Aid workers in Benin prepared today for the arrival of a boat full of suspected child slaves after two weeks at sea and the government said it wanted to punish those guilty of trading children.
The ship was thought to be carrying around 180 children caught up in a lucrative trade in minors sold by poor families and forced to work abroad on plantations or as servants.
"This is a dramatic and shocking situation. We have taken all the necessary steps to receive the children", Information Minister Gaston Zossou told reporters.
"We are waiting for the boat, but we do not know who is on board. They could be from Nigeria, Togo or Ghana - not only from Benin. We condemn this practice and we must take measures to punish and discourage those responsible", he added.
But aid workers expressed concern that the threat of punishment in Benin might lead the ship's crew to try to put the children ashore elsewhere before docking in Cotonou.
"The captain knows full well that he will have to face the music when he gets back here, so he may have tried to off-load the children in another port", said Estelle Guluman of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Cotonou.
Guluman said there were also unconfirmed reports the ship might head for Lagos in Nigeria, where the vessel is registered.
Aid workers said there were six places in Cotonou where the children could stay while they tried to trace their families.
Police sources said Benin had asked neighbouring states to inform Cotonou if the ship approached their coasts.
The ship, the MV Etireno, was chartered by a Benin businessman in mid-March and set out from Cotonou on March 30 bound for Gabon.
After being turned back from Gabon and Cameroon's main port of Douala, the ship set out for Cotonou late on Thursday.
Port officials said that even if it headed straight for Cotonou, the ship might not complete its round trip of more than 2,000 km (1,250 miles) until late on Sunday.
Benin Social and Women's Affairs Minister Ramatou Baba-Moussa yesterday said she believed there were 180 children aboard. Earlier figures put the number at 250.
Despite international efforts to curb the trade, child slavery persists in West and Central Africa, from where European slave traders shipped millions of people to the Americas from the 16th to 19th centuries.
Aid workers said their families may have been told that, once working, their children would send cash home regularly.
But after receiving a small amount of cash many families never see or hear from their children again, they said.
Many child slaves from countries such as Benin, Togo and Mali end up working on plantations producing cocoa and other cash crops in Gabon and Ivory Coast, where farmers can pay modern-day slave traders up to 250,000 CFA per child.
Thousands of children aged nine to 12 are thought to work on plantations in Ivory Coast, the world's top cocoa producer.
Life there is hard. Anti-child labour campaigners say youngsters are often forced to work for up to 12 hours a day and sometimes subjected to physical and sexual abuse.