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TORI TOKOLI, Benin — When the corn harvest is bad or a breadwinner dies, child smugglers crisscross the red dirt roads linking Benin’s villages with the big city, offering money and promises of a better life. 

They prey on villagers’ hopes for an education for their children, a good wage, a full belly. 

The odyssey of a suspected slave ship put the fate of a few score such children at the center of world attention this week. The saga ended in a confused mystery –with international aid workers unsure whether they had been mistaken all along or were duped when a cargo of men, women and children finally came to port. 

Undeniable, however, is the prevalence of child slavery in West and Central Africa. An estimate of 200,000 child slaves “is probably low,” said Nicholas Pron, a UNICEF official in Benin. 

Eugenie Zoulougbe, 35, recalls how her family relinquished her then-teen-age sister to a ring of child-traffickers more than a decade ago. Later, her neighbors gave up several sons. 

All the children ended up toiling as unpaid slaves in cocoa plantations and street markets in Ivory Coast, a West African nation hundreds of miles to the east. Months or years later, they escaped and returned home. 

“Everyone knows that if you give your child to a stranger you take the risk of never seeing them again,” Zoulougbe said in her red brick-and-tin home in the village of Tori Tokoli, an hour’s drive from Benin’s commercial capital, Cotonou. 

Uncounted others disappear regularly into a loosely organized, largely undetected web of child-trafficking that U.N. officials and aid workers say stretches from the Sahara Desert to the jungles of Congo. 

For each child, Zoulougbe says, gifts of $14 to $28 were given as “advance monthly payments” to the families. No more money ever came. 

“They give the same lies each time. Yet people will still sometimes take the chance because we are all so poor,” Zoulougbe said. 

Few other families are willing to talk about the subject – a sensitive one, however common. 

The final destination for many of the children is Ivory Coast and Gabon, two countries with relative agriculture and mineral wealth in a region of desperate poverty. Some end up picking coffee and cocoa. Others work as domestic servants. A few are sold into prostitution. 

One reason smuggling flourishes in Benin is because it bears a close resemblance to the West African practice of child apprenticeship, known in southern Benin as “vidomegon,” meaning “putting a child in a home.” 

The tradition prescribes that the progeny of poor families can be sent to stay with richer relatives or friends to learn a trade and go to school. To earn their keep, the children provide domestic services. 

Benin was known in the 18th- and 19th centuries as the Slave Coast for its central role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. 

Today, many of those who lure children out of the villages do so “as a business, like a used-car salesman,” said Pron, the UNICEF worker. Most children are neither paid nor allowed to go to school. 

The smugglers give the children’s families a fictitious address and conjure up false stories of good schools and a comfortable life. 

“You’d be amazed at the convincing arguments they use to lure families in,” Pron said. “These are not parents who don’t care about their children. They love them just as much as anyone else.” 

It is impossible to determine exactly how many of Benin’s children have been smuggled into slavery. 

Alfonso Gonzalez Jaggli, a delegate of the Swiss-run Friends of the Earth charity that runs children’s homes for ex-child slaves and other “trafficked children,” estimates as many as 400,000 Benin children have been taken from their families and end up in “dubious circumstances.” 

Benin government officials are outspoken on the issue of child slavery and have called for international assistance, including help in discovering whether 100-250 child slaves were being trafficked on the MV Etireno, the ship that sparked a frantic international search. 

Since the ship docked in Cotonou, 30 to 40 children have been placed in homes. Authorities launched an investigation Wednesday, saying conflicting reports meant it was too early to tell whether they were victims of child-trafficking. 

“We cannot handle this problem alone,” said Social Protection Minister Ramatou Baba Moussa. “This is bigger than Benin, and it is bigger than one ship.” 

Jaggli’s children’s center in Benin’s coastal capital now takes care of about 80 children, including 23 from the Etireno. 

Moise Andoka, a slightly built, wide-eyed boy of about 10 – he doesn’t know his age – has been at the center for weeks – ever since the minibus taxi he and several other boys were in was stopped by police at the border. Several men accompanying the boys were arrested, Jaggli said. 

The boy recounts being told by his mother shortly after his father died about a month ago that he was “going to take a trip.” The men who took him away were introduced as “uncles.” 

“I would like to go home now,” the boy said. “I would like to see my mama.”