Eight-year-old Charles Smith woke up at four in the morning in a small, dank, dirty bunkhouse his father had built in suburban London.
With a loaf of bread under his arm that his mother had baked the day before, he set off for the factory.
There he would spend 12 hours a day, seven days a week, depending on the needs determined by the boss, loading metal pieces or taking them out of the oven.
He ran the year 1814.
That same year, Omar Ndiaye, seven years old and a resident of the Senegalese town of Saloum, once the rainy season had begun, very early in the morning he prepared to work in the fields of his marabou, his teacher of Koranic teachings, as payment to your lessons.
On the other hand, for the descendant of Charles, nine generations later, many social, economic, political circumstances changed so that his childhood ran very differently from that of his ancestor.
We are talking about a very different context that began when, in 1919, Eglantyne Jebb, with the help of her sister Dorothy Buxton, founded the Save the Children organization in London to help and protect children affected by war.
He made that decision after witnessing the horror of the consequences of World War I, especially for minors, who were enlisted in all the contending armies and who died everywhere: on the battlefield, by starvation, mutilated, mentally shattered...
Jebb and Buxton elaborated with their foundation the five points that would become the seed of the first Declaration of the Rights of the Child and that said: “The hungry child must be fed;
the sick child must be cared for;
the handicapped child must be stimulated;
the maladjusted child must be re-educated, and the orphaned and the abandoned must be taken in and helped.”
With all the declarations, provisions, laws and historical development that have occurred since then in the rich countries, we can affirm that in Western society, the descendants of Charles Smith have a legal and social framework in which they live, for the most part, in a friendly society that protects and cares for them.
At the same time, the descendants of Omar Ndiaye, today, beg on the streets of the cities of Senegal.
With a can under their arm, dirty, ragged and with clear signs of malnutrition, they are the talibés children.
These boys, originally from the poorest areas of the interior of the country and sometimes sent from other surrounding states, are given by their parents to a marabou when they are four years old.
The situation in which the talibés still live today is one of distressing precariousness: some reside in house projects that were abandoned as soon as the foundations were laid;
others in small metal sheet barracks located in the poorest neighborhoods of the cities, without electricity or water...
This practice began to occur in the seventies due to droughts that persist today.
In Senegal, one in five children is already affected by malnutrition, warned Fabrice Carbonne, regional director of Action Against Hunger in Senegal in 2017. Due to this need, the marabouts began a massive exodus to the cities together with their acolytes.
There, far from his fields, his new economic activity would be to send his students to beg for rice, sugar and money with which they could pay for his Koran classes.
The situation in which the talibés still live today is one of distressing precariousness: some reside in house projects that were abandoned as soon as the foundations were laid;
others in small metal sheet barracks located in the poorest neighborhoods of the cities, without electricity or water...
What future awaits them without having received any training other than knowledge of the Koran, without even knowing French, which is the only official language?
I'll give you a hint.
When they have finished their Koranic training, their parents send them back to the city to look for work.
A good part of them work as porters in the market and others get a job on the lowest rung of construction.
The average financial compensation they receive is 2,000 CFA francs, about three euros for about nine hours of work.
A few months ago, Amed arrived at the center from where we treat them with pain throughout the body.
This unfortunate situation is recurrent.
Amed explained to me that his head hurt especially, a tool that he predominantly uses to carry the purchases of the people who went to the market and the boxes of the merchants who hired his services...
I was wondering in the title at the top of this article what children's things are.
Amnesty International makes a very interesting definition of childhood: “(...)Despite numerous intellectual debates about the definition of childhood and about cultural differences about what should be offered to children and what should be expected Of them, there has always been a widely shared view that childhood implies a delimited and safe space, separate from adulthood, in which boys and girls can grow, play and develop”.
Hopefully this will be a reality for children around the world, in Africa and for the talibés in Senegal.
Amador Vázquez Martín
is an educator and head of the 'Kingdom of Children' project in Senegal.
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