Modernisation Processes and Child Labour in

Fotso Divine Sackmen
Modernisation Processes and Child Labour in
Central Africa.
Thesis submitted for the
Master Degree in International Social Welfare and Health Policy.
Autumn 2011
Faculty of Social Sciences
Oslo University College
1
Many Wives of Our Father
When time came to till the turf,
And fervently farm the rich farmlands,
My father's house had many hands,
To till the turf and farm the farmlands …
Oliver Oscar Mbamara in Poems of Life
2
Acknowledgements
This work has been realized with the assistance of classmates, friends, and family members. I
take this opportunity to recognize their wonderful and special assistance. To my wife, Fotso
Linda Tanyi, thank you for your understanding, encouragement and patience during the
writing of this thesis. To Mrs. Duope Yvette, Brian Tanyi Bissong, and Tambe Bissong, I am
grateful for the jokes and the family atmosphere and discussions at home. They were helpful
to relieve my stress. To the Sackmens: Emmanuel, Alexander, Martin, Margaret, Becky,
Christy, and Maria, I miss you all. Your numerous calls made me reminisce the good days
spent together back at home caring for each other and helping dad and mum tilling the soil
during planting seasons. This thesis has been influenced by these collective experiences.
I also give special thanks to all staff members and lecturers of the Master Programme in
International Social Welfare and Health Policy at the Oslo University College for making my
studies at this Department and Faculty worth remembering.
The fine and incisive critiques, directions, fatherly supervisions and long hours of discussions
I had with Professor Michael Seltzer, my Supervisor, provided new perspectives and insights
on child labour and modernization processes in Africa. I will forever also remain indebted to
Prof. Seltzer for his office’s open door policy and for providing me with some scholarly
articles on child labour. However, I am solely responsible for any shortcoming(s) observed in
this thesis.
3
SUMMARY
With the help of institutional theories, this study looks at the relationship between
modernization processes and child labour in Central Africa. Relying on idiographic analysis
and secondary literatures, we demonstrate that modernisation processes have been responsible
for the emergence and widespread use of child labourers in Central Africa. These processes
have been partly marked by the rapid transformation of pre-capitalist local chiefdoms into
capitalist nation-states. We use three historical periods (pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial) to show that modernisation processes forcefully moved children from working in
households to become workers in larger economic spaces. Unlike the pre-colonial period
when children worked within households, during the colonial period, child labour was partly
used to create wealth for colonial capitalists. During the post-colonial period, multiple
dimensions of poverty have influenced children to work in macro-spaces to mitigate
households’ social risks. Finally, contrary to the modernist view that economic growth
(measured as income per capita) is the solution to child labour, we demonstrate that
developing countries may have higher Gross Domestic Product and income per capita, yet
children may still work in different sectors of the economy. Higher GDP figures may not fully
explain the presence or absence of child labourers in Central Africa. The prevalence of child
labour in Central Africa can be explained by the state of the existing political economies,
which influences economic agents determine what to produce, how to produce, when to
produce and for whom to produce.
Key Words: Child, Child Labour, Colonialism, Economic Growth, Institutions, Modernisation
Processes, Poverty.
4
CONTENTS
1.0
2.0
Introduction …………………………………………………………..
7
1.1
The Argument
…………………………………………...
8
1.2
Aims …………………………………………………………..
9
1.3
Justification
…………………………………………………..
9
1.4
Methodology ……………………………………………………
10
…………………….
12
Confronting Child Labour: Previous Studies
2.1
Childhood
……………………………………………………
12
2.2
Models of Childhood ……………………………………………
14
2.3
Child Labour ……………………………………………………
15
2.4
Determinants of Child Labour …………………………………..
18
2.4.1 Marxist theory of Child Labour…………………………………. 18
2.4.2 Modernist Theory of Child Labour …………………………… 19
2.5
2.6
3.0
An Institutional Theory of Child Labour …………………………….
20
2.5.1 Institutions, Children and Child Labour ……………………
21
2.5.2 Poverty, Unequal Institutional Power Relations …………..
22
Conclusion………………………………………………………….
24
The State of Pre-colonial and Colonial Child Labour in Cameroon and
Gabon…………………………………………………………………………
25
3.1 Pre-modern ‘Child Labour’ in Africa…………………………………….
26
3.2 Child Labour in Colonial Cameroon and Gabon…………………………
29
3.2.1 The Period 1884-1945………………………………………
30
3.2.2 The Period 1945-1960……………………………………….
35
5
4.0
5.0
Post-Colonial Child Labour………………………………………………
39
4.1
Economic Growth and Child Labour………………………………
39
4.2
Poverty, Intra-Domestic Power Relations, and Child Labour………
44
4.2.1 Urban Areas…………………………………………………
46
4.2.2 Rural Areas………………………………………………….
48
Conclusion………………………………………………………….
52
5.1
Modernisation Processes and the rise of Child labourers…………….
52
5.2
Poverty and Child Labour……………………………………………
53
References…………………………………………………………………………
56
Appendices………………………………………………………………………..
62
6
Chapter 1
Introduction
Modernisation Processes and Child Labour is a cross-country comparative study on ways
modern institutions have influenced the emergence and use of children as labourers in Central
Africa. Inherent to the concept of being ‘modern’ is the assumption that society pursues the
path of economic, political, and social development. That is, through development a people or
society transforms itself from a traditional to a post-traditional capitalist economic system that
partly creates new relations and forces of production by which entrepreneurs may exploit
workers.
As a process in Africa, modernization has partly influenced the rise of homo economicus and
encouraged and discouraged the use and exploitation of children as labourers via public
policies, legislations, local cultures, and income inequalities. The way modernization
processes have encouraged child labour is demonstrated in Charles Dickens’ (2003) David
Copperfield, where following the death of David’s mother, his stepfather, Mr. Murdstone,
withdraws him from school so that he works at Murdstone and Grinsby. When this
Dickensian plot is applied to modern children, we see a contrast between work and school:
That is, a contrast between whether children’s primary duty in society is to study in schools or
work on factory floors, street corners or on farmlands.
Albeit the difference between work and school may not be clear-cut because of varying values
and cultures in different parts of the world, experience shows that when poor families
encounter different types of social risks, children as dependants, are vulnerable and may be
used as workers. Some children may work permanently into adulthood, without ever
schooling, because at an early age they may have abandoned family homes, probably the
result of physical violence, disability, and extreme poverty. Others may go to school and
perform minimal chores at home. Another category of children from poor households may
mediate their daily activities between workplaces and classrooms.
One important factor responsible for this trend is parental decision-making. When faced with
multiple social risks, some parents more or less supported by institutional factors - the
inherent and culturally inbuilt unequal power relations that have determined relations between
parents/guardians and children over space and time. In times of extreme poverty, most
parents, especially rural parents, may decide that their children work and make financial and
7
otherwise contributions to household economies. Unlike in industrialized societies where
robust formal child protection and welfare institutions keep children away from workplaces,
in some African countries children may work due to parental illiteracy and ignorance, and the
absence of or inadequate robust social welfare institutions.
It seems to us that like in Dickens’ time, the presence of weak child protection and social
welfare institutions or near absence of them in some instances, and inadequate or poorly
designed public social safety nets has influenced poor families in some African countries to
depend on apprenticeship and child fosterage to cushion the effects of multiple social risks.
Historically, colonial institutions and its accompanied forced labour policies may have
directly or indirectly encouraged child labour activities in the continent through the use of
children’s labour in public works schemes, agriculture, and load carrying. It is therefore
unsurprising that by 1995, there was an estimated 250 million child labourers in the
developing world with 32% from Africa (ILO 1999). This alarming numbers influenced a
new ‘worldwide movement against child labour’ that continues to propose solutions to
abolish, if not, reduce it in developing countries. Efforts by this movement seem to have
yielded some statistical results. In 2000, economically active children (5-14 years old) as a
proportion of total children population in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) dropped to 28.8% (that
is, 48 million of 166.8 million). In 2004, it dropped again to 26.4% (that is, 49.3 million of
186.8 million) (Hagemann et al. 2006, 3). In 2008, the proportion of employed children as a
function of the general child population in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) was 28.4%, that is,
58,212,000 employed children in a population of 205,319,000 children. Of this number, there
were 52,229,000 (25.4%) child labourers, and 26,045,000 (12.7%) children involved in
hazardous work (Diallo et al. 2010, vii). Based on this context, we will demonstrate in this
study how modern institutions have contributed to emergence and rise of child labour since
colonialism.
1.1
The Argument
Our main argument is that modernisation processes have been responsible for the emergence
and widespread use of child labourers in Central Africa. These processes are partly marked by
the rapid transformation of pre-capitalist local chiefdoms into capitalist nation-states. Through
modernisation processes, children’s work has been transformed from households to larger
economic spaces. We demonstrate our argument by making use of two historical periods in
Central Africa. During the first period, colonial period, child labour was partly used to create
8
wealth for colonial capitalists. During the second period, the post-colonial one, multiple
dimensions of poverty have influenced children to work in macro-spaces to mitigate
households’ social risks.
Contrary to the modernist view that economic growth (measured as income per capita) is the
solution to child labour, we demonstrate that developing countries may have higher Gross
Domestic Product and income per capita, yet children may still work in different sectors of
the economy. Higher GDP figures may not fully explain the presence or absence of child
labourers in Africa. Our position is that child labour can be explained by the existing political
economy of a country.
1.2
Aim
We generally aim to demonstrate how modernisation processes have contributed to the rise
and spread of child labour. And how in times of poverty, parental decision is crucial to
understanding how poverty influences children to work as labourers. Our main guiding
question is: What is the relationship between modernization processes and child labour?
1.3
Justification
Child labour research has been characterised by ’contradictions’ (Ekpe-Otu 2009, 21) that
have been manifested by multiple meanings of terms such as child and child labour and the
methods and variables used to quantify child labourers in scholarly literatures and policy
documents (see, Basu and Van 1999; Edmonds 2005). Some authors (for example, Bass 2004)
recognize that child labour is a historical, cultural, and contextual phenomenon.
Most analyses on child labour in Africa use a post-colonial framework (see for example,
Andvig et al. 2001; Bass 2004; Ekpe-Otu 2009) while others fall short of making in-depth
country or cross-country studies. Those that are comparative studies sometimes use
quantitative methods to construct economic models of child labour (see for example, Andvig
et al. 2001). Other studies mention pre-colonial and colonial child labour in Africa only in a
few lines. The only exception we found is Beverly Grier’s (2009) Child Labor in Colonial
Africa. One advantage of Grier’s study is that it provides a general overview of child labour in
pre-colonial and colonial Africa. Our study builds on this foundation laid by Grier in that it is
comparative both in time and space: we analyse and compare child labour in three historically
periods (pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial) in Cameroon and Gabon to provide a
comprehensive picture on how child labour has evolved in both countries.
9
1.4
Methodology
In this study, we test our main objective and hypothesis and demonstrate our arguments by
comparing child labour in Cameroon and Gabon. Both nation-states share a common border,
are member states of the Central African Monetary and Economic Union (CEMAC), have
similar institutions that are influenced by a long period of French colonialism. However,
Gabon whose population is very small compared to Cameroon has a GDP per capita above
that of Cameroon and Sub-Saharan Africa’s average. Gabon is more a destination country of
trafficked children while Cameroon is more a country of transit and less a destination country
of trafficked children1.
Our analysis is qualitative, interdisciplinary and comparative. Comparative studies compare
social phenomena within the same, two, or more geographical spaces for the purpose of
discerning something about one or all of the phenomena that are being compared
(Heidenheimer et al. 1983, 505).
To achieve the aim of this research, we rely on a deductive and idiographic historical research
tradition. Idiographic analysis is a strand of analysis that social scientists use to
studyindividuals and groups to provide possible explanations of a particular social
phenomenon. This analytical approach helps us demonstrate the changing roles children play
and the activities they perform in domestic and public spaces and how ideologies and values
shape the way individuals and groups use and view child labour in different societies. It
provides a microscope through which we can see how societal changes, especially the
movement from a traditional to capitalist economy, impacts children. Expressed differently,
iodigraphic analysis may explain how new transport networks, the development of capitalist
plantations, cash crop production, market forces, the mass media, migration, and urbanization
have been influencing children to move from working in domestic spaces (households) to
work in public spaces (streets, factory floors, mines, agricultural farms, and animal rearing).
This thesis is based primarily on secondary literature with data obtained from textbooks,
newspapers, policy documents, scholarly journals, monographs, and the internet. These
sources enabled us to have diverse perspectives and opinions on child labour. Based on these
1
Trafficked children are children recruited, transported, transferred, and exploited for the purpose of exploitation
across national and international boundaries. Stories on child trafficking in the Press and scholarly literature
usually have a negative connotation. Traditionally, children have benignly lived with fostered parents and
guardians in Africa. However, because of economic reasons, child fostering may slip into child exploitation and
child labour in parts of Africa.
10
sources, we developed a theory, which we describe as An Institutional Theory of Child
Labour to guide our analysis. It is not an original theory but a mixture of some existing child
labour theories. The central hypothesis of this theory is that formal and informal institutions
give parents and guardians much power over children. They utilize this power to persuade and
coerce children to work when households experience poverty. Secondary literature provided
us with annual GDP and GDP per capita statistics of Cameroon and Gabon. We use these
annual statistics with those of child labour to compare child labour in both countries and to
test the modernist theory of child labour.
The main shortcoming of this study is that its reliance only on secondary literature may in
some circumstance, not reflect the true situation on the ground in both countries. Whenever
we recognized such situations, we attempted to make some corrections based on deductive
methods, inferences, empirical examples and lived experiences.
We could not find all official child labour statistics for Gabon between 1990 and 2010.
Statistics we obtained for this country are only for some specific years presented by some
international organizations. Finally, this study falls short comparing solutions to combat child
labour in both countries. The omission is intentional due to page limitation.
This work is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the thesis while chapter 2
presents a review of relevant literature on the study. Chapter 3 looks at child labour or child
work during the pre-colonial and colonial eras in the study areas while chapter 4 examines
post-colonial child labour. Chapter 5 concludes the study.
11
Chapter 2
Confronting Child Labour: Previous
Studies
Different theories (for example: Modernist, Globalization, and Socialisation theories) have
conceptualised child labour. They elucidate different theoretical and disciplinary traditions
tested in particular empirical and social contexts. We propose here an Institutional Theory of
Child Labour to explain the link between modernization processes and child labour. It is more
or less holistic and interdisciplinary in focus, with a mix of theories and perspectives to show
that child labour cannot be explained only in one form or with a single theory. Our
explanation hinges on historical, technological, economic, ideological, and political shifts in
contexts over time. We begin this chapter by defining children and child labour. Later, we
analyse some existing theories on child labour relevant to this study and use some of these
theories to propose an institutional theory of child labour.
2.1 Childhood.
In Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, Philippe Ariès (1962)
distinguishes between ancient and modern childhoods. The concepts of age and tasks assigned
to children in modern times, he writes, make them distinct from their ancient peers. Unlike the
ancient era when children’s main activity was mostly work, modern children’s primary
responsibility in society is schooling, itself influenced by industrialization, the emergence of
middle class and formal educational institutions (ibid). Since enlightenment, schools have
been used institutionally for cultural reproduction, to develop respectful and law abiding
citizens, and as strategies to eliminate class differences and discrimination in society (Christie
n.d, 4; see also, Makwinja 2010, 37).
When children’s fundamental duty (schooling) is distinct from that of adults (work), society
‘creates a strict system of apartheid; a wall’ of social ‘separated-ness’ (Makwinja 2010).
When adults construct children as the ‘other’ or separate being, it means that society has some
responsibility toward children. Levinas (1972) describes this responsibility as ‘humanism of
the other man.’
12
In his recent paper, Class Consumed by Education, Nils Christie (n.d) questions the
relationship between modern childhood and schooling and argues that without consulting
children to determine what their ‘best interests’ are, schools have become venues for pupils’
rebellion and violence. Considering the increasing percentage of school dropouts in
industrialized countries, Christie suggests a practice-based approach to learning focused on
apprenticeship. In contrast to Africa where the formal African economy employs only a
limited number of people with acquired and qualified skills from formal education, the rising
percentage of unemployed skilled graduates in Africa seems to have influenced some parents
to prefer that their children learn skills in local crafts and trade than to attend formal schools
(Kielland et al. cited in, Makwinja 2010, 38).
When terms such as ‘school’ and ‘work’ are applied in Sub-Saharan Africa, their differences
may be blurred. African cultures conceptualize education and learning holistically. Education
in Africa involves the development of skills and capacities needed for decent living. It is
schooling, social learning, apprenticeship, vocational training (see Bass 2004; Agbu 2009).
Even in the West, Makwinja (2010) argues that schooling is work or a type of work, which
makes the conceptual and philosophical distinction between schooling and work problematic.
Modern childhood is a social and historical construct and biological reality; a describable
period of life, with children defined as having special needs and characteristics. Based on
international conventions, children are ‘human being[s] below the age of eighteen years’
except when existing State laws suggests that the age of majority is reached earlier or after 18
years (see, Article 1 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and Article 2 of the African
Convention on the Rights and Welfare of the Child). The ILO’s Convention 138 of 1976
defines children as anyone below 15 years of age. The Christian fundamentalist social
doctrine, partly based on the ‘culture of life,’ views a child as ‘anyone from the moment of
conception to the age of eighteen.’2
From these conceptions of children, we may distinguish between ‘born’ and ‘unborn’
children. This distinction projects and clarifies philosophical and ideological misconceptions
of children and childhood. We rely on ‘born’ children, whose social statuses are partly
determined by law (age). Children in all societies perform social functions at two levels:
2
These varying definitions of what it means to be a child may pose some methodological problems when
defining and studying child labour and developing child-centred policies.
13
For … individual children, it establishes a series of social positions that provides clarity and
predictability, regular movement from lower to higher rungs of the age-status ladder, and a
certain coherence as new role patterns are automatically assigned with increasing age. For
society, it provides for an effective division of labor, in the broadest sense of that term, thereby
establishing a social mechanism for maintaining the economy, the educational system, the
family system, and the military, political and religious systems (Neugarten 1996, 60; italics
added).
More on children’s social functions will be discussed in latter sections of this chapter. We
view children in this study as minors, whose ages are determined by existing national
legislations. Our operational framework provides a platform for comparative analysis on child
labour because of age variations of what it means to be a child in different legal sovereignties.
Generally, conventional legal definitions of children explicitly distinguish between minors
and age of majority3. Minors are dependants, who depend on their parents and societies to
develop and survive. As will be illustrated in later sections of this chapter, children are often
defined as ‘passive recipients … vulnerable dependents that are in need of adult protection,
control and guidance’ (Brown and McCormack 2005, 189). In societies without adequate and
effective child protection and welfare policies, these vulnerabilities may potentially expose
them to exploitation.
2.2 Models of Childhood
There are different models of childhood based on psychological development and biological
development. We limit ourselves here to the sociological models by James and his associates,
who conceptualise childhood using pre-sociological, sociological and social structural models
(see Makwinja 2010, 28-29).
Their pre-sociological model projects children in two ways. First, children are ‘evil’ and
‘corrupt’ and could be rescued by schooling. Second, children are ‘innocent’ and ‘angelic’, a
kind of blank slate uncorrupted by society. Consequently, it is necessary for society to build
3
The age of majority is the age at which children cease to be dependants. They start to take personal and civic
responsibilities. They can vote, enter into contracts, and may marry without other’s consent. Absent in this legal
constructions are the views and experiences of children and societies on childhood. Anthropologists suggest that
within cultures, the experience of childhood is differentiated by ‘age, gender, class, ethnicity, urban or rural
milieu, or even religion’ and across cultures by their material conditions, and the ‘duties, obligations, restraints,
and expectations placed upon children’ (Bass 2004, 15-16). It is therefore worthwhile to consider contextual
experiences and worldviews of children within and across cultures to enhance comparative studies and to
understand the meaning of children and child labour from different perspectives.
14
future upright citizens by making sure that schooling is tailored to meet the needs of each
child (ibid).
The sociological model assumes that children are raised in particular groups and societies
through socialization processes, which enshrines and reproduces an intergenerational
transmission of values, norms, customs, and laws within groups.
The social structural model considers children universally and institutionally as a special and
separate group of ‘social actors,’ with singular needs, rights, and biological and social traits.
Each of these models aims to realize particular objectives within societies and reflect the
historical, moral, political, and social changes different societies have experienced over time
(Makwinja 2010). Thus the perception each society may have of children during particular
historical periods more or less influences the place children have and roles they play in
society.
Though these models are ways of understanding childhood, globalization seems to have made
their independent distinction questionable because practically, most developing nations
experience a mix of sociological and social structural models of childhood as revealed by
local and national institutions.
2.3 Child Labour
Before the advent of modernization processes in Africa, child work to a large extent may have
been an intergenerational non-exploitative culture. The fact that children partly socialize by
working for their families, extended families and communities has made defining child labour
in Africa difficult. There is need, therefore, to distinguish between child work, child labour
and domestic work within African labour processes.
Domestic work is work done within employers’ households. Child work is work primarily
done for vocational and social training. Child work and domestic work may be distinct but
they may slide ‘progressively … into tougher forms of exploitation that tend to remove
children from their family milieu, from the lands and life paths of childhood, and cast them on
the labour market’ (Agbu 2009, 14).
Most international conventions on child labour characterize child labour as criminalized work;
that is, paid, unpaid, and exploitative work that puts the interests of employers above those of
children, and is detrimental to the physical, biological, emotional, mental, educational and
15
moral development of children. These conventional definitions make explicit the age children
are allowed to work; the type of work they are entitled to perform; and the responsibilities that
employers have or do not have to child workers.
Definitions of child labour based on international conventions seem to lack some operational
clarity. Its failure to define ‘exploitative work’ may open this term to different interpretations
hinging on political, moral, ideological, and social factors. Thus different authors view child
labour differently using variables such as: number of school dropouts, paid work, poorly paid
work, unpaid work, hours worked, worked one hour in a week, main child’s activity
(school/work). Consequently, it becomes difficult and cumbersome to produce accurate
statistics on child labour in Africa for comparative analysis.
The International Labour Organisation (ILO) through its International Programme for the
Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) and ILO’s Bureau of Statistics have since 1998, developed
a methodology - the Statistical Information and Monitoring Programme on Child Labour
(SIMPOC) – to produce annual national data on child labour. SIMPOC’s basic methodology
relies on cross-sectional national surveys (households, employers, street children) using
‘multi-stage stratified sampling design’. Results are extrapolated using computer programmes
to produce ‘benchmark statistics on children’s work’ in general or to produce statistics on
specific core variables (Haspels and Jankanish 2000, 119). SIMPOC defines children as
persons between 5 and 14 years of age but the definition can also be extended for operational
purposes to include those below 18 years old. SIMPOC’s core dependent variables of child
labour are:
children’s schooling and training status, occupation, skills levels, hours of work, earnings and
other working and living conditions and the reasons for working, as well as the hardships and
risks, especially work related or environmental injuries and diseases they face at their
workplace which are detrimental to their health, education and physical and mental
development; the socio-economic situation of their parents or guardians or other relatives with
whom the children live, as well as the particulars of their employers; the migration status of
the children and how they live (in particular those on the streets); where the children have
been working, for how long and why they are working, their own immediate and future
plans and those of employers using child workers; and the perceptions of the parents or
guardians about their youngsters and those of the children themselves and their employers
(Haspels and Jankanish 2000,120).
These data are useful in carrying out cross-country comparative analysis on child labour over
time. They can influence the calculation of the number of injuries and incidence rates for
illnesses resulting from child labour. Comparing these rates with other child labour variables
16
and children’s gender may help policy makers design policies and projects to eradicate child
labour (Castro et al. 2005).
Directly associated sometimes to child labour is child trafficking, condemned by the UN
Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and
Children (2000). A child is considered as trafficked if there is a transaction, the intervention
of an intermediary, and a motive to exploit. Transaction refers to any practice whereby,
children below 18 years are handed over by their parents or guardians to a third party for the
purpose of providing labour (ILO 2001). There are different types of child trafficking:
abduction, placement as sale, bonded placement, temporal placement, placement as a service,
and placement as embezzlement (ibid). Recent studies show that child fostering sometimes
leads to child trafficking and exploitation in Africa and Asia (see for example, Kristof and
Wudunn 2010).
Some literature on child labour notes that child trafficking is common in (West) Africa, where
local traditions recognize child fostering. The way child trafficking discourse is framed on
Africa is overly negative and based not on African realities, but seemingly, on dominant
social structural model of childhood. While experience shows that child fostering may slip
into child labour and child trafficking, the primary objective of child fostering in Africa
traditionally has positive connotations. Historically, child fostering in Africa is aimed at
helping children learn particular skills and trade by way of apprenticeship. Today, some
trafficked children are educated. Children from poor rural households or from locales without
educational institutions are sent to live and attend schools in urban areas with relatives and
family friends. Living with their guardians, these fostered children perform domestic work,
which unfortunately has been qualified as child labour by some authors. Furthermore, the
balkanization of Africa separated ethic groups and families into different neighbouring nationstates. Fostering children from the same extended families living in two separate nation-states
for purposes of learning skills, trade and education should not, in our opinion, be viewed as
child trafficking. Child fostering is important in rural Africa because:
1) Senior relatives … have a right to claim and rear … children which is supernaturally
sanctioned and dangerous to deny. 2) The fostering of children links together dispersed kin
through shared interests, and because the child growing up in a grandparent’s, aunt’s, or
uncle’s household will develop sibling-like ties with peers there … [which] perpetuates the
link in the next generation. … Fostered children also come to know the traditions and customs
of their new homes thus reducing the strangeness of affinal ties with other groups. … 3) It is
good for the child’s character to be reared by those able to require respect and obedience.
17
Parents are believed to be too fond and thus unable to discipline a child as they should (Goody
, 240; italics in original).
Child labour as defined in this study is any work done by children that ‘violates a nation’s
minimum age laws; threatens children’s physical, mental or emotional well-being; involves
intolerable abuse such as child slavery, child trafficking, debt bondage, forced labour, or illicit
activities; prevents children from going to school; uses children to undermine labour
standards’4. Based on this definition, statistics (see Appendix 1) show that when compared to
Asia and Latin America, child labour is very high in Africa. The statistics in Appendix 2 also
shows that boys are likely to work as child labourers than girls to supplement household
incomes. Culturally, there is division of labour: girls are more involved in household chores
and boys in economic activities. It may be partly for this reason that some authors and
organizations note that culturally, child labour is both beneficial and harmful to children (see
UNICEF 1997; Bass 2004: Bøas and Huser 2006).
2.4 Determinants of Child Labour
Existing theories have explained the causes of child labour. In this section, we will provide
summary explanations of some of these theories. We will argue that some theories have failed
to grasp that cultural practices are central to understanding child labour in developing
countries. In expounding on the institutional theory on child labour, we will use the concept of
institutions to view and to explain the development and spread of child labour. We
demonstrate the increasing role formal and informal institutions have historically played in
the statistical increase of child labour. We thus agree with Ekpe-Otu that child labour studies
‘necessitates an analytical framework deriving from specific contexts and existent politicoeconomic and socio-cultural milieus’ (Ekpe-Otu 2009, 22). In fact, our institutional theory
will show that the complex nature of child labour cannot be explained by a single existing
theory.
2.4.1 Marxist Theory of Child Labour
The Marxist theory of child labour can be understood by unraveling the concept of class.
According to Max Weber, class exhibits people’s common interests in market situations, how
they perceive society, their positions in it, and their skills and educational background (see,
Hobbs et al.1999, 211). According to Karl Marx who views it as a feature of capitalism, class
4
See: http://www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/laborctr/child_labor/about/what_is_child_labor.html (accessed,
15.10.10)
18
is the antagonistic relationship between competing and opposing groups and interests and the
positions these groups have within a system of economic production (ibid).
This theory states that child labour is a symbol of exploitation and inequality of incomes and
wealth within society. It argues that child labour is essential for the survival of capitalist
economic systems and the profitability of profit-maximization enterprises. This happens when
children work for long hours, are paid poorly, with employers disrespecting existing national
labour laws within ‘modern mode of production.’ For instance, historical records register that
child labour was widespread during England’s agro-industrial revolution, where children
between 5 and 6 years old worked in ‘dark satanic mills’ for between 12 to 16 hours daily, six
days weekly without recess for meals in hot, stuffy, poorly lit, overcrowded factories and
mines to earn as little as four shillings weekly. Some were beaten to be awake while at work
while others were mutilated or killed5. Children also worked as prostitutes, shoe blacks,
crossing sweepers, and domestic servants. With inadequate Workhouses to cater for the poor
and strict eligibility criteria in administering Poor Relief programmes in parishes, English
employers exploited children from poor households to make supernormal profits. We may
criticize this thesis on ideological grounds. However, the basic hypothesis that child labour is
exploitation and that it is more or less a corollary of income inequality may be accepted as
valid based on empirical evidences.
Carolyn Tuttle (n.d) writes that the child labour debate in England was dominated by what she
calls ‘optimists’ and ‘pessimists’. Optimists (capitalist and puritan defenders of child labour)
such as John Wesley, Clapham and Ure argued that child labour was good for society in
general because it was beneficial to children, families and country: work made children idle
less so that they contribute to family income. Employers argued that because of low pay,
child labour gave them competitive edge in markets6. Pessimists such as Webber, Engels, and
Marx explained that child labour should be abolished because it was the exploitation of ‘man
by man.’7
2.4.2 Modernist Theory of Child Labour
The modernist theory says that underdevelopment is the cause of child labour and modernity
its solution. It argues that child labour is ‘an anachronism’, a feature of traditional societies
5
A better description of child exploitation during this era can be perused in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield
and many historical texts treating England’s industrial revolution.
6
Tuttle, Carolyn. ‘Child Labor During the English Industrial Revolution.’
See, http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/tuttle.labor.child.britain (accessed, 27.11.10).
7
Ibid.
19
where children are regarded as household economic resources. This feature can be corrected
by ‘the full development of modernism’, that is, the expansion of open and accountable
government, free movement of capital and labour, free markets, liberal democratic processes,
and human freedoms and rights (Hobbs et al. 1999). This thesis further argues that ‘the
continuation of child labor in the newly industrializing or underdeveloped economies can be
explained by their failure to fully modernize’ (Hobbs et al. 1999, 127). Inherent in this theory
are two interrelated assumption (1) that industrialization leads to economic growth, and (2)
that new technologies and innovations may perform work that was hitherto done by children.
Hence, economic growth and the use of technology and innovation in society is a holistic
method of combating child labour, allowing children to be in school.
The modernist theory is based on Western historical developments and cultural experiences.
Its view on correcting child labour through modernisation and industrialisation is too
idealistic because even in some advanced nations, empirical evidences show that child labour
has not been absolutely eradicated.
To Africanists, the term modernity/modernisation is value-laden, contested and more or less
perceived as a paternalistic Western concept that is ‘structured by the ambivalence of promise
and denial ... constitutive of colonialism’ (Macamo 2005, 7). When analysed within the
confines of the modernist theory, this ‘ambivalence of promise and denial’ may create
resistances to child labour eradication policies and programmes. We agree with Chowdhry
(2002, 238) that child labour is used partly as a means of constructing differentiated spaces,
cultures, and unequal power relations, which in turn, locates child labour within opposing
binaries: ‘morality/immorality,’ ‘developed/developing,’ ‘First World/Third World,’
‘rich/poor,’ and, ‘importing/exporting’ nations.
2.5 An Institutional Theory of Child Labour
Institutions have been defined differently in the social sciences. Generally, they are formal
and informal organisations, laws, rules, practices, beliefs, norms, and customs. We consider
institutions in this study as (codifiable) rules and social conventions; that is, behavioural
norms, social practices, and legal rules. Rules are laws and explicitly crafted directives from
authorities aimed at achieving specific policy goals. Implicit in this definition is the place of
formal and informal organizations within theories on institutions.
In the next section, we consider that most, if not, all child labourers come from families
experiencing social risks, especially, poverty. We will assume that parents/families who allow
20
their children to work often do so rationally and collectively through the influence of local
cultures, self-interest and economic and social pressures. In presenting this analysis, we take
as our departure point, the relationship between institutions, children, and child labour.
2.5.1 Institutions, Children, and Child Labour
Societies are organized by their institutions, which in turn, defines status roles for individuals
and groups. John R. Searle describes these roles as ‘status functions.’ In his recently published
work, Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization, Searle states that status
functions in societies are imposed by institutions and human social reality:
The distinctive feature about human social reality … is that humans have the capacity to
impose functions on objects and people where the objects and the people cannot perform the
functions solely in virtue of their physical structure. The performance of the functions requires
that there be a collectively recognized status that the person or object has, and it is only in
virtue of that status that the person or object can perform the function in question (Searle 2010,
7).
Status functions have deontic powers. By this we mean that status functions have rights,
obligations, entitlements, duties, requirements, and permissions, which provide humans with
reasons for actions that are independent of their desires (Searle 2010, 7-10). They are
dependent on: (1) collective recognition that a person or object can perform a function; (2) the
existence of collective intentional states that a person or object can perform a function; and
(3) humans have the capacity to cooperate because of shared attitudes, desires, and belief
(ibid).
Within social theory, age is an important determinant of the status functions of children.
Bernice L. Neugarten writes that:
Age status systems are built upon functional age. That is, as the individual’s physical, mental,
and social competencies change over time, he is able to carry out different social functions.
Those competencies are utilized and systematized in the interests of the society at large. Social
age distinctions appear, therefore, because they are inherently functional to society (Neugarten
1996, 59).
Considering differences in socio-economic, cultural and political developments between
societies, children’s functional age vary and may be determined by the scale of change (sociocultural, worldviews, economic systems) and household division of labour. Evidence of these
transformational changes may best explain the place of child labour in developing societies
since the pre-colonial era.
Traditionally, African children and their functions are not defined by age. Though at present
age defines children and their functions legally, in very remote communities, their transition
21
from childhood to adulthood is punctuated by public ceremonies (rites of passage) as during
the pre-colonial era. We posit that these rites of passage, which culturally determine the
functional age of children seems to have laid a solid the foundation for the statistical rise in
child labour since the colonial period.
Our argument is that in Africa, almost all cultures perform rites of passage of different forms.
After these ceremonies, children may be viewed as adults and physically strong to perform
certain tasks. Following these rituals, children from the age of 14 or 15 years take
responsibility to accept and respect customary laws and norms (Manning 1998; see also, Laye
1954). We conjecture that during the colonial era, this social practice may have encouraged
colonial administrators to exploit children as cheap labourers in their homes, public works
schemes and plantations.
Secondly, low population densities, the need for cheap excess labour, and the effects of
introducing modern medicines, child sacrifice prohibitions, the establishment of capitalist
agricultural economies, and the Christianization of Africa surely increased the value of having
more children and cheap labourers within African households.
Thirdly, the introduction of alien concepts like monetised economy, poverty, and economic
development based on agriculture forcibly transformed African worldviews. African
worldview of poverty in this new economic order is suggestive of how local peoples grapple
with the new capitalist economic systems. Some African cultures still regard poverty as the
absence of a large family8. Indeed, this worldview may have partly influenced some postindependent African governments to introduce child welfare benefits schemes (family
allowances), which indirectly increased national population figures and necessary labour force
to engineer economic development. We argue that these social and political changes may have
encouraged Africans into more polygynous marriages so that children’s cheap labour
improves household incomes per head through unpaid agricultural work. We will
demonstrate these arguments in Chapter 3 of this study.
2.5.2 Poverty, Unequal Institutional Power Relations, and Child Labour
Poverty is a broad and narrow concept whose meanings vary over time and space. Its main
determinants narrowly defined include income, human development, freedom, and social
8
For instance, Umphawi (poverty) is a term in the Chewa dialect of Malawi denoting the lack of kith and kin
(see, Iliffe 1987).
22
exclusion. Most researchers generally agree that definitions of poverty need to be understood,
at least in part, in relation to particular social, cultural and historical contexts. This has
implication for studies that attempt to compare poverty in very different kinds of society.
We conceive poverty in this study as lack of income resources without which individuals and
households may lack opportunities, capabilities, and the experience to realize a basic basket of
needs. This may result to individual and collective despair, political and social instability,
environmental destruction, poor health, loss of dignity and self-worth. Income variable has an
overriding influence in poverty studies because without it, individuals and households may
lack needed capabilities to realize basic needs basket.
The link between child labour and poverty is a contentious one. While some studies argue that
poverty does not cause child labour, other studies demonstrate the contrary. For instance,
numerous empirical studies in Asia show that children’s work is significant in raising
households’ incomes above poverty line. A statistical study on child labour participation rates
and poverty in selected African nations by the World Bank (1995) shows a less clear positive
correlation. Countries with similar levels of national income have widely different child
labour participation rates and countries with similar participation rates have widely dissimilar
national incomes levels (Andvig et al. 2001). Albeit poverty is a pointer to explain child
labour in Africa, we need not look only at statistics (ibid).
Most studies consider poverty as a given to explain child labour. They fail to show how lack
of income to realize a basket of needs influences families and households to instruct children
to work. To us, it seems probable that rational self-interest influences parents to make sure
their children work. These interests and choices are determined by the socio-economic
conditions (poverty) that households experience. Child labour may thus be considered as one
of those choices to overcome poverty because:
If [man] chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to
implement his choice. If he does not choose to live, nature will take its course. Reality
confronts a man with a great many 'must's', but all of them are conditional: the formula of
realistic necessity is: 'you must, if -' and the if stands for man's choice: 'if you want to achieve
a certain goal (Rand 1982, 118-119).
Ayn Rand continues this line of reasoning in Atlas Shrugged:
Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given
to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive he
must act and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot
obtain his food without knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch–
23
–or build a cyclotron––without a knowledge of his aim and the means to achieve it. To
remain alive, he must think (Rand 1992, 1012).
According to this existentialist position of Ayn Rand, poverty is a socio-economic reality that
individuals and families experience. As they grapple with the effects of this reality in the
absence of strong market and public social safety nets, households make rational strategies
and choice, one of which is child labour.
Jens Andvig et al. (2001) notes that poor countries with large rural populations account for
much of child labour than organized economic activities in Africa because about 90% of child
labour in Africa is not wage labour. These rural societies are characterized mostly by high
fertility rates, poverty and low per capita income, labour intensive agricultural economy,
multiple social risks, youthful population, child fostering institutions, low industrialization
and service industry, insecure property rights, absent or inefficient private and public welfare
institutions, poor labour markets for women especially in rural areas, imperfect credit and
insurance markets. Thus children work because ‘the child-labor market does not always
operate on the basis of voluntary exchange but coercion and psychological pressures’ from
parents and guardians (Basu and Van 1999, 415). These pressures may be re-enforced by
local customs that encourage children to unquestionably obey and respect their parents and
elders. Some parents use the literal interpretation of the biblical injunction in Exodus 20:12
and Deuteronomy 5:16 requesting children to respect and honour their parents to stress
unquestionable loyalty from children. This Christian command for children to respect their
elders has symbolic, spiritual, and material rewards. Its ideological interpretations in different
cultures may likely empower elders and parents to use children in social and economic
structures as labourers. A good example to illustrate this point is 17th century American
Puritans. Puritan parents viewed their roles as ‘protective, discipline, advising, and training’
of children. Children were supposed to obey the will and authority of their parents; else they
will experience ‘eternal damnation’ from God. As a result, male children started working on
farms starting at 5 years old and female children spun and sewed9.
The absence of children’s basic freedoms and respect of their rights may likely create an intergenerational ‘bucket theory’ in children’s mind, that is, children unquestionably accept
whatever they are told by their parents as correct. Dipinkar Purkayastha’s Parental Power
Model of child labour economics best captures children’s vulnerabilities and lack of power in
relation to household decision making in child labour:
9
See, http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/gaylor/Puritan.ppt (accessed, 27.11.10)
24
... income contributions of the household members are voluntary and the members have no
individual “property rights” over their income within the family. All members contribute their
income into the common family pot and a benevolent dictator makes the allocation. The
original idea came from the economics of marriage: a family allocation must be Pareto
superior to both the partners, or else the marriage itself could not have been a viable contract.
But the economics of child labour has to be different from the economics of marriage. A child
does not have a “threat point” that married partners have. A moment’s reflection will make it
clear that since the working children do not have the freedom to opt out of the family contract,
and since generally, the child cannot “divorce” the parents, the question of parental power and
parental coercion cannot be shoved under the rug … (Purkayastha 1998, 48; italics added).
This model may work in three distinct circumstances, excluding situations whereby a child
heads a household due to the death of both parents from accidents or diseases:
1. Male adults are the only suppliers in the labor market (or suppliers of cash crop), while the
female adults and the children produce the internally supplied consumer goods. The children
divide their time between household labor, education, and leisure, the women between
household work and leisure. The income and home-made products are pooled, and the
household centrally managed—the defining characteristic of the household models. In a
variation, the boys and adult men may work on the cash crops, girls and women supply work
for the non-cash goods.
2. Male and female adults are suppliers in the labor market, but the women divide their time
between cash and home production—production where output is reconsumed in the family—
where men are not involved. The children divide their time between schooling and home
production. All groups have some leisure.
3. The households are managed by adult females who divide their time between the labor (or
cash crop) market—eventually as paid work for their husbands—home production, and
leisure. The children do as in the preceding example. The income of the husband that is
transferred to the household is considered exogenous. This is a way to maintain the simple
structure of the household decision making and at the same time recognize some of the
distinctive aspects of much African family life (Andvig 2001, 15 -16).
Child labour is evident in these three scenarios because sub-Saharan Africa is not fully
capitalist. It is made up of societies where since colonialism, capitalist social relations is
comprised more of generalized commodity production, the forceful commodification of
subsistence, and petty commodity production (Bernstein n.d). Here (emerging) capitalist
farmers seem to use child labour to expand production and poor farmers, ‘to reproduce
themselves and their children as capital … as labour from their own farming’ (Bernstein n.d,
7).
In her ethnographic study on child labour in 91 different societies including 17 from Africa,
Bradley (1993) concludes that children undertake the same tasks as adults of the same gender:
younger children perform more of adult female tasks because they live in the same social
space and women control and socialize them; and some tasks (for example, tending animals)
are specifically for children. This means that there may be a positive correlation between the
proportion of female household tasks and child labour participation rates. Thus the economic
25
and social structure and the proportion and frequency of female related and children related
tasks in rural societies are influential in understanding child labour in Africa. Based on these
dispositions, economists argue that increases in household incomes may likely reduce the
prevalence of child labour in the continent.
2.6
Conclusion
Child labour is a complex and sophisticated concept that has evolved over time. However, an
institutional approach to this concept seems to provide some contours to operationalise the
meaning of childhood and poverty, and the ways in which formal and informal institutions
conceptualise and grapple with social and economic realities. We hold that informal
institutions are robust in managing social risks by use of child labour especially in absence of
market mechanisms or when public policy fail to address social risks and provide social safety
nets to protect families and households.
‘
26
Chapter 3
The State of Pre-Colonial and Colonial
Child Labour in Cameroon and Gabon
Most child labour studies with Africanist perspectives use a historical framework composed
of pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial eras (see Grier 2009; Ekpe-Otu 2009; Bass 2004;
Olutayo 1994). This framework relates to the periodization of African history, manifesting a
contextual understanding of child labour characteristics and practices over time and space. It
seems attuned to the hypothesis that the statistical increase or decrease of child labour may be
related to the functioning existing social, economic, cultural and political institutions within
societies. We note that most analyses on child labour in Africa in scholarly literature have
been limited to colonial era, and most especially, post colonial era (see, for example, Grier
2009, Ekpe-Otu 2009). The pre-colonial epoch is given less attention for reasons that will be
explained in later sections of this chapter.
Our starting point for this chapter is a contentious one: that is, when modernization processes
started in Africa. Two schools of thought, if we may call it so, have dominated this discourse.
The first, the economic and colonial one, says that modernization processes begins from 1885,
when various local African polities were gradually and forcefully integrated into the capitalist
economic system by European colonialists. The second, the Africanist one, says that it begins
from ca. 1960 when Africans obtained freedom from European oppression and domination
and asserted African personality on world affairs. In African politics, however, the term
‘modernisation’ is sometimes despised because of the brutal domination and oppression by
Europeans over a colonized people in guise of ‘civilizing mission.’
For purposes of analysis only, we suggest that 1885 marks the beginning of modernization
processes in Africa. This conscious framework is not to support or refute the argument that
Africa was not modern before 1885. The basic intention here is to demonstrate that
modernization processes, which transformed Africa economically, socially, and politically,
has contributed in the statistical rise of child labour in Cameroon and Gabon. We consider the
pre-1884 years as constituting pre-modern Africa and post-1884 years as modern Africa.
Modern Africa for reasons of categorization is divided into colonial and post-colonial Africa.
We thus view modernization in Africa as a process of economic, social and political shifts in
local societies characterized by urbanization, the free movement of goods and people, the
27
enjoyment of basic freedoms, growth in per capita incomes, spread of markets, increasing role
of nation-states and its institutions over those of ethnic nations, and the forceful movement
from pre-capitalist to capitalist economic system. In this chapter, we analyse pre-colonial and
colonial child labour. Post-colonial child labour is reserved for Chapter 4.
3.1 Pre-modern ‘Child Labour’ in Africa
There are a number of difficulties to write on pre-modern child labour in Cameroon and
Gabon. We will use the African continent in this section rather than Cameroon and Gabon
because both nation-states did not exist before 1884. However, we rely on existing literature
on pre-colonial societies in these polities in particular, and Africa in general, to deduce the
place of children and child labour, if any, in local societies that inhabited these nation-states.
European traders have been trading with coastal Africans before 1884, which resulted to the
Transatlantic slave trade, affecting millions of African children and adults. We will not
consciously be treating these effects on children. The intention here is to concentrate purely
on African institutions, which may likely have set the stage for the development of present
child labour institutions in Cameroon and Gabon. We start by presenting some reasons that
may account for the difficulty in treating child labour in pre-modern Africa.
First, there is paucity or absence of reliable data on pre-colonial child labour in African
chiefdoms, kingdoms, and empires especially as earliest European colonialists and visitors
tended to describe all Africans as immature uncivilized children. These racist descriptions did
not take into consideration the human differences of Africans such age, height, physical
structure and appearance, population structure, and sex (Carton n.d). Even if one were to rely
on texts written by some of these earliest European missionaries, traders, and explorers to
describe pre-colonial child labour in Africa, one has to tread carefully because these texts are
biased with a Eurocentric set of lenses.
Second, it seems logically inappropriate to use modern measurements, characteristics, and
standards of child labour to evaluate and analyse pre-colonial African child labour. For
instance, one variable currently used to determine national child labour statistics by ILO’s
Bureau of Statistics is children’s school attendance. Except in Islamic societies where some
Koranic schools existed during the pre-colonial era, formal schools in the Western sense did
not exist in Africa. Even in pre-colonial Koranic schools in Cameroon, it seems improbable
that pupils’ school attendances were registered. Furthermore, childhood as a legal term is a
modern social construct. Historically, its meanings have changed contextually over time
28
(Ariès 1962). Thus, it is difficult to use modern definition(s) of childhood and child labour to
analyze pre-colonial child labour.
Third, Africa’s economy was pre-capitalistic. Its trade, even with early European traders was
based on the barter system. It was later that money (cowry, Manillas) was used as a means of
exchange. Though children worked in the African pre-capitalist agricultural societies, it was
more for household consumption than markets. Stating that there was anything as pre-modern
child labour in Africa may be a misnomer.
The existing economic and social systems in pre-modern Africa did not view children
working at home and for their fostered parents and families as child labour. It was a learning
process, an apprenticeship designed to make children capable of fending for themselves in the
later years of their lives. With a few craft industries and subsistence agriculture dominating
pre-colonial economies, children’s work should not be viewed as either child work or child
labour. These terms have not been recorded as existing in African languages by linguists. The
closest to these terms in African languages are descriptions such as ‘the type of work that
children do, or work suitable for children’ (Kielland et al. cited in Makwinja 2010, 36).
According to Professor Michael Seltzer (per. comm), this kind of work can be viewed as
domestic work or family work, that is, work done by children with respect to the needs of
family units (see also Bass 2004, 20-21).
Moreover, pre-modern African families and societies did not define nor view work performed
by children as labour nor did children themselves view their performance of work as labour.
The point here being that the economic term labour application to child work activities
inherently views these partly as commodities that can be traded in labour markets. Except for
the Trans-Atlantic slave trade in human beings, labour markets stricto sensu did not exist in
pre-modern Africa.
Owing to these and related reasons, the treatment of pre-colonial child labour in Africa is rare
in scholarly literature. Much of this literature talks of work or child work, terms whose current
meanings do not suit the existing social and economic institutions during pre-colonial times.
Others scholars mention pre-colonial child work only as a historical prelude to understanding
contemporary child labour. But they do not fully demonstrate how child work operated during
pre-colonial times. For instance, A. O. Olutayo (1994) in Systemic Source of 'Working
Children' in Africa: The Case of Nigeria, abstracted only that ‘the emergence of working
children can be traced to the pre-colonial epoch in African countries. … this seems inevitable
29
to the people as a method of exploiting the environment especially because of the precapitalist nature of these countries’ (see also Ekpe-Otu 2009).
Three different economic and social institutions in this study describes work (agriculture,
apprenticeship, pawning) in which pre-modern African children were involved. We note that
these activities in which children were involved occurred within domestic spaces. Like in preindustrial Europe, the home was a productive space where children participated in the
household economy. It was also a space for children’s involvement in child rearing and
cultural reproduction.
The first economic institution in which pre-modern children participated is agriculture.
Relying on archaeological evidences, and oral histories, numerous studies have reconstructed
Africa’s agricultural practices and systems during pre-colonial times (for a general overview
of these literatures see, Widgren 2009). While subsistence agriculture dominated agricultural
systems in pre-colonial Cameroon and Gabon, MacEachern (cited in Widgren 2009) using
archaeological materials, deduced that intensive terrace farming might have taken place in the
Mandara Mountains of Northern Cameroon between 1500 and 1800. Higher precipitation
rates, volcanic soils, and protection from neighbouring pastoral communities may have
accounted for this practice. Albeit this might have been the case, we do not view children’s
work as overly central to these agricultural systems. Children worked in farms though but
probably for household needs rather than market needs because the economy was still precapitalist in nature.
Apart from farming, children were also involved in learning skills and traditional specialist
occupations (blacksmithing, drum-making, divining, fighting wars, weaving, dyeing, mining,
wood carving) through kin fosterage and apprenticeships. These part-time occupations were
sometimes learnt outside and sometimes within children’s immediate families. In this
apprenticeship framework, ‘sons live as dependent members of the household, they do
whatever work is needed, whether or not it is related to commodity production … gradually
they participate more directly in production and eventually are full-time workers in the
household industry’ (Goody 1989, 238). Goody further writes that in this framework, it was
compulsory for the ‘master’ to provide for the apprentices’ moral and social welfare while the
latter respected and obeyed the former without reserve. In this sense, ‘kin fosterage involves
the exchange of children’s labor for strengthened kin ties, and claims based on these’ (Goody
1989, 242; italics added). It is this system that may be rightly or wrongly partly regarded
30
today as pre-colonial child labour. We may christen this system as pre-colonial workfare than
child labour because the intention was to develop independent, responsible, and creative
individuals in society.
The third institution is pawning. Pawning is a system whereby children or pawns live with
creditors as collateral security when their parents contract loans. The work that pawns
perform for creditors is considered interests on the contracted loans. Upon marriage to a
member of the creditor’s household, the loan is cancelled. However, pawns were sold as
slaves in situations of famine, hardship, drought, political instability, and warfare (Goody
1989; Grier 2009). Sometimes, a family’s inability to pay a witchdoctor or diviner for services
rendered may result in pawning. ‘In Central Africa,’ writes Lars Sundstrom, ‘the charging of
interests on loans was a fairly recent phenomenon’ (Sundstrom 1974, 34) marked by the
presence of colonial parties from its coasts to the hinterlands. Girls were sometimes preferred
as pawn by creditors because they performed multiple functions - human reproduction, farm
workers, porters, and wives (Grier 2009).
As noted before, the use of children as pawns, apprentices, and farm workers in pre-modern
Africa’s economic structures and systems, albeit abhorrent in relation to modernism, should
not be viewed as child labour. It was a mode de vie deeply entrenched in pre-capitalist local
practices and customs. Slavery in some communities was a means of correcting social ills
because pre-modern African traditional practices until the emergence of colonialism, abhorred
the institutionalization of child labour (Goody 1989). Doing so can be construed as ‘a
question of a wrongful and alien deconstruction of the African child by the West’ (Ekpe-Otu
2009, 22).
3.2
Child Labour in Colonial Cameroon and Gabon
This section now turns to child labour in Cameroon and Gabon during the colonial period.
This analysis is divided into two periods, 1884 – 1945 and 1945-1960, marking distinct ways
and periods how children were treated. In both colonies, colonial policies viewed and treated
children and the use of their labour in economic production almost the same, producing
almost the same results. We have been unable to find scholarly references, as well as, (many)
photographs, paintings, and statistics specifically focused on child labour during the colonial
period in Cameroon and Gabon. Inspired by general state of colonial economies and policies
and labour recruitment systems in these colonies, our analysis is, therefore, inferentially
deductive.
31
3.2.1 The Period 1884-1945.
Prior to 1884, several events occurred along coastal Cameroon and Gabon manifesting a
prelude to the changes these colonies observed between 1884 and 1945. European merchants
and explorers had worked to abolish slavery and slave trade along the Gulf of Guinea. These
activities led to the establishment of legitimate trade with local peoples and chiefdoms and the
beginning of establishing capitalism in the colonies. Following the signing of treaties with
local chiefs (Germano- Duala Treaty for Cameroon and French-Mpongwe Treaty), both
Germany and France respectively created Kamerun and French Congo (Gabon). Thus 18841945 marks the era of European colonization, development and implementation of colonial
policies and consolidation of colonial rule.
It also witnessed the emergence of large scale internal migration amongst native peoples from
the hinterlands to coastal areas and the start of urbanization processes in these colonies. In this
light, we start by examining reasons why children’s labour was essential to realize the
colonial economies and policies put in place in both colonies. We will also investigate the use
of child labour by colonial administrators, missionaries, planters, traders, and local cash crop
producers in Cameroon and Gabon.
Though European colonial powers talked of mission civilisatrice in their quest for territories
in Africa, they partly relied on children’s labour to achieve this mission. What a contradiction
between the modernist ‘civilizing mission’ and child labour? This contradiction tells us three
things: (1) that in the absence of robust institutions in defense of children, they are likely to be
exploited by powerful capitalist profiteers, and (2) civilizing mission has generally been
accepted as colonial propaganda to place colonial peoples under foreign rule and domination,
and (3) that the exploitation of children as labourers by colonial traders and planters when
European was struggling to abolish child labour was not only colonial double standards but
probably a racist economic policy.
Between 1884 and 1945, children’s labour was forcefully recruited in Cameroon and Gabon
for the development of plantations and public works schemes. Several factors accounted for
this trend. European colonial administrators and planters met functioning pre-modern
economic and social structures favourable to the use of children’s labour. As in pre-modern
Europe, children and adults were involved agriculture, herding, manufacturing, warfare, and
hunting amongst other activities. Some children were slaves and pawns. Since children were
part of the African indigenous workforce, Europeans built capitalist economic structures in
32
these colonies partly on this indigenous foundation. Children’s labour was cheap, sometimes
free, and was important for the production and movement of crops to coastal towns and
villages for export (Grier 2009).
The commodification of labour and forceful monetization of economies was intertwining
features of colonial systems in Africa. Because in terms of policy each colony was selfsustaining financially, with some grants from Europe, direct taxation was used to raise
revenues for colonial projects and administration. This change from pre-modern African
economic systems meant that income gained from manpower hours became essential for
household survival and to meet new needs and wants. The forceful colonial requests for tax
payments and export crop by adults thus influenced parents to involve their children even
more than before in agricultural activities. Some parents pawned their children, who later,
were forced to work in lieu of interest on loans their parents contracted.
The low population densities in most chiefdoms on the eve of colonization and during
colonial rule in Cameroon and Gabon prohibited local practices like twin sacrifices. The
introduction of improved health care systems by missionary organizations and German and
French colonial governments reduced rising death and infant mortality rates from malaria,
alcoholism, trypanosomiasis, and smallpox helped to engineer future labour force and
population growth. For instance, the population of Ubangi-Shari (Gabon) was estimated by
Georges Bruel, a French colonial administrator in 1930 to be 468.000 persons with a
population density of 1.79 persons per square kilometer in 1935 (see Cinnamon 2010, 146).
John M. Cinnamon writes that Bruel in a 1918 publication suggested a ‘food crop policy that
would prevent famine and foster rapid population growth; [which], in turn, would create “a
more abundant workforce” and additional taxpayers and consumers’ in Gabon (Cinnamon
2010, 145). In 1912, Cameroon’s population was 2.6 million persons10.
It seems likely that the scarcity of adult labour in these new capitalist economies may have
influenced colonialists to transform children from domestic or family workers into child
labourers. This seems to be the case when one perceives African labourers through the
European ethnocentric lens as lazy and weak persons. Thus German planters and
10
See http://www.zum.de/whkmla/region/centrafrica/cameroon18841918.html (accessed, 3.01.11). Since
censuses were not conducted we opine that these population numbers may have been exaggerated. Though
Gabon has suffered considerably from the HIV/AIDS syndrome, its present national population is estimated to
be 1.5 million persons. If by 1935 this colony had a population of close to 500.000 persons, we suggest that this
country’s population should have been more than the present national estimate because of the different policies
implemented since independence to ensure population growth.
33
administrators and French concessionary companies forcefully recruited Cameroonians and
Gabonese to respectively work in coastal German plantations and Gabonese timber trade and
rubber collection11. This policy also involved forceful labour recruitment for road and railway
construction and conscription in the colonial army. A good example is the Zintgraff-Galega I
Treaty signed on the 23 August 1891 between Dr. Eugen Zintgraff representing the German
colonial government and Galega I, the chief of Bali Nyonga in Kamerun. This Treaty, which
in part called on Galega I to recruit able and strong natives to work in German coastal
plantations, was implemented with great attention. Labour recruitment was also a colonial
means of conquering and controlling local geographical spaces (Gray 2002).
Forced labour policy decimated villages and forced children to lose parents through deaths
and desertion of villages to hide in forests. Some children had to work as domestic servants
for European administrators (See Plate 1). Considering the fact that children are smart and
cheap as workers and German and French businessmen and planters’ complaint of labour
shortage12, it is likely that children worked as harvesters in German coacoa, tobacco, and
banana plantations in Kamerun and in the timber trade in Gabon. Descriptions in Kamerun on
the effects of forced labour by Victor Julius Ngoh in History of Cameroon Since 1800 may
help us understand the effects that forced labour may have had on children. Ngoh (1996)
reveals that overcrowded camps, poor working conditions, sexually transmissible diseases,
and slave wages for workers led to rapid rise in the annual death rates, which influenced
colonial administrators to request each plantation to have its own cemetery. In Gabon, the
forceful recruitment of labour by concessionary companies influenced adult male villagers to
seek refuge in forests. Their wives and children were held as hostages and were unfed to
ensure the return of their husbands and fathers. This sometimes resulted to the death of
children and mothers from hunger (see Manning, 1988). In their efforts to consolidate colonial
rule, the French and Germans also used children to transport imported products into the
interior and agricultural products and wild rubber to the coast for export. This involved long
distance travel, crossing rivers and hills, and without pay.
11
Though forceful labour recruited took place in both territories during this period, it was the official policy in
Kamerun between 1887 and 1914 and French Cameroon between 1923 and 1946 (see Ngoh 1996) and in Gabon
from between 1910 and 1946 under the Indigenat Law (see). Before 1910, Gabon was administered by
concessionary companies.
12
See http://www.zum.de/whkmla/region/centrafrica/cameroon18841918.html (accessed, 29.12.10).
34
Plate 1: German settlers celebrating Chriistmas in Kamerun in 1901.
Source13
Missionary bodies criticised forced labour as applied to children, arguing that the place of
children was in schools. These critiques were not given great attention before 1945.
Notwithstanding these criticisms of this colonial policy, missionary organizations in Kamerun
and Gabon allowed their pupils and students to work in farms and gardens without pay by
growing crops for staff and student consumption. Surpluses were sold in towns. Some male
students and pupils made furniture. Female ones cleaned staff houses and prepared staff food
and performed needlework. Money gained from these activities was used to promote other
missionary activities (Grier 2009). Agriculture was a central part of the curricula of colonial
schooling. This was presumably to lay the foundation of a new political economy, probably
for a new international economic order between what Raul Prebisch calls the ‘Centre’ and
‘Periphery.’ Development experts during the 1970s and 1970s describe this new economic
13
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_163-051,_Kamerun,_Weihnachten_am_Mungo.jpg
(accessed, 03.01.11). Child labour is not explicit in this photograph. However, the closeness of children to
German settlers is explicit. One may infer that settlers did not only play with these children. They might have
worked for these settlers as domestic workers at the behest of the settlers themselves or their parents.
35
order between industrialized countries (the Centre) and the newly independent or developing
countries (the Periphery) as one of dependency.
From 1930, peasant cocoa and coffee plantations were slowly introduced by the British and
French rule in French Cameroun, British Cameroons, and Gabon. The impact of this policy
was the entrenchment and indigenisation of capitalism and stabilization of population
numbers (Cinnamon 2010). As money and material possession manifested wealth within
colonies, likewise, it created social classes and income inequality between colonial peoples.
Consequently, pawning increased in these colonies. Wealthy peasant farmers and traders
acting as creditors relied on children and adolescent pawns to expand their cash crop
production and family labour. Boys worked in traditional craft industries for traders (Grier
2009). Sometimes children’s guardians pawned them to have money to pay royal fines, royal
titles and new wives (ibid). After 1945, pawning as an institution was weakened because (1)
of colonial suppression and the emergence of new sources of loans (cooperative societies,
banks, ethnic welfare associations); (2) land/private property replaced children as collateral
security for contracted loans; and, (3) children’s resistance to work due to the modernizing
effect of colonialism (ibid).
Albeit forced labour policies had great effects on children, the Germans between 1885 and
1916 did a considering job in educating Kamerunian children compared to the French in
Gabon even after 1885. This is well illustrated by Charles William Weber:
… the overall educational statistics for Cameroon in 1914 included the following: 793
elementary schools with 57,195 pupils and 928 teachers of which total the missions had
789 mission schools with 56,372 students and 911 teachers, while the government had only
four elementary schools with 823 students and 11 teachers. In addition there were 24 schools
of higher elementary level with 1919 pupils and 71 teachers … (Weber 1993, 18).
When compared to the whole of French Equatorial Africa that had 417 vocational and
technical schools between 1842 and 1960 (Gardinier 1982), these statistical educational
progress in German Cameroon was not only aimed at churning out the needed semi-skilled
labourers for the sustenance of colonial economy. It was rendered possible thanks to
modernization markers (roads, railway lines) that linked villages, which influenced villagers
to have sedentary and communal lifestyles. We do not contend that the establishment of
schools stopped child labour. It did not. However, it probably reduced the heavy work burden
that children some experienced daily in plantations, farms, and homes. Though they worked
in mission schools, such work may have been compensated by the education they received
36
from missionary organizations and the consciousness it created amongst future nationalists
who attended these schools to fight colonial policies between 1945 and 1960. It is interesting
to note that the ILO Article 427 of the Versailles Treaty requested ‘the abolition of child
labour and the imposition of such limitations on the labour of young persons as shall permit
the continuation of their education and assure their proper physical development.‘ Also, the
ILO Minimum Age (Industry) Convention, 1919 (No. 5) set 14 years as the minimum age for
employment in industry. In 1920, 14 years was adopted as minimum age for maritime work.
In 1921, the same standard was applied to agriculture, with an explicit call for compulsory
education for children. These ILO Conventions were not extended to colonial peoples because
colonial powers argued that they applied only to Europeans.
3.2.2 The Period 1945-1960.
This period is characterized by the gradual urbanization of some towns, nationalism, and the
abolition of forced labour. Compared to the former period, children still labored but it seems
likely that the psychological, mental, and otherwise consequences this work had on them was
mild during this period.
Forced labour and pawning was abolished, which influenced the development of colonial
labour markets. Though incomes received by these labour groups were sometimes determined
by their employers, the emergence of trade unions not only challenged the hitherto authority
wielded by colonial plantation owners. Through collective bargaining and sometimes strikes,
plantation owners were forced to operate primary schools and sometimes grant scholarships
for further education to the children of their workers. A good example was British Cameroons
where the Cameroon Development Corporation (CDC) incorporated in 1947, managed the
cocoa, coffee, oil palm and banana plantations of former German planters. In 1953, CDC
provided free education to about 2000 workers’ children (Colonial Office 1953) and gave an
annual grant of £5000 to the Southern Cameroons Scholarship Board so that Southern
Cameroonians in general could pursue higher and secondary education (CDC 1958).
Many children went to schools and worked domestically. The emergence of an elite class
influenced families to send their children to school so that in future they may enjoy the
advantages associated with a decent education. This trend marked a local cultural
transformation. Female children from educated households who earlier were perceived as
future mothers, housewives and producers of children, started to go to school. Likewise, the
creation of schools, even some remote areas by missionary organisations, helped alleviate
children’s plight as child labourers. In Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe partly tells us how
Africans perceived the importance of formal education during this period. The hero,
37
Okonkwo, had his higher education sponsored by his kinsmen grouped under the Omuafia
Progreesive Union (see Achebe 2000).
The urbanization process in these colonies influenced some adolescents to migrate to towns.
Alone or in company of their parents, these adolescents moved away from grueling
agricultural work in remote areas to embrace domestic service, panhandling, and work in the
informal sector. Grier (2009) reveals that children who migrated to cities alone did so with the
blessings of their parents while others did so as rebellion against agricultural work. Better
schools, better job opportunities, and higher incomes may likely have influenced migration to
towns and cities. In this sense, these migratory currents from remote areas to cities in the
colonies were voluntary.
There is more or less a resemblance between child labour practices in Cameroon and Gabon
between the period 1945 and 1960 and during the post-colonial era. In order to avoid
repetition, a description of this practice will be dealt with more in the next chapter.
Child labour during the colonial era developed greatly before and during the interwar years
than between 1945 and 1960. The main reason that account for this change was the abolition
of forced labour in the study areas. We therefore accept Beverly Grier’s conclusion that the
history of child labour in colonial Africa reveals that ‘First children were not “extra” hands,
useful to employers only when adult labourers were in short supply. Children were sought
after in their own right because they had qualities adults did not appear to have: They were
considered cheaper, easier to control, more adaptable, and with their “nimble” fingers, better
at handling certain crops such as tea, tobacco, and cotton. Second, through tax … and labour
laws, colonial governments played an important role in facilitating child labour (Grier 2009,
175).
38
Chapter 4
Post-colonial Child Labour
Most scholarly articles on African child labour in scientific journals start from ‘the long
eighties’: the period between 1979 and the 1990s. These interests on child labour may have
been influenced by three factors. First, most nation-states in SSA, experienced acute
structural, economic and political crises during this period, which was marked by poor
governance, budget deficits, rising unemployment, negative GDP rates, balance of trade and
balance of payment deficits amongst others. To cure these fiscal problems, most SSA’s
governments contracted IMF loans by signing Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP).
SAP retrenched public workers and entrenched markets as main employers in national
economies. Rising unemployment due to SAP and the 1990s economic crisis increased
poverty, which in turn, changed the way African households and families treated children.
Some children were withdrawn from schools because of widespread poverty. Others worked
as hoarders, prostitutes, panhandlers, domestic servants, and agricultural workers to improve
household incomes.
Second, the 1st January, 1979 was declared by the UN as the International Year of the Child.
Accompanying the UN 1959 Declaration of the Rights of the Child and preceding the UN’s
CRC a decade later, ‘the long eighties’ was a period during which the sufferings experienced
by African children (inaccessibility to education, malnutrition, high mortality rates and child
labour) were brought to the attention of humanity by the mass media and policy makers.
Third, the development of a statistical model (SIMPOC) developed by the ILO to quantify
child labour data on a local, provincial, national, and regional bases likely produced a ‘great
leap forward’ in child labour studies in general. Data obtained from different places based on
this model helped scientists and policy makers underpin the causes of child labour and find
solutions, even if temporal, to eliminate child labour.
In this section, we describe post-colonial child labour with focus on rural and urban areas of
Cameroon and Gabon. We consider urban areas here as places with populations exceeding
100,000 persons. This means that ten cities in Cameroon (Douala, Yaounde, Kaele, Kumba,
Bamenda, Garoua, Maroua, Bafoussam, Ngaoundere, and Nkongsamba) and three in Gabon
39
(Libreville, Franceville, and Port Gentil) are urban areas. Rural areas have a population of less
than 100,000 peoples. This distinction is to demonstrate that children’s participation in
economic activities is related to the dominant economic activity taking place within
environments.
Because of the absence of statistics on child labour before ‘the long eighties,’ this chapter
examines post-independent child labour mainly from 1990. We rely on different sources of
statistical data on child labour in the study areas. Unlike Cameroon that conducted a national
child labour survey in 2007 based on SIMPOC modeling, this has not been the case with
Gabon. Child labour statistics for Gabon are therefore estimates by different organizations.
This chapter starts by attempting to show the linkage between poverty and child labour in
both countries. We further analyse the interrelationship between parental power and poverty
and the ways these two factors influence child labour in both countries.
4.1
Economic Growth and Child Labour
To understand the relationship between poverty and child labour in Cameroon and Gabon, we
start by testing the modernist theory on child labour, which partly assumes that economic
growth can reduce child labour. We look at two decades (1990-2009) Gross Domestic Product
(GDP) and GDP per capita for Cameroon and Gabon (see Table 2) obtained from the
EconomyWatch website’s14 annual Economy, Investment, and Financial Reports. Economic
growth is considered here as increases in GDP per capita relative to existing purchasing
power parity rates. For comparative reasons, it is usually valued in US dollars.
Table 2 shows that the GDP per capita for Cameroon fell continuously from US$ 1,626.68 in
1990 to US$ 1,406.88 in 1994 and started rising continuously from US$ 1,443.24 in 1995 to
US$ 2,146.89 in 2009. The GDP per capita of Gabon is spectacular and has been recognized to be
above SSA average (CIA Factbook 2010). In 1990, Gabon’s GDP per capita stood at US$ 10,860.35
while in 2009; it rose (with some small bumps along the way) to US$ 14,317.55.
Following the modernist theory and taking into consideration annual inflation rates and value of these
GDP per capita statistics, one may probably not expect to observe much poverty in either Cameroon or
Gabon. Even if one were to observe poverty in Cameroon, it probably should be minimal or non14
See http://www.economywatch.com/economic-statistics/country/Cameroon/ and
http://www.economywatch.com/economic-statistics/country/Gabon/ (accessed, 23.01.2011).
40
existent in Gabon because the former’s population is presently almost thirteen times that of the latter.
Unlike Cameroon, which experienced annual falls in GDP per capita between 1990 and 1994 because
of the economic crisis, Gabon’s spectacular GDP per capita may be explained by large revenue from
its petroleum sector, which contributed, for example, 50.7% to its 2005 GDP (AfDB/OECD 2007, 4).
Table 1: Annual GDP and GDP per capita of Cameroon and Gabon between 1990 and 2009.
Cameroon
Years
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
Population Gross
(Million)
Domestic
Product
(Billion
US$)
11.524
18.746
11.879
18.68
12.241
18.539
12.61
18.351
12.986
18.27
13.35
19.267
13.723
20.615
14.108
22.049
14.503
23.424
14.909
24.815
15.326
26.404
15.755
28.219
16.423
29.826
16.883
31.696
17.356
33.732
17.842
34.857
18.34
37.152
18.855
39.462
19.383
41.467
19.926
42.778
Gabon
GDP
per
capita
(PPP)
in US$
1,626.68
1,572.51
1,514.54
1,455.24
1,406.88
1,443.24
1,502.20
1,562.92
1,615.17
1,664.44
1,722.81
1,791.11
1,816.09
1,877.41
1,943.57
1,953.66
2,025.59
2,092.94
2,139.39
2,146.89
Population Gross
(Million)
Domestic
Product
(Billion
US$)
0.93
10.1
0.96
11.099
0.99
11.011
1.014
11.698
1.039
12.388
1.065
13.276
1.092
14.019
1.119
15.085
1.147
15.786
1.176
14.587
1.266
15.477
1.235
15.272
1.266
15.477
1.298
16.197
1.33
16.809
1.364
17.839
1.398
18.637
1.433
20.186
1.454
21.171
1.475
21.119
GDP per
capita
(PPP) in
US$
10,860.35
11,561.03
11,122.24
11,536.93
11,919.41
12,461.37
12,838.07
13,477.48
13,759.77
12,404.90
12,222.07
12,361.04
12,222.07
12,478.53
12,633.84
13,081.16
13,332.74
14,088.88
14,562.13
14,317.55
The poverty ratio for Cameroon as a proportion of her total population in 1996 was 53.3% and
in 2001, it dropped to 40.2% (Fambon 2010). In 2007, it fell slightly to 39.9%15. It has been
difficult to find reliable poverty statistics for Gabon. We rely on statistics from some
websites. The Guerilla Aid website quoting the UN, writes that ‘between 60 and 70 percent of
the population live below the poverty line, scraping by on less than US $1’16. The Trading
Economics website says Gabon’s poverty ratio (2dollars/day) was 19.57% in 2005 and 19.4%
15
See, http://www.statistics-cameroon.org/ (accessed, 10.02.2011). The poverty ratio in these statistics is based
on the poverty line: less than 2 dollars/day of adult expenditures. In local currency, the poverty threshold is
CFAF 185, 490 (see Fambon 2010).
16
http://www.guerrillaaid.com/World-Country-Guide/Gabon.html (accessed, 07.03.2011)
41
in 200617. The World Bank writes that in 2005, Gabon’s poverty ratio (US$1.25/day) as a
proportion of the population was 4.8%. These statistical sources for Gabon use different
values (US$1/day, US$2/day and US$1.25/day) in calculating poverty lines distinguishing the
poor from non-poor. According to Gabon’s Department of Statistics, ‘the poor comprise 80%
of Gabon’s 1.2 million people’ and ‘the average Gabonese lives on $3 or $4 a day, while the
poorest eke out a living on $1.8 a day, says the Ministry of Labor.18
GDP per capita is an income measurement of standard of living of a population. Taking into
consideration multidimensional measurements of poverty (a long and healthy life-life
expectancy at birth, access to knowledge-years of schooling and expected years of schooling,
and standard of living-GDP per capita) constitutive of the Human Development Index (HDI)
that captures a broad spectrum of human needs, the poverty ratio of both countries may be
more than suggested by the income approach to poverty alone. For instance, Daniel Morrel
states that:
When poverty is defined as living on $1.25 or less a day, about 40 percent of both Ethiopians
and Uzbekistanis are considered poor. But by multidimensional measures that capture living
standards, almost 90 percent of Ethiopians live in poverty, while only a small percentage of
Uzbekistanis do (Morell 2011)19.
We subscribe to the HDI as a poverty framework here because albeit income serves
individuals and households to acquire basic needs, it fails to expose their broad varying needs
and the choices they makes with limited incomes to acquire these needs. Markets that provide
some of these needs may exclude the very poor from acquiring them. It is therefore the place
of central governments in developing countries to be socially-inclusive by provide freedom
and security, good roads, safe drinking water, and schools to its citizens.
In its study, Economically Active Population 1950-2010, STAT Working Paper, the ILO
(1997) estimated that in 1995, Cameroon had 418,000 (191,000 girls and 227,000 boys)
economically active children between the ages of 10 and 14 constituting 25.25% of this age
group. This study also projected that by the year 2000, Cameroon would have 430,000
economically active child labourers, of which 196,000 were girls and 234,000 were boys
representing 22.96% of 10-14 years age group. The Cameroon Institute of National Statistics
17
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/gabon/poverty-headcount-ratio-at-dollar2-a-day-ppp-percent-of-populationwb-data.html (accessed, 07.03.2011).
18
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-51664304.html (accesssed, 07.03.2011).
19
http://harvardmagazine.com/2011/01/who-is-poor (accessed 07.03.2011).
42
(2011) in its study, Etude Sur Le Travail des Enfants au Cameroun, reveals that in 2007 there
were 41% (2 million) child labourers in Cameroon between the ages of 5 and 17 years.
The ILO (1970) estimated that in 1997, there were 20,000 economically active children in
Gabon between the ages of 10 and 14 years representing 18.37% of this age group. It further
projected that in 2000, Gabon would have 19,000 economically active child labourers within
the 10 and 14 years age representing 14.07% of this age bracket.
Some official discourses in Gabon talks of the near absence of child labourers and also that
children who labour in Gabon are trafficked children. In his article in a Gabonese
anthropology website (http://ethno-web.com), La Problematique du Travail des Enfants, Paul
Kialo (2009) reveals that trafficked children in Gabon are of West African origin, who work
mostly in the informal sector. In 1990, these children represented 12%, that is, 4,800 of the
40,000 informal sector labour force (Panhus, cited in, Kialo 2009). Whether child labourers
are native or foreign children, the fact that extensive cash crop agricultural products (coffee,
coacoa, sugar, palm oil, cattle) including fishing and forestry employs 41% of Gabon’s labour
force20 compared to Cameroon where it employs 70%, is likely a good marker manifesting the
existence of child labourers in both countries.
Why does child labour exist in both countries though they have better GDP per capita
compared to other African and Asian countries? Before answering this question, we start by
making some general comments on child labour statistics for both countries. We contend that
the economic growth theory on child labour is faulty for several reasons. First, it fails to
consider the political economy operating within developing countries. Compared to Europe,
the economies of these countries are agriculturally more labour-intensive especially in terms
of households’ cash crop production, fishing, and cattle rearing. This economic system is
attuned to the dependency theory, which is premised partly on the assumption that poor
peripheral nations provide natural resources, agricultural products, and cheap labour to
developed nations without which the former cannot enjoy improved standards of living. In
this economy, children’s labour is viewed as cheap and geared toward improving households’
standards of living. In fact, about 90% of child labour in Africa is not wage labour (Andvig
20
http://www.novelguide.com/a/discover/wene_01/wene_01_00028.html (accessed, 10.03.2011). Other sources,
(see for example, http://www.theodora.com/wfbcurrentgabon/gabon_economy.html - accessed, 10.03.2011), say
agriculture employs 60% of Gabon’s population.
43
2001) and takes place more in subsistence agriculture and informal trading; activities whose
incomes are not registered in GDP accounts.
Second, Jens Andvig (2001) stated that statistics on economic growth alone cannot explain
the link between poverty and child labour in Africa. He contends that poverty and child labour
in SSA is mostly rural because rural communities have robust child labour institutions such as
child fostering. In the absence of labour markets, public and private social welfare
institutions, and perfect credit and insurance institutions, these local institutions are used as
households’ social protection instruments.
Third, economic growth itself does not explain differential lifestyle choices individuals make
in different communities based on available scarce resources. While in developed nations,
households use labour-saving devices such as dish washers and washing machines and child
care institutions (crèches) that spare children from domestic work and focus them on
education, these devices are scarce in most homes in SSA. The absence of these technologies
in most African homes has culturally influenced households to use children to perform these
roles.
Fourth, GDP per capita does not explain income inequalities, which describes the uneven
distribution of income within society and is usually measured using the Gini coefficient,
Hoover Index, Atkinson Index, or Theil Index. For instance, the Gini coefficient for
Cameroon in 1996 was 48.82 and in 2001, it was 44.5621. For Gabon in 2005, it was 41.4522.
These indexes shows the variations in income inequalities in both countries, thereby,
explaining that economic growth does not mean the absence of poverty or child labour in
developing countries.
Our position is that for the economic growth theory to explain the decline of child labourers in
any society, we have to consider the existing state of the political economy of that society.
While we agree with this theory that industrialization may considerably reduce child labour,
developing societies with a large agricultural sector may realize this objective only when
correct policies attuned to special contexts are implemented. This position is consistent with
21
See http://www.tradingeconomics.com/cameroon/gini-index-wb-data.html (accessed, 13.02.2011). A Gini
index of 0 measures perfect income equality while an index of 100 measures perfect income inequality.
22
See http://www.tradingeconomics.com/gabon/gini-index-wb-data.html (accessed, 13.02.2011).
44
that of Eric V. Edmonds (2005) who states that economic growth does not imply the
eradication of child labour because the same policies that fosters economic growth may
simultaneously influence the rise of child labour.
4.2
Poverty, Intra-Domestic Power Relations, and Child Labour
The effects and means of correcting poverty are multidimensional. Poverty creates
powerlessness, hopelessness and helplessness, lack of self-worth, social exclusion, political
instability, and diseases. Empirical evidences show that the absence of robust formal public
and private social protection measures to address poverty in developing countries influences
individuals to depend on informal social networks and child labour to mitigate social risks
they experience (see Holzmann and Jørgensen 2000; Tesfay 2003; World Bank 1999).
Poverty as inadequate income may not independently explain child labour. Diseases,
unemployment, lack of education and portable sources of safe and chlorinated drinking water
are amongst a wide range of idiosyncratic and covariate social risks that increases the
vulnerability of the poor and very poor, who may rely on child labour to reduce these shocks
(Holzmann and Jørgensen 2000). For instance, based on the interpretation of the most recent
data on child labour collected in Cameroon by the Cameroon’s National Institute of Statistics
(CNIS), this organization states that in Cameroon:
Les caractéristiques de l’enfant, celles du chef de ménage et de son ménage sont les
déterminants de la mise au travail des enfants. La mise au travail des enfants s’explique par
les caractéristiques del’enfant (niveau d’instruction, âge et survie des parents), celles du
ménage auquel il appartient (taille, présence des enfants de moins de 5 ans, le niveau de vie, le
milieu de residence, la région d’enquête) et celles du chef de ménage (le niveau d’instruction,
la religion et le groupe socio-économique). Ainsi, les risques pour un enfant de travailler sont
grandes lorsqu’il n’est pas scolarisé, qu’il est orphelin de père ou des deux parents, que le chef
de ménage n’est pas instruit et qu’il exerce dans le secteur agricole, que le niveau de vie du
ménage est faible et qu’il réside en zone rurale (CNIS 2011, 4)23.
Lack of education for children creates widespread illiteracy and lengthens poverty cycle
within families. For their parents, it may contribute to the development of a culture of
ignorance and oppression of children. It is in this context that Christianity may play a crucial
role to promote child labour because uneducated parents may exploit biblical injunctions
requesting children to respect their parents. Respect for elders may compel children to work
without questioning the rationale undergirding work without schooling. Sometimes, when
23
Child labour is determined by the characteristics of : households to which children belong (household size, the
number of less than 5 year old children, standard of living, residential area), children (level of education, age,
economic survival of parents), and head of households (educational level, religion, and socio-economic group to
which they belong). Thus the risk of child labour is great when a child is an unschooled orphan, when household
heads are uneducated agricultural workers living in rural areas and experiencing low standards of living (the
translation is mine).
45
children prefer schooling than work, some parents use physical force to make sure they work.
May be, the use of physical force is a way of imposing parental authority, which in itself is
reminiscent of colonial forced labour locally called njongmassi in Cameroon. In fact, parents’
authority over children is partly explained by the fact that socially and economically, children
depend on their parents. A proprietarian perspective to child labour dating since Roman
civilisation explains that, ‘parents who head families … are considered rightful “owners” of
children – especially those they have given birth to’ (Makwinja 2010). They have decisionmaking powers on the activities of their children. In this context, parents may oppose
children’s rights protection as encroachment into inviolable private and family spaces.
In both countries, this oppressive culture influences low-income illiterate parents and
households to influence children to work because: (1) National and local institutions
protecting children’s rights are poorly staffed and lack the necessary financial resources and
capacities to accomplish their mission; (2) Children’s rights as enunciated in national and
international laws and conventions are seldomly taught in schools, homes, nor are they
oftentimes enforced by courts of law or other national institutions; (3) Probably for political
and electoral reasons, governments are not willing to change time-honoured cultural practices,
social networks and other informal collective social protection coping strategies (child work
and domestic work). For instance, except for ‘dangerous work,’ Cameroon does not have any
legislation proscribing child work or domestic work (see CNIS 2011, 5); (4) These two
countries are still young and more than half of their populations are composed of young
persons, a huge reservoir of cheap labour; (5) Children are prized within families as unpaid or
poorly paid agricultural and informal sector workers; (6) The exclusionary nature of family
allowance provision to only dependants of public and private sector workers registered with
national social insurance schemes seems to influence families not enjoying these child welfare
rights to rely on children’s labour to supplement household incomes; and (7) The statistical
rise of unemployed graduates provides a perception that education as a means to improved
income is useless.
Notwithstanding their illiteracy and poverty, some parents still have consideration for their
children’s education when children mediate between working and schooling. For instance,
28.7% of children between 5 and 17 years mediate between schooling and working in
Cameroon (CNIS 2011, 8).
46
In this section, we examine child labour in both rural and urban areas of Cameroon and
Gabon. Urban areas in both countries are dominated by the civil service, formal and informal
trade and commerce, manufacturing and processing, and transportation while rural areas host
agriculture, mining and the extraction industries. This distinction that is based on economic
activities is not all clear-cut as we characterize here. Sometimes they overlap. We have been
unable to find the most recent poverty statistics for Cameroon and Gabon. We depend
therefore on poverty data collected the 1990s. These data are important to explain child labour
during this period but falls short of doing so now.
4.2.1 Urban Areas
We define these areas as places with a population of more than 100.000 persons. By 2002, ten
cities in Cameroon (Douala, Yaounde, Kumba, Bamenda, Bafoussam, Garoua, Maroua,
Kaele, Ngaoundere, and Nkongsamba) and two cities in Gabon (Libreville and Port Gentil)
were urban areas.
Children principally work in these places as domestic servants and street hawkers. Girls work
more as domestic workers than boys. They wash dish and clothes, cleaning, ironing of
dresses, fetching water, preparing food and cater for children, which sometimes occur before
or after completing primary school. Domestic workers work in guardians’ or extended family
members’ homes while street hawkers work for their parents, guardians, or extended family
members. For instance, 8.8% of children between 5 and 17 years in Cameroon work in the
commerce and catering industry (CNIS 2011).
Urban poverty in Cameroon in 1996 affected 22.1% households, a marked increase of 10% as
per 1983 figures resulting from lack of access to basic necessities due to high costs food,
medicines, clothing, school fees, and poor access to credits and formal employment,
retrenchment of public sector workers, poor road infrastructures, and the devaluation of the
CFA Franc. The poverty incidence for Yaounde and Douala moved from 1% in 1983 to 20%
and 30% respectively in 1993. (Sikod n.d. 203). By 2007, urban poverty in Cameroon fell to
12.2% thanks largely to government efforts to reduce poverty in the country24.
The World Bank’s 1999 report: Republic of Gabon: Poverty in a Rent-Based Economy,
Volume II, reveals that poverty in Libreville and Port Gentil affects 90%, that is, 96.000
24
http://www.statistics-cameroon.org/news.php?id=18 (accessed, 20.05.2011)
47
residents, who live below minimum food and absolute poverty lines. Nearly 20% of these
residents have a disposable income less than 29.000 FCFA/person/month, the absolute
minimum. Average household size in these two cities is 5.5 persons. In Port Gentil household
size variation between the poor and very poor is small. In Libreville, it is very wide because
poorer individuals have large household sizes.
The poor in urban Gabon are the unemployed, retirees, private sector employees (21%),
independent formal and informal workers (18%), and public and para-public sector employees
(15%). Averagely, household heads’ income make up 62% of the combined household
income amongst the urban poor. Some middle class families (6%) experience relative poverty
because they cater for poorer relatives. As a result:
The extended household in situations of poverty implies a lower standard of living, and a
lower level of benefits derived from public services, in particular education. The more
children between 6 and 16 years of age in a household, the more likely they are to be behind
in their schooling. The number of children in a household was found to be as important as
the level of education of their parents or guardians in determining the children's success at
school. This suggests that the practice of welcoming relatives may lead over the medium or
long term to the collapse of a family's cultural and education heritage, and to the
impoverishment of future generations (World Bank 1999, 36; italics is mine).
This context is well captured by ‘a young jobless family’ living in Petit Paris, Libreville:
I left high-school two years ago. I have a wife and two children. The house belongs to my
father, who went back: to the village, and that lets me save on rent. Besides my-wife and the
two children, we have six others with us: my two younger brothers, a cousin, two younger
sisters and a sister-in-law. We have only three rooms, and when it rains hard, the water can get
a meter deep in the house. That's hard on us, because everything gets wet-mattresses,
bedclothes, everything. Every year it's the same-we see nothing from the fine promises that the
Mayor and our politicians keep making. I don't have a job, and I don't have any vocational
training. I get by with doing little odd jobs or painting and such. But it's not always enough,
and we sometimes go all day without eating. My wife no longer works. She has a kindergarten
teacher's diploma, but she can't find a job. When things get too tough, neighbors from our
ethnic group help us. My older sister and my mother do some farming out on the PK 25 road
and they send us food and a little money, and medicines, too, since we are often sick with
malaria, diarrhea and skin diseases because of all the dirty water around us. My sister-inlaw has tuberculosis but we don't have money for all the medicine she needs. We never know
what's going to happen to us next (see World Bank 1999, 37; see also for Cameroon, Sikod
n.d, 202-205).
Extreme poverty dehumanizes and creates destitution, paupers, scavengers, and social
exclusion. This family, like many others in SSA in the same situation, may likely encourage
their children to work or give them out to extended family members and other third parties as
panhandlers, traders, street hawkers, or domestic servants. Some do so after written or verbal
contracts between parents and guardians or third parties that may involve but not limited to
the following: (1) children are to work for and as directed by their guardians or third parties,
48
who in turn has the responsibility of training - educate or skill – them, (2) child are to work
for their guardians or third parties, who pay a weekly, monthly, or yearly fixed income to
child workers’ parents. This practice is common in Cameroon and Gabon, where trafficked
Togolese, Malian, Beninois, and Nigerian children work as domestic servants, informal sector
workers, and mechanics (CIA 2010). Both countries are usually described in child trafficking
literature as ‘countries of destination and transit’ of children from West Africa25. The US
State Department 2010 child trafficking report for Gabon notes that ‘most child traffickers are
women, who serve as intermediaries in their countries of origin. In some cases, child victims
report that their parents had turned them over to intermediaries promising employment
opportunities in Gabon.’
4.2.2 Rural Areas
Poverty and child labour affects rural areas more than urban areas in both countries partly
because these areas and economies are respectively more populated and more labour intensive
and employs more persons than urban areas. Market vagaries of agricultural products, poor
road networks, access to market information, and health care centres, poor access to land, and
poor schools may also explain rural poverty (see World Bank 1997). Unlike in Cameroon
where agriculture employs more than 70% of the population and contributes more than 60%
to the country’s GDP, Gabon’s agricultural production is low, but this sector employs about
60% of the country’s population (US State Department 2010). Its contribution to the country’s
GDP was 5% in 1995. Between 1981 and 1990 Gabon’s food production per capita fell by
16% (ibid). Much of the 80% that characterize the poor in Gabon are located in rural Gabon
(US Department of State 2010). In 1996, 49.9% of the poor lived in rural Cameroon. In 2007,
this figure increased to 55%26. This increase in rural poverty compared to urban poverty that
witnessed a fall within this same period in Cameroon may be explained partly by pro-urban
public investment policies aimed at curbing political tensions and social instability in these
communities. It has generally been observed that in both countries, poverty generally affects
women and children more than men.
25
Child trafficking is a Western moralistic construction of child fostering. Child fostering in SSA is presently
abhorrent because of the consequences of modernization processes such as capitalism and its associated features:
labour, money, transportation systems, individualism, and markets. A deep look at the African Ubuntu
philosophy tells us that ‘I am what I am because of who we all are.’ Archbishop Desmond Tutu puts it this way:
‘We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are
connected and what you do affects the whole world. When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of
humanity.’ Fostered children may be abused partly because of modernization but child fostering aims principally
at creating a Benthamite utilitarianism.
26
http://www.statistics-cameroon.org/news.php?id=18 (20.05.2011).
49
These statistical rural poverty numbers may explain the widespread use of child labourers in
both countries. 83.3% of children between 5 and 17 years work in the agricultural, fishing,
hunting, and forestry sectors of rural Cameroon (CNIS 2011). Albeit we have not been able to
find rural poverty statistics for Gabon in 2011 to enable comparison, we rely on the World
Bank study, World Development Indicators 2001, that gives us some comparative statistics
for children between 10 and 16 years working in Cameroon and Gabon (see Table 4.2).
Table 2: Some Development Indicators for Cameroon and Gabon
Country
% of 10-16
% of 10-16
Real GDP
% of
% of rural
years old
years old
per capita in
agricultural
population to
children
children
US dollars in
contribution
total national
working in
working in
2000
to GDP in
population in
1980
1999
2000
1999
Gabon
29
15
6.300
8
20
Cameroon
34
23
1.700
44
52
Source: World Bank (2001) illustrated in Bass (2004).
These statistics shows that the higher GDP per capita for Gabon may have reduced child
labour for children between 10 and 16 years by 14% between 1980 and 1999. For this same
period, the lower GDP per capita ($US1.700) of Cameroon may have reduced child labour
within this age bracket by 11%. Like the relationship between urban child labour and urban
poverty, the relationship between GDP per capita and child labour does not fully reveal the
extent of rural child labour in both countries. The place of agriculture in the political economy
and the proportion of rural population in relation to national populations of both nations may
provide a framework for understanding the extent of child labour in rural communities. The
importance of this framework is illustrated by Loretta Bass, who after analyzing child labour
and GDP data of 37 African countries, including Cameroon and Gabon, states that because
low income households dominate rural communities, agricultural activities feeds rural child
labour in SSA (Bass 2004, 44). She further argues that ‘… there is a positive relationship
between the proportion of children working and the proportion of the total population residing
in rural areas. As the percentage of the rural population increases, so does the rate of child
50
labor’ (Bass 2004, 47). This is also ‘evident when examining the relationship between the
percentage of children working and the percentage of GDP derived from agricultural
production. … children are more likely to work when a higher percentage of … GDP is
derived from agricultural production’ (Bass 2004, 47).
This statistical interpretation by Loretta Bass is supported by Jens Christopher Andvig. In his
study, Family-Controlled Child Labor in Sub-Saharan Africa-A Survey of Research, Andvig
(1999) writes that 95% of African child labour occurs in ‘private households.’ By
constructing scatter plots using data on child labour and ruralisation of more than 20 African
countries, Andvig agrees with Bass that ‘countries with a large, rural household sector are on
average poor, but at given income levels the household sector accounts for more child labor
than any other ways that economic activities are organized.’
This model may be reliable when applied to Cameroon but not Gabon because some of its
implicit assumptions are wrong. For instance, it assumes that when agriculture contributes
less to a country’s GDP, there is likelihood that child labour may be low in such a country.
Whereas this obtains in industrialized societies, in a developing country like Gabon with a
low industrial sector and the petroleum sector contributing greatly to its GDP, subsistence
agriculture has been influencing child labour positively. Though Gabon imports foodstuff
from her neighbours, we do not view foodstuff imports as the absence of subsistence farming
but rather as the inability of this farming system to feed Gabonese population. We thus opine
that child labour in Gabon like in Cameroon may be more than what obtains in official child
labour statistics.
Finally, we agree with Jens Andvig et al. (2001) and supported by our personal experiences
since childhood that most of the child labour practiced in rural parts of SSA is not paid labour.
In what we call the social psychology of child labour, children in parts of rural Africa are
conscious that they are an integral part of poor households. The provision of their labour to
economic activities that generate household income is step toward improving family welfare.
Part of this income is used for health, education, and otherwise expenditures for household
members. This types of work in which children are involved is not exploitation of children per
se but a coping strategy against poverty.
51
Chapter 5
Conclusion
In this study, we have so far tested two basic hypotheses vis that (1) modernization processes
influenced the emergence and statistical rise of child labourers in Central Africa, and (2) the
present state and cause of child labour in Cameroon and Gabon is the due to poverty. That is,
poverty measured as lack of has influenced parents and guardians to make decisions that send
children to work on factory floors, homes, and street corners as hawkers, domestic servants,
entertainers, farm workers, and prostitutes.
5.1
Modernisation Processes and the rise of Child labourers
The place and role children play in Gabon and Cameroon is dependent on the ways evolving
formal and informal institutions organize and regulate the activities of children within the
overall political and socio-economic framework of these two countries. During the precolonial period (17th and 18th centuries), children in local polities of both countries
participated in household production more or less for household consumption. These local
polities were basically dependent on the pre-capitalistic nature of their economies that was
dominated by barter exchange. Furthermore, the space in which children worked was in or
close to households because the rudimentary technology that households used for economic
survival was limited to the exploitation of small agricultural lands or herding of small flocks
of cattle. Other activities such as arts and crafts, blacksmithing, and childrearing were more or
less limited close to households. Like we said in the first part of Chapter 3, this kind of
activities in which children were involved during the pre-colonial era cannot be qualified as
child labour. It was domestic or family work.
Colonialism and its accompanying modernization processes it engendered, completely
reconstructed local polities and the role of children in Gabon and Cameroon. The emergence
of new road networks and railway lines that linked the hinterlands to the coasts and increased
the rate of voluntary and involuntary migrations enlarged local pre-colonial spaces within
these two colonies. Because parents migrated alongside their children to work in colonial
capitalist plantations and other public works projects, both colonies started to experience
forced and child labour and as from now on, children worked in both domestic and public
spaces. Jack Lord captures this trend excellently when he says that;
52
The most profound colonial-era change in commerce for children was probably spatial: the
replacement of urban for village streets, the invention of new marketplaces like the cinema,
racecourse or lorry park, and the distancing of the workplace from the home due, first, to
the use of bicycles and public transport and, second, to the proliferation of lighter, cheaper
consumer goods that children were easily able to carry and sell (Lord ,36).
However, between 1884 and 1945, children in Cameroon and Gabon were forcefully recruited to work
in the homes of European colonialists, in plantations, and other public work schemes. As in premodern Europe, children also participated in agriculture, herding, warfare, hunting alongside adults.
They were also slaves and pawns. Like in almost all colonies, because there were shortages of adult
labour, colonialists in Cameroon and Gabon prohibited twin sacrifices and introduced improved health
care systems to engineer population growth to engineer economic development and the profitability of
colonial enterprises. Though primary schools were established to educate children, it did not stop child
labour. Their establishment was aimed at creating semi-skilled labourers such as clerks to assist
European planters in the management of established capitalist plantations.
Compared to the period 1884-1945, children experienced mild consequences in relation to child labour
during the period 1945-1960 in Gabon and Cameroon. This was due to the abolition of forced labour
and pawning, the emergence of trade unions and nationalisms. Many children went to school, which
saw the rise of an elite nationalist class. However, children still worked in newly established cocoa and
coffee plantations owned by local peasants as well as in subsistence farming. Rural children also
herded animals, catered for younger siblings, cooked food for the family. In urban centres, some
served as street workers hawking different types of manufactured products.
Compared to the pre-colonial period, it is thus evident that colonialism and its accompanying
modernization processes mark the origin of child labour in the Central African sub-region. Because of
colonialism, children did no more participate only in household production for household
consumption. They were forcefully integrated into the global economy dominated by the power of
globalised markets and consumption, which continued during the post-1960 era. This position is
consistent with other studies in the sense that economic changes in European and North American
societies influenced the emergence of child labour (see, Humphries 2003, Edmonds 2005).
5.2
Poverty and Child Labour
Previous studies have shown the link between poverty and child labour in different parts of
the world (see Andvig et al. 2001, Humphries 2003, Edmonds 2005). We also used poverty
and child labour statistics for Gabon and Cameroon to show that poverty in all its dimensions
is partly responsible for the widespread use of children as labourers in agricultural plantations,
street corners, and homes in both countries. However, Jens Andvig and his associates tell us
53
that the correlation between poverty and child labour cannot be explained only by statistics
because most child labourers in both countries work in rural areas. But urban children also
work as domestic servants, prostitutes and hawkers.
Like in most communities, there is division of labour between boys and girls in both rural and
urban areas of Cameroon and Gabon. Boys work as plantation workers harvesting tea, coffee,
cocoa, and other food crops. They also herd cattle, participate in preparing plots for
cultivation, hoard goods along street corners, as well as, participate in other aspects of local
trade and commerce. Girls work as domestic servants and prostitutes. They also fetch water,
prepare food and cater for their younger siblings.
In both countries, poverty makes parents to experience helplessness. In this context of
capitalism, they seek children’s labour to ameliorate household incomes. Because children
themselves are conscious of the poverty their families experience, they sometimes willingly or
through coercion provide manpower hours. This situation is moreover influenced by
oppressive local cultures and the fact that formal institutions protecting children’s rights are
poorly staffed and lack the necessary financial resources and capacities to accomplish their
mission. Furthermore, concepts such as child poverty are alien to Cameroon and Gabon.
Social welfare benefits limited only to public workers and some private sector workers
registered with national insurance schemes exclude a large category of parents leaving them
exposed to the vagaries of markets and poverty. Some parents may wish to protect themselves
against social risks using market tools but insurance market in Africa in general is weak and
poorly developed because of poor regulatory mechanisms and the increasing role played by
social networks in SSA.
However, some distinctions in child labour were notice in Cameroon and Gabon. The number
of child labourers in Gabon is lower than that of Cameroon probably because the population
of the former is lower than that of the latter. And Gabon is more a destination country of
trafficked children from West Africa than Cameroon. This trend may be explained by the
higher GDP per capita of Gabon that is above that of Cameroon and SSA’s average. On the
other hand, some of the children trafficked to Gabon transits through Cameroon.
This study contradicts that modernization theory of child labour, which states that economic
growth is the panacea to child labour. During the long eighties and following the economic
crisis of the 1990s, Gabon and Cameroon experienced economic growth and improved GDP
per capita. Yet, child labour still prevailed in both countries. The main reason for the
54
continuous existence of child labourers in both countries cannot be explained only by income
inequality. Our postulation is that the existence of child labourers in any society can be by the
existing state of its political economy. This position is consistent with that of Eric Edmonds
(2005) writes that policies that promote economic growth may in turn, promote child labour.
Because Gabon and Cameroon’s economies are still largely dominated by subsistence and
cash crop production, which are labour intensive, we submit that these economies and
prevailing poverty are responsible for child labour in both countries.
55
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Appendices
Appendix 1: Percentage of children aged 5-14 years engaged in child labour by region,
1999-2008
*Excludes Nigeria.
** Excludes China.
*** Excludes Nigeria and China
Source: UNICEF (2010)
62
Appendix 2: Percentage of Children aged 5-14 years engaged in child labour by gender ,
1999-2008.
*Excludes Nigeria.
** Excludes China.
*** Excludes Nigeria and China
63