It's an ancient tradition in Togo for impoverished families to lend their children to the rich, who then pay for education and medical care in return for domestic service. Fishing is one of the industries where modern-day "slaves" are put to work. (David Gutnick/CBC)

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Listen to David Gutnick's Sunday Edition documentary about modern-day slavery in Ghana.

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The old granite fortresses along Ghana's Cape Coast are now museums, bitter reminders of the colonial slave trade. Grim-faced tourists pay to see the musty dungeons, rattle the rusting chains and open the doors that led to the slave ships.

But just down the road from the Cape Coast museums, slavery isn't about roots and it isn't about history. Today in Ghana, it's estimated that between 5,000 and 7,000 children ply the waters of Lake Volta, fishing. They have masters, they don't get paid and they don't go to school. If they try to escape they are beaten. The going rate to buy a five-year-old is $10 — cheaper now than it was 200 years ago when their ancestors were being loaded onto ships.

The story of modern child slavery in Ghana isn't straightforward or simple. It's a story of trade-offs between development and grinding poverty, between school and food, between children and parents and police. There is no quick fix and no easy ending.

In the middle of it, an unassuming man named Jack Dawson uses whatever transportation he can find — rusty bicycles, borrowed boats, strong feet — to take him to where the child slaves are. He's a master of the extremely delicate negotiations that can save at least a few of them.

The Yeji market

It's in the bustling marketplace of Yeji, a city on the shores of Lake Volta, that the children are first sold. "People live in fishing villages along the lake," Dawson tells me. "They come to conduct business. Most of the men are fishermen, and most of the children who are sent here are used in the fishing industry."

The Yeji market is familiar turf for Jack Dawson. He comes here often, to watch and listen for child traffickers. He points to a blue van he's seen before, parked in the shade of a banana tree. "The driver's probably off having a daytime nap," he says. "Traffickers work nights. They don't sleep. It is profitable to use children to get fish."

Tall, gentle, unflappable Dawson is in his 40s and works for an organization called Apple, the Association of People for Practical Life Education. Apple is Ghanaian but gets its funding from Free the Slaves, a U.S. anti-slavery organization. Apple operates on a budget of $60,000 a year, which barely pays for a dozen salaries and expenses. There's no money for a car.

For 20 years, Apple workers put on birth control and AIDS prevention workshops in Yeji and in the fishing villages on the shores of Lake Volta. Then a few years ago, Dawson began noticing children who didn't speak with the local accent.

Traffickers were bringing children in from faraway regions and selling them in the Yeji market. Fishermen were the customers. The children were their slaves. Apple changed its mission.

Dawson's an enormously patient man. But the driver of the blue van, Dawson says, isn't worth waiting for today. There's something more pressing. Dawson and another Apple worker named William want to talk to a fisherman they suspect is keeping a slave. He lives an hour away in Votideke, a village they know well. "Think of it as a fishing community that uses children," Dawson says. "We're going to see some slaves."

A visit to Lake Volta

In 1957, Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African country to win independence. President Kwame Nkrumah promised prosperity, and electricity would be the key. In the mid 1960s, the giant Akosombo hydroelectric dam was built on the Volta River. Canadian engineers helped design it. Farms and villages were flooded and trees disappeared under water. Rivers were diverted to create a giant reservoir.

Lake Volta was supposed to guarantee a steady supply of food for the people on its shores, protein to go along with their diet of pounded cassava. And for a while it did. No one down river was supposed to suffer. But a combination of increasing population, drought, destructive farming methods and pollution along the shores emptied downstream rivers of fish, leaving families poorer and hungrier. Lake Volta is increasingly choked with weeds and rotting wood, and the fish are getting smaller.

In Votideke, two women sit on the ground gutting finger-sized fish, tossing them onto a straw mat to dry. Beside them there's a pile of nets, all shiny silver with more minnows trapped by the gills. It takes small fingers to gently twist them out from the netting. And that's where the child slaves come in. Fishermen and traffickers travel down river to desperate villages. A few dollars change hands. They promise parents the children will only work part-time, and that they'll go to school. Instead the children become full-time slaves in villages like Votideke.

"That is the master," Dawson says, pointing to a man in a blue multi-coloured shirt. He says he's been keeping his eye on him. He asks if they can sit and talk for a while. Dawson's a sophisticated urbanite, but he's learned how to make himself welcome among illiterate fisherman. He's a listener.

An image from one of the anti-slavery pamphlets Apple hands out to fishermen and child traffickers in Ghana.

As Dawson sits down with the slave owner, other fishermen come out of their huts and join their talk, and a bottle of palm wine is passed around. As the fishermen share their hardship stories, Dawson nods and suggests ways to help them make their lives easier. Dawson uses gentleness and humour. It's why the slave master is willing to look at the pamphlet Dawson's passing around. He looks at the drawing of a dead child in a fisherman's arms. Many child slaves on Lake Volta drown when they untangle nets caught on underwater stumps. Their bodies wash up on shore.

The conversation between the master and the anti-slavery activist is calm.

Dawson says threatening him won't do any good because the fisherman might take out his anger on the child and warn other masters in other villages to keep Apple workers out.

The fisherman finally admits he bought a boy in Yeji. But he's not a good boy, the fisherman complains, he keeps trying to run away. You can have him, he says, if you can find him. "They all say they don't have slaves," Apple worker William says, "but meanwhile the slaves, they are there."

Under Ghana's new child trafficking law, anyone caught buying or selling a child is locked up for five years. But off the record, a top police official told me that officers are reluctant to turn in parents and fishermen. The officers know how desperately poor the players are. Parents who are in jail can't take care of children still at home, and no one else will.

Apple doesn't have the resources to open an orphanage. And the government has other priorities. Before Dawson rescues a child, he has to locate the parents, and the parents have to agree to take the child back. If they can't be found, or they say no — and some parents do — the child stays a slave, and Dawson moves on to the next option. "We cannot raid," Dawson says, "because you get people who are not ready to be rescued. We do it systematically by making sure we take the right people into our camp."

William and I leave Dawson with the master and walk out past red clay huts and banana trees towards the windy shores of Lake Volta. As we get closer I spot a group of six girls and boys carrying nets. Then they spot us and begin running away. William tells me that it happens all the time.

William and I are all alone on the shore. Muddy brown water stretches to the horizon. It's hot as an oven. We wait for more than an hour. Then William nods and points into the tall grass. Peeking out is a skinny, bare-chested boy wearing tattered shorts. He's got a rolled up fishing net under his left arm. He hesitates, and then slowly walks toward us, his eyes never leaving the ground

William gently questions him. "His name is Krokuvie and he is from far downstream," William says. "He doesn't know how old he his; he looks about eight to nine. He spends his days casting nets and paddling his master's boat." William asks whether he'd like to go to school and Krokuvie nods. He says his master sometimes threatens to beat him. But when William asks whether he would like to return home, he says no.

Krokuvie has to get to work. He wades into Lake Volta. When he's in over his waist, he unrolls his net and ties one end to a tree stump. He walks out further until his net's stretched taught and ties it to another stump. He comes back in to drag his master's boat out of the mud. The boat's name is painted across the bow: "Believe in God."

Dawson has wandered down to join us on the shore. "For this afternoon, the best thing we can do is identify him as a trafficked child," he says. "When we go to the camp in Accra, you will see similar children there, both boys and girls."

Halfway home

The Medina Social Welfare Department for Trafficked Children is in a suburb of Ghana's capital city. It is a walled compound with a dormitory, a kitchen, a classroom and a soccer field.

If Dawson can find Krokuvie's parents and they want him back, and if he persuades Krokuvie's slave master to let him go, the boy will come here for five weeks. He'll see nurses, because slave children often carry infections and parasites. He'll see social workers, because slave children are often traumatized. He'll eat until he's full. And he'll sit in a classroom for the very first time. Just like the 31 children who are here now.

Two weeks ago the children at the Medina camp were all still slaves, holding nets. Now they're holding chalk, learning how to write on slate boards. Evelyn Kruirkutana is their teacher. She's standing by the desk of a little girl wearing a new bright blue T-shirt.

"Some of the children are really traumatized," she says. "When they do something wrong and they see you coming, they try to clean it very fast and they end up sometimes tearing their books. I get so sad with those who are really not picking up quickly." She points to a little boy in the front row. "This little one is about seven years old. He was still at the age of development when he left and he's been malnourished. Because there were no fruits, there were no vegetables, slavery has really affected his growth and development."

Adriana Thomson is a social worker at the centre. Over the years she's heard all the arguments from parents trying to justify why they sold their children to traffickers. "I cannot understand why," she says. " No matter the poverty you are in. I don't have any sympathy for them. If they really want to look after the children, they can do it."

Back home

Atitekpo is a long day's drive from Yeji. A generation ago it was a thriving riverside community. Now the river's empty of fish. And the traffickers' vans are full. A grandfather sits under a tree to get away from the sun. He's holding a sweat-stained sheet of paper covered with a neat hand-written list: the names and ages of children from this one village who were sold as slaves and later rescued. There are 32 of them.

Now most of them are students at the Atitekpo village school. Apple pays their school fees, pays for books and chalk. Their parents are also given 20 or 30 dollars and some counselling. It's enough to persuade them to keep their children home.

A chorus of former child slaves are standing in the schoolyard. "Thank-you, Lord, I feel so good, every little cell in my body is happy," they sing.

A shy, slight, barefoot boy named Gabriel is in the front row. Gabriel was four years old when a fisherman came to visit Atitekpo. He had heard that Gabriel's mother couldn't feed her three children. Veronica only had a few chickens, and in her small garden she couldn't grow enough yams or corn.

The fisherman promised that he'd feed Gabriel and enrol him in school.

Gabriel was traded away for an armful of dried fish.

When Dawson first spotted Gabriel, he was picking minnows out of a net on Lake Volta. When he tracked down Veronica, she said she regretted what she had done and she wanted Gabriel back. He was put on the list for the next round of rescues. When Dawson's list had 30 names on it, he scraped together the money to rent a bus, went from fisherman to fisherman to pick up the children and brought them to the camp in Accra. Five weeks later, Dawson walked into Atitekpo holding Gabriel's hand. He wanted the whole village to see that the story could end like this.

Dawson remembers Veronica's reaction when they arrived amid the mud huts. "She was so happy, so excited. She ran to hug him in a very joyful mood, and some of us even cried for it, because for such a small child to have been in bonded labour is painful and difficult.

Veronica remembers that day also. "It pains me a lot, but things are OK now and we have almost forgotten the bad times." Veronica says she "prays that the boy becomes somebody in the future. I don't want any other family to suffer the way my family did when I sent Gabriel away."

Back in Votideke, Krokuvie is still paddling his master's boat and tying his nets to stumps on Lake Volta. If Jack Dawson can find his parents and persuade them to take their boy back, he'll be rescued sometime this spring.

"I can't cry now because I must be strong in order to carry on with the job," Dawson says.

"When you go to a funeral and you start crying with the people who are mourning, it means that you are also mourning with the people. One of them should be strong enough to say, 'Stop crying, it will be OK, it will be OK.' "

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