Africa and its children

Second of three parts

URAMO BEACH, Nigeria -- It was just a shack made of cardboard and bamboo.

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To 12-year-old Bidemi Ademibo, it meant the world. The shack had been home for more than two months to her and eight other young girls. Some of them, like Bidemi, were runaways. Others were orphans. One had escaped slavery. All lived entirely on their own.

One morning a year ago in this beach slum at the southern edge of Lagos, the nine girls sat listlessly around the remains of the shack, blackened poles and smoking piles of ash. The night before, a gang of young men had poured gasoline over it and set it ablaze. The girls awoke to heat and smoke, scrambled over one another, and pushed their way out the door. They screamed in fear, only to be silenced by blows from the men waiting outside. Later, the girls learned the gang was battling the shack owner for control of Kuramo Beach, and they were simply in the way.

"That's the mentality here," Bidemi said, as she picked foam from a burnt pillow. "Everyone is looking after themselves, and no one else."

Under a deep blue sky, with the surf roaring in their ears, Bidemi and her friends dug their toes into the warm sand. They had no idea where they would go.

The reason for the fight didn't matter to them. Their home was gone, and they were adrift. Again.

Children like Bidemi are an unavoidable sight in Africa, from Senegal to Somalia, from Egypt to South Africa.

Deepening poverty is pushing many families to cast off their children to earn pennies a day on the streets. War and disease -- AIDS in particular -- have nearly doubled the number of orphans on the continent, from 3.5 million in 1990 to nearly 6 million in 2001, and millions more today. Where once these orphans, castoffs, and runaways would have been taken in by extended families, tribes, and villages, the sheer numbers have overwhelmed this caring tradition.

And so they must fend for themselves.

Over the past year, a Globe reporter and photographer have traveled among these child survivors and gathered their stories: Girls who give little thought to the dangers of selling their bodies in order to buy a meal, and girls who risk all by refusing to do so. One polite boy who admitted killing other children in order to save his own life, and who now wonders whether God will forgive him. And one girl who lost her mother and father, only to become a mother to her younger siblings and a caretaker for her great-grandmother -- at age 12, a matriarch.

Some of these children pray that adults will help them. Others embrace their freedom.   Continued...