Nigerian Children Deemed Witches Tortured

More than 200 people have been killed in two days of clashes between Christians and Muslims in central Nigeria, the Red Cross said yesterday, during the worst unrest in the country for years.

The army sent reinforcements to enforce a 24-hour curfew in the city of Jos, which lies at the flashpoint where Nigeria's Muslim north and Christian south meet, after rival gangs set fire to churches and mosques.

'I counted 218 dead bodies at Masalaci Jummaa . There are many other bodies in the streets,' said a Red Cross official, who asked not to be named. That death toll did not include hospital mortuaries, victims already buried, or those taken to other places of worship. The final count could be much higher, officials said.

About 7,000 people had fled their homes and were sheltering in government buildings and religious centres, the Red Cross said.

The governor of Plateau state, of which Jos is the capital, said in a statement that troops had orders to shoot on sight to enforce the curfew in neighbourhoods hit by the violence. Gunfire and explosions heard in the early hours of Saturday later died down, but many streets remained deserted. Military checkpoints were set up around the city and soldiers helped to clear bodies from the streets.

Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country, with 140 million people (one-seventh of all Africans), and it’s one of the few nations divided almost evenly between Christians and Muslims. Blessed with the world’s 10th-largest oil reserves, it is also one of the continent’s richest and most influential powers—as well as one of its most corrupt democracies. Last year’s presidential election in particular—in which President Olusegun Obasanjo, an evangelical Christian, handed power to a northern Muslim, President Umaru Yar’Adua—was a farce. Ballot boxes were stuffed by thugs or carted off empty by armed heavies in the pay of political candidates. Across the country, political power is a passport to wealth: according to Human Rights Watch, anywhere from $4 billion to $8 billion in government money has been embezzled annually for the last eight years. The state has all but abdicated its responsibility for the welfare of its people, roughly half of whom live on less than $1 a day.

In this vacuum, religion has become a powerful source of identity. Northern Nigeria has one of Africa’s oldest and most devout Islamic communities, which was galvanized, like many others, in the 1980s by the global Islamic reawakening that followed the Iranian revolution. For Christians, too, in Nigeria, there’s been a revolution: high birthrates and aggressive evangelization over the past century have increased the number of believers from 176,000, or 1.1 percent of the early-20th-century population, to more than 51 million, or more than a third now. Thanks to this explosive growth, the demographic and geographic center of global Christianity will have moved, by 2050, to northern Nigeria, within the Muslim world.

No one knows what this shift will yield, in part because neither faith is a monolith. Indeed, the most overlooked aspect of this global religious encounter may be that the competition within the faiths—between Pentecostals and orthodox Christians, or between Islamic groups that want to engage with or reject the modern world—is just as important as the competition between the faiths. But it’s also true that the fastest-growing forms of faith on both sides tend to be the most effervescent and absolute. They promote a system of living in this world that promises heaven in the next, they see salvation in stark binary terms, and they believe they have a global mandate to spread their exclusive brand of faith.

While religion became a source of friction in Nigeria during the Biafran civil war in the late 1960s, the trouble between Christians and Muslims intensified in the 1980s, when the first oil boom fizzled and the ensuing economic downturn led to violence. Since then, thousands have been killed in riots between the two groups sparked by various events: aggressive campaigns by foreign evangelists; the implementation in 1999 and 2000 of sharia, or Islamic law, in 12 of Nigeria’s 36 states; the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan in 2001; and the 2002 Miss World pageant, when a local Christian reporter, Isioma Daniel, outraged Muslims by writing in one of Nigeria’s national papers, This Day, that the Prophet Muhammad would have chosen a wife from among the contestants. Most recently, in 2006, riots triggered by Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad left more people dead in Nigeria than anywhere else in the world.

“These conflicts are a result of secular processes,” said Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, one of Nigeria’s leading intellectuals and a top executive of one of the country’s oldest banks, FirstBank. “It’s about bad government, economic inequality, and poverty—a struggle for resources.” When a government fails its people, they turn elsewhere to safeguard themselves and their futures, and in Nigeria at the beginning of the 21st century, they have turned first to religion. Here, then, is the truth behind what Samuel Huntington famously calls religion’s “bloody” geographic borders: outbreaks of violence result not simply from a clash between two powerful religious monoliths, but from tensions at the most vulnerable edges where they meet—zones of desperation and official neglect where faith becomes a rallying cry in the struggle for land, water, and work.

... A Nigerian pastor has called on fellow pastors in Nigeria to stop deceiving people with the notion of witchcraft. Apostle John Okoriko, the founder and president of Solid Rock Kingdom Church in Nigeria has described the practice of pastors as shameful and manipulative. However such assumed witches and wizards are always the poor in society ... “This thing is dragging our state backward; people have been brainwashed to think negatively. If they suffer a slight misfortune in their businesses instead of looking for practical solution, the pastors will tell them that they are attacked by witches and the person will become a slave to the pastors. It is sad,” the pastor added ... Pastor Helen Ukpabio has used the film industry to create a certain credibility for herself as an expert and force in the spiritual realm. Despite the poverty, hardship and suffering that the political and economic instability in Nigeria creates amongst the poor, the acclaimed deliverer attributes it all to the making of witches and wizards ...

Nigerian Withcraft: Pastor fights deceitful counterparts
Attacks fellow pastor and calls for a stop to the deceit
Thursday 23 April 2009 / by Konye Obaji Ori
http://en.afrik.com/article15604.html

Africa

In Africa some children were killed because of fear that they were an evil omen or because they were considered unlucky. Twins were usually put to death in Arebo; as well as by the Nama Hottentots of South West Africa; in the Lake Victoria Nyanza region; by the Tswana in Portuguese East Africa; among the Ilso and Igbo people of Nigeria; and by the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert.<8> The Kikuyu, Kenya's most populous ethnic group, practiced ritual killing of twins.<60> If a mother died in childbirth among the Ibo people of Nigeria, the newborn was buried alive. It suffered a similar fate if the father died.<61>

There's a scar above Jane's shy smile: her mother tried to saw off the top of her skull after a pastor denounced her and repeated exorcisms costing a total of $60 didn't cure her of witchcraft. Mary, 15, is just beginning to think about boys and how they will look at the scar tissue on her face caused when her mother doused her in caustic soda. Twelve-year-old Rachel dreamed of being a banker but instead was chained up by her pastor, starved and beaten with sticks repeatedly; her uncle paid him $60 for the exorcism.

Israel's cousin tried to bury him alive, Nwaekwa's father drove a nail through her head, and sweet-tempered Jerry - all knees, elbows and toothy grin - was beaten by his pastor, starved, made to eat cement and then set on fire by his father as his pastor's wife cheered it on.

Child Witches
Background

An increasing number of children in the Niger Delta are being forced to the streets and trafficked as a result of a deeply held belief in child “witches” and also due to persistent violent conflicts, poverty, abuse, torture, rape, or being orphaned by HIV/AIDS. The role of HIV/AIDS in the escalating street children crisis cannot be underestimated. The United Nations estimates that there are 930,000 HIV/AIDS orphans in Nigeria. The failure to address the increasing incidence of HIV/AIDS and the belief that it is spread by witchcraft is significantly amplifying the primary causes of the crisis. Care for Nigeria's street children remains one of the governments' major challenges, but little is being done by them to support these children.

Child Witchcraft: The Akwa Ibom Perception


The deeply held belief by the people of Akwa Ibom State and the Efik speaking communities in Cross River State cuts across all tiers of society. Widely read and travelled academics and local villagers fear such children. This fear stems from the belief that a spiritual spell can be given to a person through food and drink. The soul of the person who eats this spell will then leave the body to be initiated in a gathering of witches and wizards. The initiated person will then have the power to wreak havoc, such as causing diseases like HIV/AIDS, malaria, hepatitis, typhoid, cancer. All accidents, drunkenness mental health problems, smoking of marijuana, divorce, infertility, and misfortunes are seen to be the handiwork of witches and wizards. In recent times it is believed that children have become the target for initiation by the elderly witches as they are more susceptible to their spells and are quicker in action.

And you can call my analysis of this situation whatever you want, but it doesn't stop the fact that this murder was committed by a Christian following Christian precepts at the urging of his Christian pastor. Sounds pretty cut and dried to me