Sechaba kaNkosi
Zodwa does not know her age but she looks about 16. She cannot read or write, and every morning she wakes up before dawn to get her one-year-old child ready and, by six, starts her duties at a small farm near Boksburg.
If you are a few minutes late, the farmer forfeits your days pay or sometimes more, so we try to be as punctual as possible, she explains.
For the next 12 hours Zodwa will be working on the fields. Like most other child labourers in South Africa, she knows no other life than the farms she claims to have been working on for eight years now.
My mother stopped working after suffering a stroke many years ago. I had to work so that we could all survive. I would not say I am happy with my pay, but it is much better than what I used to earn before I came here, she says with a smile.
Zodwas plight and that of thousands of fellow working children has highlighted loopholes in the laws that are meant to protect children, and tensions between government and child-care activists on the definition of child labour. They say there is a contradiction between the Constitution, which sets a minimum voting age of 18 and implies that anyone younger is not adult, and the South African Schools Act and the proposed Basic Conditions of Employment Bill, which sets 15 as a minimum working age.
This, argues the Network Against Child Labour, leads to exploitation. Representative Thabo Mokoena says they are lobbying business, government and labour to agree on a common age and definition that will be suitable for all. We want 18 to be accepted as a minimum. Child labour takes different forms in South Africa. In most instances children are forced into it by poverty. So the definition must include anything that affects the development of a child. If we can have that as a starting point, we believe a lot of children can be protected.
The Department of Labour agrees a minimum age of 18 would be ideal. But Director General Sipho Pityana says the contradiction between the laws is mainly based on material conditions in South Africa. Pityana argues that while the new Bill wants the minimum working age to be 15, it also seeks to provide strict protection for working children between 15 and 18. Says Pityana: We have to be careful not to create an environment which will leave our children out of school, while they will not be able to find any means of survival if they drop out.
Local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are planning to take the issue to a ministerial meeting on child labour in Oslo this month. The conference, organised by the Norwegian government, plans to identify strategies to combat child labour worldwide. Its key focus will be on the most intolerable forms of child labour, such as slavery, prostitution and drug trafficking. This meeting is expected to extend its recommendations to the International Labour Organisation next year.
Keneuoe Mosoang, a researcher at the Farmworkers Research and Resource Project, says: In Europe children are prepared for the world from a very early age, and are more comfortable making their own decisions around 18. So if you accept the minimum age of 15, you are basically perpetuating the same system that apartheid tried and failed.
You are saying to black children they are only good enough to be educated to primary school level so that they can become manual labourers like their parents. How do you address inequality and poverty that way? asks Mosoang.
Pityana retorts that local children should not be treated differently from their counterparts in other countries. He says this will present more disadvantages for them. While we understand the argument about childrens development, we have to make sure that our children are also able to ply their skills in the job market at an early age if conditions prevent them from continuing their education.
There are no official statistics on the number of working children in South Africa. But Zodwa hopes that her child will not become one of them. Although I want to take him to the highest possible levels of education, she says, there is no guarantee that he will not work as a child like I did. I did not choose it, it was foisted on me by poverty.