On July 29 Christian witch-hunters accused of torturing and killing local children attacked and beat campaigners for child protection at a public meeting in Calabar, Nigeria.
The same week hundreds of members of the Islamist group, Boko Haram, were killed in suicide attacks on police stations across the north of the country.
It’s easy to dismiss these distant events, but the consequences of this religious extremism has spread far beyond West Africa.
The Calabar meeting was arranged by the Nigerian Humanist Movement, with campaigner Leo Igwe scheduled to give a speech condemning the abandonment, torture and killing of children alleged to be witches. Igwe and others claim that these children ”are taken to churches where they are subjected to inhumane and degrading torture in the name of exorcism. They are chained, starved, hacked with machetes, lynched or murdered in cold blood.”
Thousands allegedly take part in these activities, led by Christian church groups. Authorities have been reluctant to act until recently, hampered by belief in witchcraft among officials themselves.
As Igwe prepared to speak, about 200 members of the Liberty Gospel Church stormed the meeting in an invasion recorded on YouTube.
”We had no warning,” Igwe said. ”They trooped into the hall through different doors, chanting slogans and stamping their feet.”
He was beaten and robbed, relieved of his camera, money and cellphone before managing to escape to a nearby police station to seek help. He is shocked, but remains determined: ”I really felt sorry for Nigeria.”
As Christian extremists hunt witches, their Islamist counterparts are more concerned with the West. Members of Boko Haram reject Western education and scientific theory, insisting that theories such as evolution must not be taught in schools.
Talking to the BBC prior to his capture and death in last week’s attacks, its leader, Mohammed Yusuf, even denounced those ”saying the world is a sphere. If it runs contrary to the teachings of Allah, we reject it.”
Anti-Western sentiment in the predominantly Muslim northern regions of Nigeria may seem distant, but it has had dire consequences for Africa.
In the 1990s Nelson Mandela helped launch an ambitious campaign to ”kick polio out of Africa”, at the core of which was a plan to vaccinate millions of people. The plan was a great success, yet by 2003 Nigeria remained the last great stronghold of the disease, accounting for 80% of African cases.
Officials in three northern states banned the vaccine, amid claims by prominent Muslim campaigners, such as Datti Ahmed, that ”modern-day Hitlers have deliberately adulterated the oral polio vaccines with anti-fertility drugs and viruses which are known to cause HIV and Aids”. Thanks to their actions the campaign failed and Nigeria is now an exporter of polio as far afield as the Middle East and Indonesia, reinfecting countries that were once cleared.
It’s not just polio that Nigeria exports. Igwe believes that child ”witch” outcasts may end up victims of human trafficking. In Britain a 2006 report for the department of education highlighted a worrying growth in cases of child abuse relating to witchcraft.
In Nigeria intervention by Christian and Islamic groups has been subdued and it has been left to secular ones such as the Nigerian Humanist Movement to campaign to protect the country’s children. —