TEMA, Ghana—When you hear of the exploitation of children in Ghana, it's most often about child labour on cocoa farms. Living here though, one quickly learns that, unlike North American children, kids here are expected to help out on the farm during the brief harvest season. They may take some time off of school to get the harvest in, but it seems more like cooperation than exploitation in most cases.
Though there doesn't seem to be much evidence that overworked children here are tied to cocoa trees, as has been claimed, in hundreds of internet cafés young men are falling prey to a form of exploitation that makes them both perpetrators and victims.
I Just Wanted to Check My Email
On a visit to Tema, Ghana's port city, my seventeen-year-old stepson took me to a café to check my email. He's a sweet kid, and a clever one who can always figure out how to use the complex features on my laptop or cell phone—stuff I'm afraid to touch. He also knows which Internet café in Tema has the fastest connection.
My son leads me past several cafes to his favourite, where he sometimes works. As we enter, he greets his many friends. I am surprised to see the café is run by young men his age. The oldest person in the place is 22. This café runs 24 hours a day. Morning, noon, and night, the place is full of teenagers.
'Chatting as a Girl'
I plug in, but my eyes wander to the screen next to me. An old, topless white man is displayed using a web cam. I look away and continue to check my email.
I check the screen on the other side of me. The young man next to me is chatting.
"Will you have sex with me" reads the msn messenger line.
"Are you lonely?"
He is chatting simultaneously with several "interested parties." When he answers, "Yes, I am lonely," the picture of a woman with the chat name Betty shows up. He is pretending to be an impossibly good-looking white woman, chatting with a South Asian gentleman whose picture is displayed.
I begin to look around. There are several more teenage boys msn and Google messaging "as girls." I go back to look at what my stepson is doing. I peer over his shoulder as he quickly signs out of "sugardaddies.com." As we leave the café I pry the whole story from him.
Internet cafes in Tema are filled with teenage boys. The average age is 18. They are "chatting as a girl"—playing a game they hope will pay off financially. Pretending to be women, using photos of sisters or girlfriends, some have solicited 10,000 Euros or more from prospective "husbands" abroad.
I decided to return the next day to interview some of the young men at the cafe. Kwame (an alias) is 22 years old. He is acknowledged by all his peers to be the biggest money-maker in the café. He tells me the smallest amount he has solicited is $300 CDN, the largest 1300 Euros.
Kwame uses free dating sights only, like Lavalife, Date Me Free, Afro Introduction, and Black People Meet—a site mainly visited by white men in their fifties, he informs me.
Kwame tells me he makes most of his money using his own photo and joining "gay chat." He has 11 "boyfriends" online from Austria, Australia, the U.S., and Canada.
Kwame is one of my son's close friends. I can see he is ashamed, but because we have met several times before his is willing to share with me. I ask him if it what he sees online is upsetting.
"It is," he says.
How do you feel about it, I ask. "I'm doing it for fun," says Kwame, which as a parent I don't buy for a minute.
"I'm just playing around with them. But I don't want them to know that I'm playing with them. They think I'm very serious."
I ask him what he sees on the web cam. "It's there everyday," he says, describing in detail not suitable to print here men and women masturbating.
"Some people are looking for women or men as slaves," Kwame says. "They will command you to do this and this. They will command you to slap yourself on camera."
Kwame says he plays along. "If you don't want to do so, you tell them you don't have a cam. You just tell them you are doing it."
Kwame says some of the white men are also willing to act as slaves. He's commanded white men to eat their own feces and burn themselves with candles, he says.
I ask him how he feels about presenting himself as a slave to old white men.
"It's no good. So we are just fooling them because of what they did to us some years back."
"You mean slavery?" I ask. "It's because of that," he responds. "They are on the net looking for people to be slaves. Whatever they get they deserve it. I am a slave so he will command me, so he will pay me money to go to hospital. 200 or 400 dollars, sometimes he can give $1000."
When asked what he does with the money Kwame says: "I will use it for myself, my business, for my education. I paid my younger sister's school fees, books and things."
Kwame is an apprentice to a welder. His monthly salary is about $70, barely enough to eat regularly.
Kwame's experiences are not uncommon. As we entered the café I walked past the car purchased by a young man here who "chatted as a girl." With the 10,000 Euros he received, he bought the car and paid his first-year university tuition.
A Tragedy of Errors
I decide to check out the next café and take some photos. I survey the place and have a peak at a few screens. Of the 12 people in the café, three are checking their email, three are teenage boys who serve as the sole custodians of the place, and six are chatting online.
I feel saddened for them. Like gamblers in front of slot machines, feeding in their lost innocence, waiting for a pay off.
That's when I spot Rolph over somebody's shoulder, a 50-year-old German man whose profile reads: "No porn. Looking for relationship."
Rolph is sending 36 year-old Ghanaian bachelorette "Peggy" a photo of him and his nine-year-old daughter. Only Peggy is really a 15 year-old boy named "Boogie." My sympathy is evenly divided between "Boogie," a child who could be my son, and Rolph, a man who could be my father. Now I am just sickened.
"We chat online with girls our age," says my son, clearly lying to me. And that is when I raise my voice: "Do you think you are the only ones out there fishing online?" I ask.
"Never meet anyone you know from a chat room." I tell him, "You might think you are meeting some cute girl and then a man will show up instead. He'll tell you, 'Oh, I'm her father. Get in the car,' and we will never see you again!" People come to Ghana to make child porn, I warn him. "Don't you know what a snuff film is?"
I want to cry as we pass the empty soccer field on our way home. No young men are playing, even though high schools are on a two-week break here. I have seen 35 boys under the age of 19 in the two days I spent researching for this story. I can honestly say I am probably the only parent who has any clue what is going on inside these cafés.
Run by children, patronized by children, and monitored by no one, this seems to be Ghana's very worst sort of exploitation.
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