South Africa: Open Borders for Child Traffickers

Cebile Dlamini at the Amazing Grace Children's Home in Mpumplanga. The 12-year-old Swazi girl was kept as a domestic slave from the age of 10

MALELANE, SOUTH AFRICA -- When the governments of Mozambique and South Africa decided to revive the transport route between Maputo and Johannesburg in the mid-1990s, child slaves were not the cargo envisaged for haulage.

Yet management at the Amazing Grace Children's Home (AGCH), a grassroots child welfare organisation in Malelane, near one of the main border-crossing points to Mozambique in South Africa's northeastern Mpumalanga Province, believe child traffickers are increasingly using the highway to deliver their human merchandise to local and overseas buyers.

Every month up to 100 Mozambican and Swazi children are trafficked along the Maputo corridor to Johannesburg, South Africa's economic hub, where they are sold into the local sex industry or transported to Europe, according to AGCH's expert on child trafficking, Vusi Ndukuya.

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