Raising a machete over the girl, an albino child, he cut off her legs to later drink blood from them and possibly consume them—a practice witchdoctors told him could heal his body and bring better fortune.
The girl, left to die, succumbed to her injuries not long after, GlobalPost reports.
The ritual murder of an albino child is a crime that has been committed at least 60 times over the past several years. Belief has grown in regions of Africa that consuming the body parts of an albino has a restorative effect.
In Nigeria, meanwhile, a 12-year-old boy accused of witchcraft in the death of his mother was locked in a room with her body as punishment, then burned and beaten when he refused to eat parts of the corpse in a ritual his accusers believed would purge him of a perceived demonic possession.
This scenario has grown more and more common as thousands of children suffer accusations of witchcraft in a disturbing trend that a new UNICEF report says is on the rise.
A widespread belief in the occult, fueled by years of poverty and conflict in areas such as the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Nigeria, has driven some people to commit appallingly violent acts in order to improve their stations or secure supernatural solutions to their problems.
The root of the problem is poverty and the broken governments that are unable to provide the basic services which would relieve the hardship behind much of the desperation, says Joachim Theis, UNICEF's Head of Child Protection for West and Central Africa.
Solving the base issues is a long way off, he says. In the meantime, the problems of albino persecution and child "witchcraft" continue to spread.
The Child Witches of Nigeria
The mere existence of the report will be surprising to many.
“Children Accused of Witchcraft,” an investigative report released by UNICEF in July, says that not only is belief in witchcraft rampant in Africa, it is taking an increasing turn toward scapegoating children as a method of exorcism.
“Whereas in the past, elderly people, particularly women, were accused, these days the number of children accused of witchcraft is increasing,” the report reads.
Deep and widespread, the belief in witchcraft confounds some anthropologists, who had predicted that occult practices would phase out as nations developed. The UNICEF report found otherwise:
“It was previously believed that these beliefs and socio‐cultural practices would disappear over time, but the current situation indicates the contrary. Far from fading away, these social and cultural representations have been maintained and transformed in order to adapt to contemporary contexts.”
Theis says a long, relentless buildup of crisis and conflict is behind the drastic application of some of the beliefs.
“Anthropologists link it to… they call it the ‘multi-crisis.’ There’s family breakdown, there’s conflict, there’s economic crises, there’s HIV and AIDS, there's urbanization and migration and a general insecurity in society.”
Many Africans still turn to the arcane and supernatural to find a solution.
“What people do is they associate every mishap, every death, every disease, crop failure… they associate it with supernatural forces,” Theis says. Searching for a remedy, they are ready to believe a religious figure’s pronouncement that the source is a possessed person—even one of their own family members, or a 3-year-old toddler.
And quite often, that accusation comes from a Christian evangelical leader.
Researchers rarely get a pointed, easily identifiable trigger for behaviors like child witchcraft accusations. But a specific spark has been pinpointed in Nigeria: a video series made by a Pentecostal priestess showing child witches attacking and torturing innocent adult victims.
A boy in the Nigerian town of Kano rests in front of a shop. (Photo: Radu Sigheti/Reuters)
She’s not the only one. As seen in the documentary series Dispatches: Saving Africa’s Witch Children, from BBC’s Channel 4, preachers on a local level engage heavily in the practice of accusing youths of witchcraft.
Even if a child avoids physical abuse that often comes with an accusation, she can be cast out of her family and forced to live on the streets, entering a downward spiral that easily leads to drug use, work in the sex trade and an early death.
UNICEF workers found that many of the street children in Kinshasa, Nigeria, were homeless because they were driven out after witchcraft accusations. Theis estimates that as many as 20,000 accused “witches” now live on the streets in that city alone.
And no one is safe, seemingly, from an accusation. As seen in Dispatches, and the follow-up series Return to Africa’s Witch Children, girls and boys as young as 2 1/2 years old are subject to accusations—and reprisals, including murder.
Focused in part on the work of SteppingStonesNigeria, a U.K.-based nonprofit dedicated specifically to protecting children accused of witchcraft in Nigeria, the film shows that people are trying to help.
The impact of the first installment, says SteppingStonesNigeria founder Gary Foxcroft in the follow-up, was significant, and child accusations were made illegal in one of the most affected areas of Nigeria.
But as the UNICEF reports attests, the accusations are still rampant.
Albinos Targeted
While the numbers of children affected by witchcraft is higher, in terms of sheer brutality, violence against albinos of all ages is unmatched.
A child takes a break at a school that doubles as a sanctuary for albino children. (Photo: Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty Images)
Tanzania has one of the largest populations of albinos in the world, an estimated 170,000.
According to a report by the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, a full set of albino body parts, including the limbs, genitals, ears, tongue, hair, blood and nose, can sell for more than $75,000.
Attacked with machetes, dozens of albinos have been murdered in the past two years, GlobalPost reports. More undocumented murders are likely in rural areas.
“The areas where [attacks] are most prominent are areas where there’s strong mining and fishing communities,” says Andrew Brooks, Head of Child Protection for UNICEF in Tanzania.
“One of the beliefs that goes with getting an albino’s—and particularly a child albino’s—body parts is linked to the riches that will follow,” he says of the belief that obtaining albino body parts will result in a better catch or greater haul from the mine.
Victims and their families, living in huts in rural areas, are often defenseless against nighttime raids, as highlighted in this powerful “Albino Murder” video from the My Shocking Story series.
The response by the government is simple, effective—and unsustainable: segregating albinos in fenced-off, guarded compounds.
“One of the responses by the government in the regions that have been most affected… is basically to indentify some safe premises, normally schools, where they can go. So we find these... sanctuaries in the midst of quite threatening environments,” Brooks says.
The sanctuaries meet the immediate security needs for the albinos, but they’re not the ultimate solution, he says. Child albinos are separated from their families, often by long distances, just to keep them safe.
While that meets the basic needs for threatened kids, Brooks said the underlying beliefs must eventually be challenged.
“There’s the bigger questions around how to take on and address these kind of traditional beliefs,” he says.
Brooks and his team are looking at other possibilities to ensure albinos’ safety, including relocation to other communities. A big part of what he and his team are doing right now is simply trying to figure out where the current sanctuaries are and how they can be helped.
“We don’t have a great depth of knowledge right now,” he says. Brooks says his team will be investigating ways to help improve the situation, which will put him in the same territory as a group called Under the Same Sun, run by a Canadian albino man named Peter Ash.
The U.S. government, too, is rallying against albino mutilation and murder. In March, a Virginia congressman passed a bill condemning the practice and calling for swift justice after meeting a Tanzanian albino woman who’d had both arms cut off.
Tanzania has put an emphasis on justice for its albino slayings. In November 2009 it made its first conviction for an albino mutilation. This July, Kazimiri Mashauri, the man who killed the 5-year-old girl in her room for her legs, was found guilty of the murder.
He is sentenced to hang.
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