Pain of under-age ‘Blackgold’ traders of Trans Mara

By Leonard Korir

Narok, Kenya: As the living standard for most Kenyans continue to soar, some parents are turning to their children for economic support.

A new trend is emerging in Trans Mara West District where young children in Kilgoris are dropping out of school to engage in charcoal business as a way of supplementing their parents’ efforts in catering for their daily needs.

Dawn and morning dew usually finds children on a tiresome journey in search of the precious commodity.

The ‘young traders’ in the making move from one charcoal burning site to another collecting any charcoal debris which they later take home where their parents look for a market to sell and leave some for domestic use.

It is a situation many locals seem to have turned a blind eye and is fast turning out to become a normal daily occurrence.

Their efforts to signal down passing vehicles in a bid to be offered lifts always falls on deaf ears and instead are left covered in clouds of dust as the vehicles speed past them.

Forested areas

Their journey, which usually begins at 6am sees them walk for more than 20 kilometres passing through forested areas with dangerous wild animals straying from the nearby Masai Mara National Game Reserve.

Majority of them are aged below 12 years and they revealed to The Standard the tribulations they encounter as they go over their overwhelming chore.

Wafula (not his real name), a standard five pupil from Oltanki Primary School in Kilgoris, narrates how on several occasions he together with his colleagues have managed to escape being attacked by rogue elephants while collecting charcoal in the forests.

He says such dangers have forced them to learn tricks of avoiding the wrath of the deadly jumbos by using smoke and fire.

“We have learnt that most of the wild animals fear smoke and fire and we have to employ such tricks to survive in these forests,” says Wafula.

However, young girls are the ones who are more exposed to the risky environment where they can easily be defiled.

Some naive-looking girls who have been introduced into the business innocently narrate how some of them are lured into having unprotected sex with the charcoal burners in order to be rewarded with charcoal spoils.

Sexual exploitation

“Some of these men ask for sex before allowing anyone to collect charcoal remnants. Due to desperation for the commodity, and to avoid going home empty-handed, some girls give in to their demands,” confessed one of the girls.

According to Hellen Katim, chairlady Maendeleo ya Wanawake, Trans Mara branch, the young innocent girls in the business easily fall prey to charcoal burners who lure them into sex acts in exchange for charcoal.

She said the Provincial Administration should crack down and arrest these children so that they can identify their parents so that disciplinary measures can be instituted against them.

“Once their parents have been identified, proper action must be taken against them as they are practicing child labour, which is against International labour laws,” Katim told The Standard.

Elizabeth Kakui, a child activist dealing with vulnerable children groups says the idea of engaging school-going children in such risky and labourious activity would interfere with their normal growth.

She says the activity was a product of a rotten society where parents run away from their responsibilities of providing for the family.

Charcoal trade is a booming business in the region with several business people especially from neighbouring Kisii and Nyamira counties trooping to Trans Mara in search of the commodity locally termed as ‘black gold’.

The commodity is currently trading between Sh600 and Sh1,400 per bag and it is due to its rising value that even the security personnel are embroiled in the business as indirect actors.