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ANTANANARIVO - These days, Fanja smiles a lot. At 15, she has at last found some employers who treat her like a human being, after going through hell with their predecessors who used to beat her.

However, although she has been a domestic servant for three years, she has never been paid, like hundreds of thousands of Malagasy children who are virtually slaves.

Every day from five in the morning, long queues of these little "mpanampy" (the Malagasy word for "assistants"), most of them barefoot, form in front of the capital's fountains. In Madagascar, only 12 percent of households have running water.

Like her nine brothers and sisters, Fanja went to school in the village of Ankaramainty, 270 kilometres (170 miles) south of Antananarivo, until she was 12. Then her parents, who were too poor to feed all the family, handed her over into domestic slavery, along with three of her brothers.

The parents contacted a "mpanera" (go-between), usually a reputable tradesman with contacts born of his travelling. The go-between acts as a kind of moral surety between the parents and the employers, the ethnologist Sylvain Razafindrabe explained.

The family and the mpanera drew up an oral contract, fixing Fanja's wages at 50,000 Malagasy francs (about eight US dollars) a month, which is paid directly to the girl's mother.

These transactions are frequent in Madagascar and regarded as absolutely normal in what is one of the poorest countries in the world and where 50 percent of the 15 million population is less than 16 years old, Razafindrabe explained.

Often boys are handed over to be cowherds in the countryside, in exchange for a zebu or a plot of land.

Fanja rises at 5 am every day, and quickly lights the "fatapera" (brazier) on which she will cook the rice, and heads for the fountain, not far away from her employers' tiny house in the poor Analamahitsy neighbourhood in the north of the capital.

Even modest households have their domestic servants, who are often a relative of the family -- in which case the parents are not paid as the children are deemed to be helping the host household out of solidarity.

"It is the tradition," said Fara, Fanja's 25-year-old employer.

At 6 am, the young girl wakes Fara's only son, a seven-year-old, gives him breakfast and walks him to school, about a kilometre away.

She returns to do the housework, the shopping and to cook the midday meal, brings the boy home, feeds him and takes him back to school at 2 pm. Then she can enjoy two hours to herself. She does not have to do the laundry, has no other child to look after and shares the family meals.

Fanja thinks herself lucky compared with other domestic servants. "Every household in the neighbourhood has one, sometimes aged beween eight and ten," Fara said.

Two years ago, Fanja was placed at Toliara in the southwest of the island with a "very rich" family. "They treated me very badly," Fanja said. "If I had not finished my work, they knocked me down and kicked me."

She could not run away: the children are not allowed to leave their employer without the agreement of the go-between. Finally an "arrangement" was reached.

With her new family, Fanja enjoys Sunday afternoons off, after going to church. Like other mpanampys, she heads for the nearest public park to spend the only free time she is allowed.

Fanja said her ambition was to be able to keep half her wages to buy some crockery "and marry a rich man." In Madagascar, a woman or her family must bring crockery and cutlery as her dowry.

"In the past the system was for a child to be handed over when its parents could not feed it. The idea was that the child was educated, fed and given a roof over its head, but the system has been corrupted," said Razafindrabe.

"The parents regard their children as merely a source of income and the go-betweens, who often take a cut, have become crooks," he said. Nampa-AFP

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