Rip Hopkins
IN the capital of Madagascar, Antananarivo, thousands of children live on the streets. Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world and the capital sees the extremes of its poverty. The children, some as young as six months old, survive in gangs of 30 or so. Some sleep in skips or in road tunnels; most scavenge for food among the city’s rubbish.
The children in a particular gang look out for each other and subsist by doing small, menial jobs in the marketplace, by begging, stealing or by prostitution.
The Madagascan government, keen to encourage tourism to the island, has recently come up with a solution to the ever-growing mass of children on its capital’s streets. It has set up a special police department. The department organises nightly raids known as rafles during which children sleeping rough are collected in wagons. Some of the children are then sent to private detention centres. The rest – those suspected of criminal activity, of “delinquency” or “theft” – are committed to prison. There is no trial; their sentences commonly last for three or four years.
Madagascan prisons which officially take children only over the age of 13 are brutal establishments. Financed by the state, they tend to be run by ex-prisoners who, having finished their sentences, are encouraged to become wardens. The wardens operate a reign of terror. They take the majority of the food destined for the prisoners and maintain “law and order” with clubs, knives and sticks.
In one prison we visited, Prison d’Antanimora, the children were required to give their guardians weekly cadeaux of 100 Madagascan francs; failure to do so resulted in them having to stand for days on end within the confines of a circle chalked on the prison floor.
There is no minimum age for children who are held in private detention centres in Antananarivo; as a consequence, many of the inmates are as young as five or six. These places tend to be run by local families, who force the children to work – in glass factories or in chicken farms or in some cases as prostitutes, selling themselves by night and returning to their “home” by day – and then collect money for them.