Downtown Lomé, capital city of Togo, where a child-slave trade flourishes. (CBC)

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Listen to David Gutnick's Dispatches documentary about modern-day slavery in Africa.

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When Routkiatou Boreh was 12, her mom and dad sat her down and told her they had some bad news: she was going to have to quit school. They could no longer afford the $10 it cost to send her.

In Togo, in West Africa, even public schools cost more than many parents can afford. For decades, corrupt military dictators were more interested in stuffing bank accounts than classrooms.

These days, the generals are back in their barracks. Togo has an elected government, but the desperate poverty hangs on. Thousands of children who should be spending their days practising with pencils are, instead, pushing carts or washing floors or digging yams. Parents let traffickers take their children because they buy their lies that the whole family will end up better off if the children are allowed leave to take temporary jobs. Instead the children become full-time slaves in Ghana, Nigeria or the Ivory Coast.

The situation looks hopeless. Togo is known for being an important source for child slaves, and international anti-slavery organizations are critical of government attempts at cracking down. But former child slaves who were trafficked out of Togo have found their way back home, and are spreading the word that slavery has got to end. They've even persuaded one child trafficker to stop.

Tricked into slavery

The field that surrounds an elementary school in Tchalou, in the central region of Togo, is almost always jammed with soccer-loving children. The kids are barefoot. The red clay is as hard as concrete, and the straw-filled ball's been kicked so often it's lopsided. There's not a lot of money in Tchalou for sports equipment or supper.

From sunrise until late evening, people in Tchalou and in the surrounding villages struggle to find the few cents needed to buy the yams that women pound into fluffy boiled dough called fufu. Day after day, fufu soaked with a fiery hot tomato sauce is the main meal. And in the mud hut in the nearby village of Yelivo, where the Boreh family lives, it's often eaten in the dark, because the Borehs cannot afford electricity. Even candles are a luxury.

It wasn't that long ago that suppertime at the Borehs was pretty much like it was in the other households: people sitting around, telling stories and catching up on the day's events. But then something changed. There was a new song in the air, a song composed and sung by their daughter Routkiatou. It is meant to teach her parents a lesson.

"My song talks about the children who are sold as slaves to Nigerians," Routkiatou said. "We're telling parents that they shouldn't be sending their kids there. We're also telling kids not to go. We're also telling the traffickers to refuse taking them. We're asking our parents to listen to us because we all want to go to school."

Routkiatou's song rings true because it's about something that happened to her.

From the first day she set foot in a Grade 1 classroom, Routkiatou loved school. She loved putting on her white blouse and khaki skirt before sunrise, quickly eating some warmed up fufu and fruit, and then joining neighbourhood kids for the dusty 1½-hour walk to class. She loved learning French and math.

But the summer when Routkiatou was 12, her parents told her there would be no need for her to put on her uniform in the fall.

"Our talk took place during my summer vacation. My parents said that they just didn't have enough money," she said. "What happened next was that a man came and said that he had a solution. He would find a summer job for me in Nigeria. I could go there and make some money and then come back in time for school. He said he would even help me buy my school books. My parents thought it was a really good idea, and so did I. So I accepted to do it.

"I was taken to Nigeria, to work as family helper. When the time came to go back to school, I said to the family that I wanted to go home. They said no, that I had to stay to work. I had to wake up at three in the morning. I had to do everything around their house. It was really hard work, much harder than what I do at home. And the food they gave me to eat was terrible. I had to eat the burned rice from the bottom of the pot, the stuff that nobody else would eat."

An escape plan

Five months went by. The trafficker had lied. Routkiatou was never paid.

Whenever she complained, her masters threatened to beat her. One day when she was in the market, she ran into another young person from her home village of Yelivo who was also a slave. They compared notes: both of them were exhausted and homesick.

Routkiatou hatched an escape plan.

Early one morning, she slipped out her master's door and walked to a highway truck stop. She found a truck with Togo licence plates and climbed on the back. She hid under a tarp. And she prayed it was going in the right direction.

It was. Lots of rides later, she was back home.

Issaka Rechees, Routkiatou's best friend, remembers what Routkiatou looked like when she arrived.

"She was so skinny. She was really sick," Issaka said. "And her parents felt really bad. They asked her for forgiveness."

The anti-slavery club

Routkiatou said that she would forgive them. But she didn't want any other families to fall prey to traffickers. Routkiatou and Issaka decided they needed to find a way of making sure the adults knew they meant business.

So when they weren't hauling water and gathering firewood and when the more fortunate kids weren't in school, they got together and founded a club opposing child slavery. It's called Parlant pour que ça change — "talk to make things change."

Club members meet in a thatched mud hut that sits besides the local mosque. Routkiatou was appointed president and Issaka is a counsellor.

One night, as the club president explained her anti-slavery mission, her father, Tchadjou Boreh, stood in the moonlight surrounded by a couple of his wives and neighbours, and nodded his head.

"I am very happy with what she's saying," he said.

"That's what all of the parents want, too. We want our kids to go to school. We don't want anyone to fall prey to traffickers who take our kids away to faraway countries to work. What I know now is that those kids end up working like animals. We have to keep kids here so that they have a future."

Putting out the word

Most people in this region of Togo don't own refrigerators or televisions. But they do have battery-run radios. A lot of the time those radios are tuned to Radio Cosmos, whose antenna towers over the palm and teak trees that surround the city of Sotouboua.

Children put the Radio Cosmos programs together. They are members of a club called Young Great Reporters. Club members meet and learn about tape recorders, computers and their own rights.

Reporters like Ragune Iribun, 11, interview judges and police officers and politicians. They also play their favourite music, including a hit song by Togo superstar King Mensa that berates teachers for hitting students.

For years, traffickers had a free hand in Togo. Underfunded aid organizations and the police couldn't shut them down, and Togo's corrupt generals simply turned a blind eye.

Five years ago, Radio Cosmos began as a community project with 10 children. A couple of adults acted as guides. Now hundreds of children are involved. Many of the young reporters have friends who have fallen prey to traffickers. Many adults listen to Radio Cosmos, so the children use it as a way to tell them they don't want to be slaves.

They want the traffickers to stop. And sometimes they do.

A trafficker changes his ways

One trafficker heard the children and was willing to talk about his work, although he insisted that neither his name nor that of his village be mentioned. He recently stopped loading children into buses and sending them north to Nigeria, west to Ghana and the Ivory Coast, and south to work in Lomé, Togo's capital.

"It used to be easier to recruit children into slavery," he said. "You spotted parents who were suffering and promised a bicycle to the child you wanted. You promised the dad a piece of sheet metal so he could repair a leaky thatched roof and you promised the mom a goat or some chickens."

But now, he said, the market for selling children in Nigeria, where he sent the children, is drying up. As well, he said, "Selling children just didn't seem like the right thing to do anymore."

That is something one hears frequently in Togo these days. There are anti-trafficking pamphlets and posters in the marketplace and on school walls. Community activists say more and more people are aware of the damage done by slavery.

In the schoolyard in Sotouboua, a horde of sweaty kids take a break from kicking around a badly bruised ball. A little bare-chested boy sees a radio broadcaster's microphone. He grabs it and smiles. Then he breaks into song. Off in the distance, the Radio Cosmos antenna towers above the palm trees. It's show time. The air is alive with children clamouring to be heard.

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