Tafadhali Mama! (Please Mama!)

Eight artists from diverse performing backgrounds and from different theatre companies spent over a month together to develop the mobile production that was titled Tafadhali Mama (Please Mama!). The main focus of the production was to educate local communities to understand the concept of child trafficking and to help people, especially children, identify the characteristics of child trafficking and learn how to intervene when confronted with a case of trafficking.

The 13-day puppetry road trip started in Kakamega, a remote town in the Western part of Kenya, with a street carnival led by schoolchildren and giant puppets. This was followed by an opening ceremony which drew a large audience. The puppet tour also took the artists along the Kenyan part of the Kenya-Uganda Highway. Further performances were held at a school in Eldoret, an open field in Nairobi, a stadium in Mombasa, and two large performances in Voi.

The performances aimed to engage audiences, especially children, in song, dance, and dialogue. The puppets and actors, through interactive dialogue and action, strongly challenged the practice of child trafficking, tackling issues related to why families are vulnerable to traffickers and how international child trafficking rackets operate. The performance, which incorporated drama, music, and dance with puppetry, revolved around a rural family living in poverty who are lured into the trafficking spheres by a local cartel. Two of the family's children end up in slavery in the urban towns. The performance is participatory, allowing the audience to direct the flow of the storyline. With the input of the audience, the children are usually rescued from the child traffickers.

Human Trafficking, Children, Rights.

Kenya is believed to be both a source and a transit point for human trafficking. According to research, within Kenya, people are generally trafficked from rural to urban and coastal centres to work as servants, street vendors, day labourers, and prostitutes. The districts of Mombasa, Nairobi, Malindi, Nanyuki, and Nakuru are known for trade in child sex tourism. Authorities suspect that the practice is occurring in places such as Malindi, where there are an estimated 500 foreign-owned villas, most of which are located in isolated areas with great security.

Children are mostly trafficked through personal and familial networks. There are isolated incidents where children and women have been abducted or have disappeared without a trace. There also appears to be significant cross-border movement of children, especially for domestic labour, in the border areas between Uganda and Kenya.

UNIMA is a non-governmental organisation (NGO) affiliated with United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) that brings together people from around the world who contribute to the development of the art of puppetry with the objective of using this art to pursue human values such as peace and mutual understanding between peoples regardless of race, political or religious convictions, and differences in culture, and in accordance with fundamental human rights as defined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of December 10 1948.