Ex-Actor Offers New Roles to Sengalese Street Children : Africa: A youth theater project is directed at one of the continent’s most explosive problems, its street children.

Confident in his tattered costume, Alioue Seydi, 19, might have been playing a role drawn from his own life on the streets.

The role was that of Gorgi, a typical street kid of Dakar. Abandoned by his father, left by his mother in the care of an ailing grandfather, Gorgi begins to skip school. At present he finds himself among a gang of pickpockets out of “Oliver Twist,” spending his spare hours sniffing glue and gasoline.

One day, caught in a particularly clumsy attempt to snatch a woman’s handbag, he is arrested and sent to a reform school. But before long he is on the streets again, and the cycle begins anew.

On a recent night, as Alioue performed under a moonlit sky on a stage erected amid hanging laundry and open balconies, the playwright, Souleymane Ndiaye, watched from one side. Ndiaye, a former actor with the National Theater of Senegal, later talked about how he had discovered Alioue living under a stairwell in his neighborhood.

The boy had come to Dakar from neighboring Gambia. His father, as far as he knew, was somewhere in Guinea. His lifestyle was an endless circle of petty truancy and glue-sniffing with cronies.

Yet, there was something in his eyes, Ndiaye said, that made him believe Alioue could be saved--a hint of intelligence and will.

Besides, he needed an English-speaker for a play about apartheid, and Gambia, Alioue’s home country, is an island of English-speakers in the sea of French-speaking West Africa.

In 1984, Ndiaye gave up his position with the national theater to assume another role: collector and rehabilitator of street children. His vehicle is a theater group made up exclusively of children culled from the streets.

In the years since 1984, Ndiaye has taken 125 children off the street and placed 73 of them in trade apprenticeships.

They live with his family and perform in his socially instructive playlets in the neighborhoods, at embassies, occasionally at the presidential palace.

Sometimes, he escorts a child home to his family, if the village and family can be identified. Often, the family will not take the child back.

“Their parents don’t accept them, but I do,” Ndiaye told an interviewer in the courtyard of the airy, busy house where he is sheltering eight members of his troupe, along with his own eight children. “I find them and I tell them, I’m not the police--I’m a brother, an artist.”

Modest as it is, Ndiaye’s project is one of the few in Africa directed at one of the continent’s most explosive problems, its street children.

In virtually every large city in Africa, there are children working and sleeping on the streets, abjuring school, contributing to growing civil instability.

They appear under a score of guises, depending on the country and the prevailing local opportunities for petty trade, or crime.

In Nigeria, they are hawkers, offering motorists trapped in traffic items ranging from television antennae to hard candies.

In Ghana, they are porters around the railroad stations, airports, harbors.

In Nairobi, they are known generically as “parking boys,” for until recently they had a monopoly on directing drivers to parking spaces and exacting a handful of shillings to keep an eye on the car or its contents. Now they have been shouldered aside by unemployed men.

The children’s stories, related late at night after their daily labor is over and their night entertainment is finished, feature a dismal sameness.

Listen to the tale of Mawuli Dese, who unfolded himself one night at 2 a.m. from the cardboard mat placed before the locked gate of Accra’s central rail station:

Mawuli, 10, said he came to Accra two years ago to join two brothers who were working as railroad porters. Their father had left home years ago, and their mother had left home to work in Abidjan, the capital of neighboring Ivory Coast.

“Abidjan,” a social worker said later, “means she’s gone there to work as a prostitute.”

Mawuli did not find his brothers, and his experience is common, social workers say. Mawuli was absorbed into an organized group of porters, and now he rises as early as 5:30 a.m. and works all day. At night, there is a ceaseless round of movie-going. At 2 a.m., the boys settle down on their cardboard sheets.

Children like Mawuli are everywhere in Africa, and their number is growing. The U.N. Children’s Fund’s regional office for Eastern and Southern Africa forecasts that by the year 2000 the number of children living and barely surviving on the streets will reach 15 million.

Roughly half of Africa’s population is under age 15--the accepted definition of the term child --and this might be seen as a fountain of youth to give the continent the energy it needs. Instead, the failure of Africa’s institutions is creating a generation of malnourished, physically stunted illiterates.

“A nation whose children are out of the classroom and trying to survive in the market breeds a future of thieves and swindlers,” a member of Ghana’s Cabinet said recently.

Poverty is general in all these places, and war and natural disaster add to the problem.

Social workers in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, say that when the Islamic government’s war with non-Islamic southerners intensified in 1985, the population of street boys in Khartoum quickly swelled by 20,000. At that point the Children’s Fund organized some of the children into an enterprise called Street Kids Inc., which performed courier services for offices around town.

All this is happening on a continent where the people’s vaunted love for children is evidenced only by a sheer abundance of births.

Children are physically abused, psychologically assaulted and exposed to health hazards that places every sub-Saharan country except one in the U.N. categories of “high” or “very high” mortality rates for children under age 5. Of the 15 countries at the top of the child mortality tables, 14 are African.

In Nigeria, the percentage of children immunized against measles, a killer in Africa, has dropped from 55 in 1981 to 31 in 1987. Only 21% of Nigerian children have been immunized against polio, compared to 24% at the beginning of the 1980s.

For street children, there are few statistics, which means there is little awareness.

“At first I didn’t think there were any street children here,” said Comfort Caulley-Hansen, executive secretary of the Ghana National Commission on Children, a 10-year-old agency. “But as we went around to the beaches, the railway stations, the marketplaces, we realized that some of these children really do sleep outside. We were quite amazed.”

Ghana’s one attempt to study its street children, in 1988, involved only 100 children. So Ghana, like Senegal, Nigeria and Kenya, still has no reliable figure for how many of its children are sleeping on the street, missing school, working at menial jobs so demanding that if they do get to school they settle firmly at the bottom of their class.

The proliferation of street children is the product of the failure of several African institutions, officials say. One is the family. In Kenya, as many as 30% of all families are headed by single mothers.

Another is education, which is still of only peripheral importance to many rural Africans.

“When you look deep, you see that most of these children’s parents are illiterates who place very low importance on education,” said Ghana’s Caulley-Hansen, “so they’re not bothered if their children are not in school.”

Free compulsory education is the rule in most African countries only as far as primary school.

But all across the continent, according to World Bank figures, only 20% of the children of secondary-school age are enrolled.

On the stage in the courtyard behind Ndiaye’s house, the street children of his latest playlet are hounded by their families, punished by schoolmasters, sent begging on the sidewalks by religious masters, hauled in by the police. The neighbors in the audience recognize some of them as the vagrants who used to steal from their shops and sleep in their yards.

“Now the entire neighborhood accepts them,” Ndiaye said, “and they all come to watch.”

Then he carefully puts his project in perspective:

“It’s important to give the kids something constructive to do, some recreation. After all, they’re the future of the country.”