Nigeria: Girls Not for Sale

20 February 2020
opinion

In the dark days of slavery, the Benin Kingdom was one of the few territories in the southern part of Nigeria where slavery did not thrive with the active collaboration of the locals, especially kings and chiefs. Instead, the kingdom was known for its stout refusal to participate in what was then the common practice of selling indigenes out to Europeans for the ultimate journey into slavery.

It should therefore be considered an irony of history that the two states that probably incorporated the Benin Kingdom of old - Edo and Delta states - are today arguably the headquarters of modern slavery in Nigeria, which is just but part of a global problem. Most media reports on Nigerian girls trafficked virtually on a daily basis out of the country with promises of lucrative jobs, who, but who end up parading the streets of major European cities as prostitutes or, at best, employed in menial jobs with little or no pay, indicate that many of them are from those two states.

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