Al Jazeera: People & Power – Slaves to Football
March 6, 2011For many African youth, football is a dream, an escape from locales bereft of opportunities. The glamourous images on the TV contrast greatly with the grinding mundane of daily life and restless youth chase after those dream images. Many are talented footballers. Some are not. The fact remains that their dreams are the foothold of unscrupulous traffickers.
Yes, human trafficking and football are connected. It is a multi-billion dollar industry that feeds off of the dreams and aspirations of African youth. Football recruiters transport boys thousands of miles away in Europe (or even domestically) with the promise of training at football academies for budding talent. There they are forced to work in conditions of forced labor or indentured servitude- even abandoned to become beggars and unskilled laborers in a strange land.
Unscrupulous traffickers and coaches profit from the domestic, international and transnational trafficking of Africa’s aspiring football stars. In the video, you see the example of one man in Côte D’Ivoire, who housed boys in his house and “sold” them to traffickers masquerading as recruiters.” The report indicates that he was investigated by the Ivorian government.
Fatou Diome, Senegalese author, tells the story of Moussa in her book “The Belly of the Atlantic.” Moussa, a Senegalese youth who was trafficked to Italy under the pretense of receiving training in a football camp and gaining exposure to FIFA’s talent scouts, offers a cautionary tale to the other football-obsessed boys in his home village. Instead of meeting talent scouts, he is rejected and abandoned, forced to beg to get the money back home. In his home village, he is seen as a failure because he came back from the alleged ‘land of plenty’ with nothing in hand. The story has a tragic ending.
However, this is not to say that all stories end in tragedy. Instead, I’d like to raise awareness about this issue. I will be blogging more about the organization I work for- Free Generation International and their ground-breaking initiatives.