In Africa, the market is a meeting place for buying and selling, a place that shapes relationships. It is built on goods, but above all, on people. The market is the meeting place of tradition and modernity. It is a crossroads of voices, noises, gestures, glances. A chaos of colours, smells and flavours.
Like all African markets, the Dantokpà market in Cotonou, the economic centre of Benin, is a largely female environment: women transport the products, set up the markets stalls, take care of the bartering.
Today, however, the market is also a place of exploitation and the trafficking of minors.
Fourteen thousand children work at the Dantokpà market either peddling or, more often, transporting goods, or even collecting rubbish. Many girls are sold at the market as domestic hands.
They are known as ‘Vidomegon’ in the Fon language: “domestic serving girls”. Indeed, according to a consolidated practice in the rural areas of West Africa, many families chose to entrust their children to a guardian to guarantee them better living conditions and access to education. From the 1980’s onwards though, with the gradual impoverishment of families, this tradition lost its connotation of solidarity and degenerated into the trafficking of children, sold as a free labour force.
Can this change be attributed to the market? This was the sensation of the Salesian sisters and their collaborators, involved in an extremely important awareness and prevention drive that began in the most downtrodden area of Dantokpà market, ironically known as the Belle Etoile because many people have erected roofs there under the stars.
For the Sisters of John Bosco, the market was the launch pad for a new beginning and new opportunities for these girls. In 2002 they constructed a cabin, writing “Vidomegon” on the outside. It is here that the Daughters of May Help of Christians welcomed the girls, listening to them and their life stories. They organised basic literacy, DIY and sewing courses.
The Vidomegon were subsequently received at Foyer Laura Vicuña. Every year, this large family home that the Sisters created in Zogbo, a district of Cotonou, hosts around 400 girls of 6-17 years, rescued from the trafficking market by the police or encouraged to visit the market by the sisters themselves, or the social educators that work with them.
The arrival of the girls at the family home represents the beginning of a process. There they can find a warmth that they have never felt before. Before being reintegrated in their original families they can stay at the Foyer and attend literacy courses, go to school or learn a trade, such as tailor or hairdresser, or take part in activities such as gardening, cooking and soap preparation. They start to live again and to hope.