going through would end miraculously, that she would wake up the following morning and realise that it was all a nightmare, she said. But this is her life.
“I have never attended a day of school in my life. I wish I could be like the children I see wearing beautiful uniforms, trekking to school at Mushin every morning. I can neither read nor write,” the girl said.
At age 18, the young mother can neither read nor write. She speaks scanty pidgin, which is a common street language in Lagos but there was no doubt she was a really intelligent girl.
Tosin said nobody who saw her would realise the great suffering she was passing through.
“People knew me on the street where we lived. I was just another child but nobody knew what I was passing through. My siblings and I worked like machines – washing and cleaning and serving as sales boys and girls all day long. That was my life,” she said.
‘Sold’ to another sexual slavery
After two abortions, Tosin said Akintunde passed her on to another woman, Alhaja Silifat Lawal, in 2013. “You will be working for her now,” was all the woman told her.
Any hope she had of escaping the slavery conditions she was subjected to in her first boss’ house quickly disappeared when Lawal made it clear to Tosin that she owned her.
“When I was leaving my Alhaja’s (Akintunde’s) house, she instructed me to do all the woman asked me to do. The day I got there, my new ‘madam’ told me I would be her son’s wife and that if I was obedient, I would not suffer in her house. I told her I did not want to be a wife yet but she said I was mature enough,” the girl said.
There was no marriage ceremony, just another round of sexual abuse that would last many months until the girl became pregnant again. Tosin gave birth to a baby girl in May 2014.
But she would soon be thrown out to live on the street by her ‘mother-in-law’ who cited the girl’s ‘unruly’ behaviour in the house as the reason for sending her out. With baby in hand, Tosin first got help from some neighbours who took her in. But her fate worsened when a woman who harboured her had to travel and she became a homeless mother.
Tosin’s mother brought her to Lagos from their village in Ekiti State in 2001, adding to the already established notion that many child servants originate from rural areas.
The Walk Free Foundation opined that “Nigeria has a significant transnational and internal human trafficking with many victims, especially children, transported from rural to urban areas.” Another shade of the commonly known trafficking is child labour and modern slavery in which impoverished children are forced into labour in the domestic sector by even their parents and relations.
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