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A Nigerian Witch-Hunter Explains Herself

Sunday, May 23rd, 2010

At home in Nigeria, the Pentecostal preacher Helen Ukpabio draws thousands to her revival meetings. Last August, when she had herself consecrated Christendom’s first “lady apostle,” Nigerian politicians and Nollywood actors attended the ceremony. Her books and DVDs, which explain how Satan possesses children, are widely known.

So well-known, in fact, that Ms. Ukpabio’s critics say her teachings have contributed to the torture or abandonment of thousands of Nigerian children — including infants and toddlers — suspected of being witches and warlocks. Her culpability is a central contention of “Saving Africa’s Witch Children,” a documentary that will make its American debut Wednesday on HBO2.

Those disturbed by the needless immiseration of innocent children should beware. “Saving Africa’s Witch Children” follows Gary Foxcroft, founder of the charity Stepping Stones Nigeria, as he travels the rural state of Akwa Ibom, rescuing children abused during horrific “exorcisms” — splashed with acid, buried alive, dipped in fire — or abandoned roadside, cast out of their villages because some itinerant preacher called them possessed.

Their fellow villagers have often seen DVDs of “End of the Wicked,” Ms. Ukpabio’s bloody 1999 movie purporting to show how the devil captures children’s souls. And some have read her book “Unveiling the Mysteries of Witchcraft,” where she confidently writes that “if a child under the age of 2 screams in the night, cries and is always feverish with deteriorating health, he or she is a servant of Satan.”

Visiting Houston last week to lead a four-night revival for a local church, Ms. Ukpabio, 41, had no idea that “Saving Africa’s Witch Children,” which brought protesters out to greet her in London, was about to be shown in the United States. But she was eager to defend herself.

“Do you think Harry Potter is real?” Ms. Ukpabio asked me angrily, in the lobby of the Holiday Inn Express where she was staying. “It is only because I am African,” she said, that people who understand that J. K. Rowling writes fiction would take literally Ms. Ukpabio’s filmic depictions of possessed children, gathering by moonlight to devour human flesh.

Still, “Saving Africa’s Witch Children” makes clear that many rural Nigerians do take her film seriously. And in her sermons, Ms. Ukpabio is emphatic that children can be possessed, and that with her God-given “powers of discernment,” she can spot such a child. Belief in possession is especially common among Pentecostals in Nigeria, where it reinforces native traditions that spirits are real and intervene in human affairs.

In Nigeria, many preachers not only identify possessed children but charge dearly to perform exorcisms. To redeem their children’s souls — and to keep the child from being killed or banished by neighbors — parents scrimp or borrow to pay the preacher.

Ms. Ukpabio argued that “Saving Africa’s Witch Children” exaggerates or invents the problem of child abandonment. Asked how she could be so sure, she said, “because I am an African!” In Africa, she said, “family ties are too strong to have a child on the street.”

The Children’s Rights and Rehabilitation Network, a school for abandoned children run by Sam Itauma and featured in Mr. Foxcroft’s documentary, is “a 419 scam,” Ms. Ukpabio said, referring to the section in Nigeria’s criminal code that deals with fraud.

She said the children’s gruesome scars and wounds, shown in the documentary, are not real — or perhaps they are real, “but there are many ways children can get maimed.” And if the injuries are the result of witchcraft accusations against the children, she said, those accusations could not have been made by Pentecostal Christian preachers, but by charlatans.

Since “Saving Africa’s Witch Children” was first shown in Britain, in 2008, Mr. Itauma’s home state has adopted a law against accusing children of witchcraft. But Ms. Ukpabio went on the offensive by suing the state government, Mr. Foxcroft, Mr. Itauma and Leo Igwe, a Nigerian antisuperstition activist.

In the lawsuit, Ms. Ukpabio alleges that the state law infringes on her freedom of religion. She seeks 2 billion naira (about $13 million) in damages, as well as “an order of perpetual injunction restraining the respondents” from interfering with or otherwise denouncing her church’s “right to practice their religion and the Christian religious belief in the existence of God, Jesus Christ, Satan, sin, witchcraft, heaven and hellfire.”

In other words, in the name of religious freedom, Ms. Ukpabio seeks a gag order on anyone who disagrees with her.

The lawsuit also reiterates Ms. Ukpabio’s contention that Stepping Stones Nigeria and Mr. Itauma’s school are not charities but extortionate front organizations. According to Ms. Ukpabio, Mr. Foxcroft and Mr. Itauma aim not to educate abandoned children but “to use the said funds to blackmail.”

“We’re a registered charity in the U. K., so we publish our accounts,” said Mr. Foxcroft by phone in England. “She can come in and see how much money we raised and where we spend it.”

In Houston, Ms. Ukpabio reiterated that the state should close Mr. Itauma’s school. To the children living there — who, according to her, may be actors or witches, but if witches, they were not abused, and if abused, then certainly not by Christians — Ms. Ukpabio offered the services of her own church.

The school “does not understand demonic possession,” she said. “If they understood, they would take the children to Liberty Gospel.

“We would deliver them!”

Source: New York Post

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Witches Overwhelm The Courts In The Central African Republic.

Friday, May 14th, 2010

SNAKING AROUND the outer wall of the courthouse in Mbaiki, Central African Republic, is a long line of citizens, all in human form and waiting to face judgment. It’s easy to imagine them as the usual mix of drunks, reckless drivers, and check-bouncers in the dock of a small American town. But here most are witches, and they are facing criminal punishment for hexing their enemies or assuming the shape of animals.

By some estimates, about 40 percent of the cases in the Central African court system are witchcraft prosecutions. (Drug offenses in the U.S., by contrast, account for just 12 percent of arrests.) In Mbaiki—where Pygmies, who are known for bewitching each other, make up about a tenth of the population—witchcraft prosecutions exceed 50 percent of the case load, meaning that most alleged criminals there are suspected of doing things that Westerners generally regard as impossible.

I went to the front of the witch line and asked Abdulaye Bobro, the chief judge, what the punishment was for casting spells. Bobro spoke in an articulate French baritone so rich with authority that I could imagine him flourishing as a crafty small-town defense lawyer, a Central African Atticus Finch, if he were not on the bench.

Bobro’s magisterial bearing was undiminished by his inglorious chambers, which are roughly the size of the reinforced-glass cubes gas-station clerks inhabit in bad neighborhoods. I asked him if he could explain how he reached judgments in witchcraft cases, and he cracked open his filthy, plastic-bound copy of the penal code. Without consulting the table of contents, he found the section on PCS, or the “practice of charlatanism and sorcery,” and let me read along as he quoted from memory the section that dictates a decade or more in jail and a nominal fine for engaging in witchcraft. In practice the penalties were significantly less, because the town had insufficient funds to maintain a jail. But Bobro supported the law’s preservation, perhaps because it gave him so much authority.

The classic study of witchcraft in Africa occurred among the Azande, who inhabit the eastern edge of the Central African Republic. The anthropologist Edward E. Evans-Pritchard found that the Azande attributed a staggering range of misfortunes—infected toes, collapsed granary roofs, even bad weather—to meddling by witches. Nothing happened by chance, only as an effect of spell-casting by a wicked interloper. That sentiment remains widespread among Central Africans, who demand that the law reflect the influence of witchcraft as they understand it. The standard legal concept of force majeure, under which a defendant cannot be held liable for an “act of God,” is thus rendered meaningless.

Foreign human-rights groups have noticed that many of the targets of prosecution are vulnerable types (like Pygmies, or even children), and nongovernmental organizations that exist to encourage the rule of law are embarrassed that the “law” in this case resembles the penal code of 17th-century Salem.

In response, the Central African parliament is considering striking the clause outlawing witchcraft from its books. The parliament is in Bangui, the capital, which sees far fewer witchcraft cases per capita. Even so, most lawyers I consulted there favored keeping the law intact, although they admitted that it fits uneasily in a modern legal system. “The problem is that in a witchcraft case, there is usually no evidence,” said Bartolomé Goroth, a lawyer in Bangui, who recently defended (unsuccessfully) a coven of Pygmies who had been accused of murder-by-witchcraft in Mbaiki. Goroth said the trials generally ended with an admission of guilt by an accused witch in exchange for a modest sentence. I asked how one determined guilt in cases where the alleged witches denied the charges. “The judge will look at them and see if they act like witches,” Goroth said, specifying that “acting like a witch” entailed behaving “strangely” or “nervously” in court. His principal advice to clients, he said, was to act normally and refrain from casting any spells in the courtroom.

Goroth argued that the legal system could not ignore a social fact as firmly embedded as witchcraft is in the republic. And every other lawyer I met not only supported its criminalization, but seemed to believe in the reality of shape-shifting and killing with magic spells. More than one pointed to the elbow when referring to witchcraft, indicating the site in the body where sorcery is said to reside.

I visited Mbaiki’s sole foreign nongovernmental organization, an Italian group called COOPIthat exists to promote human rights and the rule of law. The two employees there were both educated Central Africans; the Italian running the office had gone home for a holiday, leaving them in the steaming office with her purring computer and a small stack of Italian books, a translation of The Celestine Prophecy on top.

They acknowledged that the rights of the accused are violated regularly in witchcraft prosecutions, because the charge carries enormous pressure to confess. But they, too, supported keeping the laws on the books, for pragmatic reasons: if people thought witches could hex with impunity, mobs would simply seize the alleged offenders, bring them to a pit, and bury them alive. One said, “If we do not apply laws against PCS, we will apply lex talionis.” That is, the rule of an eye for an eye, as preached in the Bible.

Source: The Atlantic Magazine

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Hunted By Witchdoctors: Tanzania’s Albinos Get Help From Canadian

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

Her face still scarred by the machete attack that nearly killed her, Rukia Khalfani cannot hide her astonishment when she gazes into the eyes of the Canadian who has come to comfort her. His eyes are as pale as hers, and his skin is as white.

She had no idea that albinos existed outside Tanzania. She laughs in amazement.

“I want you to know that I am your brother,” the visitor from Canada, Peter Ash, said. “You and your children are just absolutely beautiful.”

It’s a message she has never heard before. Shunned by her village, she raised her children in isolation in a mud-and-stick hut on the edge of the jungle, where her teenage daughter could escape the taunts and threats of her classmates.

When people passed by their home, she heard them shouting “dili dili”– the Swahili word for “deal” – a reference to the lucrative profits they could make by selling her body parts to witch doctors. It’s a word that Tanzania’s albinos hear every day.

On the night of Feb. 7, a machete-wielding man crept up to her hut in darkness. When she stepped outside, carrying her infant daughter on her back, the man slashed viciously at the baby, trying to sever her leg. He pursued them into the hut, slashing Ms. Khalfani on the forehead, leaving her with blood pouring over her face.

It was the 60th reported attack on Tanzanian albinos since 2007. It was followed by two more attacks this month, including the killing last Sunday of a four-year-old girl whose right arm and leg were chopped off. At least 56 albinos have been killed in the attacks, and many more are believed to have died in unreported cases.

The grisly trade in albino body parts is supported by powerful forces – even politicians and police officers, according to experts – and prosecutions have been slow. At least five policemen were among the dozens arrested after the attacks, but only two of the 56 homicides have led to criminal convictions. The affluent buyers who pay for the body parts have never been identified in court or police records.

Mr. Ash, a 44-year-old B.C. businessman who himself has albinism, is trying to change all of this. He has spent $1-million in a campaign against the albino killings, setting up an organization in Tanzania to lobby for justice and educate the public. He plans to spend a further $500,000 to $1-million annually to keep the fight alive.

Albinism, a genetic condition that causes a lack of pigmentation in the hair, skin and eyes, is more common in Africa than in North America. Most of the estimated 100,000 albinos in Tanzania are persecuted and fearful, and poorly educated because of vision problems. Mr. Ash visits the attack survivors to dispel the myths and provide support and scholarships.

This week, on his fifth trip to Tanzania since 2008, Mr. Ash drove down the narrow, bumpy roads to Ms. Khalfani’s village to offer assistance. When he met Ms. Khalfani, he took off his glasses and showed her his nearly blind eyes and his easily burned white skin.

Her 14-month-old daughter has a vivid purple scar running from her thigh to her hip, where the attacker tried to chop off her leg. The assailant escaped, but Ms. Khalfani’s husband and another man were detained for 10 days of questioning.

Her husband denies any involvement, but she has separated from him and moved into her mother’s home for protection. “I don’t trust people very much nowadays,” she told Mr. Ash. “I just stay at home with my mother. I don’t even go out for firewood.”

Albinos are often betrayed by husbands or other relatives, lured by payments of up to $3,000 for an albino limb and $75,000 for a “full set” of albino body parts. The parts are ground into potions and talismans that are believed to bring wealth and power.

A recent survey found that 93 per cent of Tanzanians believe in witchcraft – the highest percentage in Africa. Witch doctors were banned by the government last year, yet many still operate freely.

Albinos have been murdered in other African countries too, including at least a dozen in Burundi. The difference, however, is that the Burundi killers were prosecuted and convicted, which rarely happens in Tanzania, despite pledges of action from its Prime Minister.

After visiting Ms. Khalfani’s village, Mr. Ash flew to the shores of Lake Victoria and drove to the town of Igoma, where 22-year-old albino Jesca Charles was killed last June. She disappeared after attending an evening church meeting. Her mother still cannot bring herself to talk about it. “When we found the body, the limbs had all been chopped off – the arms at the shoulders and the legs at the knees,” her father, Charles Joshua, said.

Jesca was buried in a cement-covered grave, so that her remains cannot be dug up for sale to witch doctors.

An even more horrific story came from another village in the region in 2008. The killers slit the neck of five-year-old albino Mariam Emmanuel, drained her blood into a cooking pot, drank the blood, chopped off her limbs and fled. Her eight-year-old brother, Manyasi, heard the killing from another room and barely spoke for months afterward.

He was transferred to a school for the blind, where 105 albino children are now guarded in an overcrowded fenced-off compound, described by Mr. Ash as “a concentration camp.” His non-profit organization, Under the Same Sun, has since paid for Manyasi to attend a private boarding school.

Nemes Temba, a 33-year-old Tanzanian albino who works for Mr. Ash’s organization, remembers when the killings began in 2007. He started to hear the new taunt – “dili dili” – on the streets of the cities. “Almost everyone with albinism was scared,” he said. “When it was dark, we would stay at home.”

He sees the attacks as a sign of Tanzania’s spiritual confusion. “People aren’t sure what they believe in. They only believe in material things. They want to be rich or politically famous, and they’re not afraid of the police. They’ll do anything to be rich or famous.”

Mr. Ash made his first trip to Africa in 2008, after seeing reports of the albino killings. “I felt their helplessness, their fear,” he said. “It would strike fear into me if I was living here, knowing that people could break into my house and kill me. Albinos have been dehumanized in this country, like Hitler dehumanized the Jews.”

As a boy growing up in Montreal, he was teased and called “snowflake” or “Casper the ghost.” But he never experienced anything like the persecution in Tanzania. He has had to hire a security detail to guard him and his brother, Paul, when they travel here. One of his senior officials, Vicky Ntetema, was forced into hiding in 2008 because of death threats after she produced an investigative report on the albino killings.

Mr. Ash, who spent 10 years as a Baptist minister in Manitoba before going into the consumer finance business, is planning a television advertising campaign in Tanzania to dispel the myths and lies about albinos. He has been masterful in mobilizing the Tanzanian media to his cause. He brings television crews on most of his visits to albino families, and he speaks publicly at every opportunity – even at Sunday church services.

“Albinos are not evil,” he told a crowd of thousands at a church service in Dar es Salaam last week. “They are not a curse. They are not from the devil. They are God’s children.”

His message was undermined, however, by the pastor’s Swahili translation. The pastor used the word zeru zeru – a derogatory term for albinos – throughout the sermon. He was simply unaware of any other word.

Source: The Globe and Mail

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Go On Then Kill Me! Sceptic Challenges Guru On Live TV

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

A Tantrik tries to kill Sanal Edmaruka in a live TV program with his magical powers

When a famous tantric guru boasted on television that he could kill another man using only his mystical powers, most viewers either gasped in awe or merely nodded unquestioningly. Sanal Edamaruku’s response was different. “Go on then — kill me,” he said.

Mr Edamaruku had been invited to the same talk show as head of the Indian Rationalists’ Association — the country’s self-appointed sceptic-in-chief. At first the holy man, Pandit Surender Sharma, was reluctant, but eventually he agreed to perform a series of rituals designed to kill Mr Edamaruku live on television. Millions tuned in as the channel cancelled scheduled programming to continue broadcasting the showdown, which can still be viewed on YouTube.

First, the master chanted mantras, then he sprinkled water on his intended victim. He brandished a knife, ruffled the sceptic’s hair and pressed his temples. But after several hours of similar antics, Mr Edamaruku was still very much alive — smiling for the cameras and taunting the furious holy man.

“He was over, finished, completely destroyed!” Mr Edamaruku chuckles triumphantly as he concludes the tale in the Rationalist Centre, his second-floor office in the town of Noida, just outside Delhi.

Rationalising India has never been easy. Given the country’s vast population, its pervasive poverty and its dizzying array of ethnic groups, languages and religions, many deem it impossible.

Nevertheless, Mr Edamaruku has dedicated his life to exposing the charlatans — from levitating village fakirs to televangelist yoga masters — who he says are obstructing an Indian Enlightenment. He has had a busy month, with one guru arrested over prostitution, another caught in a sex-tape scandal, a third kidnapping a female follower and a fourth allegedly causing a stampede that killed 63 people.

This week India’s most popular yoga master, Baba Ramdev, announced plans to launch a political party, promising to cleanse India of corruption and introduce the death penalty for slaughtering cows. Then, on Wednesday, police arrested a couple in Maharashtra state on suspicion of killing five boys on the advice of a tantric master who said their sacrifice would help the childless couple to conceive.

“The immediate goal I have is to stop these fraudulent babas and gurus,” says Mr Edamaruku, 55, a part-time journalist and publisher from the southern state of Kerala. “I want people to make their own decisions. They should not be guided by ignorance, but by knowledge.

“I’d like to see a post-religious society — that would be an ideal dream, but I don’t know how long it would take.”

His organisation traces its origins to the 1930s when the “Thinker’s Library” series of books, published by Britain’s Rationalist Press Association, were first imported to India. They included works by Aldous Huxley, Charles Darwin and H.G. Wells; among the early subscribers was Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister.

The Indian Rationalist Association was founded officially in Madras in 1949 with the encouragement of the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, who sent a long letter of congratulations. For the next three decades it had no more than 300 members and focused on publishing pamphlets and debating within the country’s intellectual elite.

But since Mr Edamaruku took over in 1985, it has grown into a grass-roots organisation of more than 100,000 members — mainly young professionals, teachers and students — covering most of India. Members now spend much of their time investigating and reverse-engineering “miracles” performed by self-styled holy men who often claim millions of followers and amass huge wealth from donations.

Read the rest of the story at: TimesOnline

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Learn To Be An Astrologer Or Palm Reader In 10 Easy Steps

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

From: Scientific Indians

1. Set the stage for an intimate, comfortable, experience. Establish your Psychic authority with props such as important looking charts, or bookcases full of reference books.
Provide comfortable chairs with a small table between them. A lace table cloth, candles, a soft rug with soft colored lighting and incense will give your reading a “spiritual” feeling. Your client should feel they are the center of an important ritual.

2. Project a sympathetic personality. Put your client in a receptive, cooperative mood by Explaining that a reading is a team effort.
Use a soft voice, a calm demeanor, and sympathetic and non-confrontational body language: a pleasant smile, constant eye contact, with head tilted to one side while listening. Face the subject with legs together (not crossed) and arms unfolded. Call yourself a “Psychic Intuitor.” Explain that your “clients” come to see you about various things that might be weighing heavy on their hearts (the heart being the preferred organ of New Age spirituality), and that as an intuitor it is your job to use your special gift of intuition. Explain that everyone has this gift, but that you have improved yours through practice. To rationalize your soon to come misses, come right out and say that psychics cannot predict the future perfectly: “While it would be wonderful if I was a hundred percent accurate, no one is perfect. Even Michael Jordan missed lots of shots!”

3. There are seven things people most want to talk about: love, Health, Money, Career, Travel, Education, & Ambition.
Stick to these themes by asking a lot of questions and making plenty of statements from each category. This will also help you remember where you are in the reading.

Click to continue »

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