Is superstition king in Africa? You bet. Even I am scared enough not to give details, but I will tell the story. There is a rich East African farmer, and four years he went to his farm which at the edge of a forest. He thought he saw armed men deep inside the forest, and thinking they were protecting illegal loggers he crawled to the edge of the forest and peeped over to see.
What he saw shocked him to the bone. There were many armed men around. A little inside in a clearing, was a witch doctor (whom the farmer knew) in feather cap and leopard skins standing over a bare-chested figure. The witch doctor was sprinkling “magical potions” over the kneeling man. The kneeling fellow was the most powerful in the land!!! And there he was being sprayed probably with chicken blood mixed with crocodile teeth and mountain gorilla testicles powder!
This should not come as a surprise. According to a report by the Pew Research Centre released last week, roughly one in four Christians in sub-Sahara Africa believes sacrifices to spirits or ancestors can protect them from bad things happening.
The report, published April 15, said: “Sizable percentages of both Christians and Muslims - a quarter or more in many countries - say they believe in the protective power of juju (charms or amulets).
In Tanzania and South Africa – where 60 per cent and 87 per cent of respondents respectively claimed to be Christian – more than half the people surveyed (60 per cent and 56 per cent respectively) said they believed that sacrifices to ancestors or spirits could protect them from harm. (See “Tolerance and Tension: Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa”, at http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=515).
In Uganda, a minister who is a very Born-Again Christian who wants gays and lesbians to be hanged, adulterers to be stoned, and critics of the government (he believes President Yoweri Museveni is God’s messenger) to be tortured, did a U-turn when it came to witchcraft. Child sacrifice is rampant in Uganda, and when it seemed to be getting out of control, there were calls for tough laws against witchcraft. The minister, however, came out and said a tough law that imposes the death penalty for extreme juju was too harsh. So to him, sacrificing children was a less than cheating on your husband or wife, consensual gay and lesbian sex.
If you a child living with albinism, you can be killed and eaten in full sight of the police and they will not intervene. There was that horrible story in Tanzania two weeks ago when a man raided the house of the single mother who lived next door to him. She had an albino child. He frightened the hell out of her, leaned down, chopped off the arm of the child, and walked out calmly with it!
