On this date in 2003, 116 Black African boys were rescued from a slave labor camp in Nigeria. Police rescued the boys, who were as young as 4 years old, who had been put to work in the granite quarries in southwest Nigeria.
This initial intervention stemmed from increased international attention to child labor. The intervention activity includes boycott threats of Ivory Coast cocoa, often harvested with the help of trafficked children. Their parents had put them in the hands of labor traffickers for as little as $35.
In Benin, three of the children later died after they had been transferred. Kemi Olumefun and a Nigerian women’s charity helped rescue the children. Some of the children had been working in the quarries for up to four years.
