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Child Trafficking or Labor Migration?: A Historical Perspective from Mali’s Dogon Country

In 2000, Mali’s Ministry for the Promotion of Women, Children, and the Family asked donors for 824 million West African Francs (CFA; $1.7 million) to fight child trafficking in neighboring Cote d’Ivoire. The question of child trafficking quickly drew so much attention from state and privately owned media that it submerged other issues, such as AIDS or poverty. As soon as the debate was launched in Mali, child trafficking became the object of a moral condemnation so strong that few researchers have dared to examine it from a historical and sociocultural angle. Such an approach, however, can put into strong relief the disparity between the regional politics of applying formal international conventions on child labor and local ways of thinking about labor and the life cycle in rural Malian societies. In what follows, I attempt to do just that while focusing on the villages and villagers of what is commonly known as ‘‘Dogon country.’’ As scholars have done in other contexts, I would like to bring out the double tension between the victims of trafficking (peasants and their children) and government officials—not only around the concept of child trafficking itself but also, and especially, the question that bears on the social and moral responsibility of the anonymous traffickers and the impoverished parents.1 It is hard today to engage in debate over child trafficking in the poor countries of West Africa without referring to the various United Nations conventions on human rights, and especially the International Labor Organization’s Convention 182, the ‘‘Worst Forms of Child Labor’’ Convention, adopted June 17, 1999. This convention is one of the new legal instruments intended to eliminate the ‘‘worst forms’’ of child labor in the same vein as the ILO’s earlier Forced Labor Convention (1930), as well as the UN’s Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery (1956). How is trafficking in children defined in these international legal materials? According to Article 3 of the convention, the worst forms of child labor are: ‘‘all forms of slavery or practices similar to slavery, such as the sale and trafficking of children, debt bondage and serfdom and forced or compulsory labor, including forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict; (b) the use, procuring or offering of a child for prostitution, for the production of pornography or for pornographic performances; (c) the use, procuring or offering of a child for illicit activities, in particular for the production and trafficking of drugs as defined in the relevant international treaties; (d) work which, by its nature or the circumstances in which it is carried out, is likely to harm the health, safety or morals of children.’’2 Convention 182 does not openly give a definition of trafficking in children, nor does it offer a