Obi Nwankanma
16 November 2008
opinion
It is an utterly shameful truth; one of the very examples of the great wickedness of this land: in some states, many innocent children have been killed and maimed; many turned into vagrancy by those who have accused and stigmatized them as witches and wizards.
One of the great casualties of Nigeria's economic and moral decline in the last twenty-five years has been children whose quality of life generally measures the well-being index of nations.
The situation of children has been compounded with a tragic upturning of traditional practices and codes that once protected and promoted the child as the ultimate gift of nature and of God.
Much of the violence against children has come, some might say, quite ironically, by certain "Christian" practices, and sometimes by a twisted sense of value which through what I generally call colonial trauma, has reduced the human person in the average Nigerian consciousness to something of a beast; a creature to be exploited.
The guarantees for childhood have been so fully dismantled by many current practices, some of them based on terribly primitive and superstitious beliefs, which makes the Nigerian child today one of the most endangered in the world. The Nigerian child is daily subjected to violence and exposed to hazards which children in many places elsewhere in the world could never even imagine possible. The labor of the child is exploited by ruthless and conscienceless guardians.
Many stories have been told, and many of us have known some of these children who have been taken from their indigent and helpless parents to go to cities and live with distant relatives or even with people who are hardly related to them as "housemaids" and general factotum. The very thought of it at the moment in fact leaves shivers of indignation in my mind. Occasionally, some of the stories of these children "farmed out" turn out quite well.
Occasionally they meet compassionate people who take them in, send them to schools, and adopt them, even as they serve as "housemaids." Sometimes, they get opportunities which the indigence of their parents' homes could never afford them. They turn out, through that association, to be independent and adjusted citizens.
That was generally the original idea behind sending a child to live with more handy relations or neighbours: it was often hoped that those among whom they are sent would help to bring them up with compassion, and offer them opportunities that their own parents, constrained by immediate difficulties, could not. But such compassionate stories are far and in between these days. The stories are mostly stories of violence and exploitation of these children of a Dickensian proportion.
I was quite totally shocked once in the home of a rather good friend of mine in Lagos; a fine fellow generally in the larger scheme of things; but to find him brutalizing his "housemaid" - a mere child not even beyond twelve - was a bit of a shock to me. But the mask fell in the words of his young son who said to me about the "housemaid" in the following unforgettable words: "she does not listen. My mummy says she is a witch!"
Those words had a numbing effect on me. But it also placed writ large, the abominable situation of many Nigerian children who have become victims of a society whose crassness is as dehumanizing as its capacity for superstition, even among its most educated.
I will return to this witch story and the witchcraft industry that has also evolved out of the insanity of this era. But let me say that the Nigerian child is exposed to highly polluted environments - polluted morally, spiritually, and physically. 75 per cent of Nigerian children have little access to the kind of nutrition that is required for complete physical and mental development; they live in environments that expose them to chemical hazards like lead; plastics, and many dangerous toxic materials which they are forced to ingest willy-nilly, by many ignorant parents and guardians.
The most revelatory face of the situation of the Nigerian child is in the clear picture of the learning environment in which they are instructed: the physical dilapidation of the schools mirror the ways we regard our children.
But by far, the most heartless story that has emerged to tell the story of the Nigerian child today is the story coming out about children turned to the streets and into refugees because some crazy preacher has instigated the hysteria of witchcraft.
It is a story that is both demeaning to me as a Nigerian, as an educated man, and as human person conscious of evil. This is the story of the kind of folly that parallels the famous Salem witch hunt in 18th century America.
It is remarkable that in the 21st century world, somewhere in a place where the Telegraph newspaper of London calls "one of the most dangerous parts of the world" children have become fodder for the overheated imagination of a population that has been driven mad by religion, and by a gnawing hunger for verities. It is the story of children who have been branded, stigmatized, ostracized, brutalized, and in many cases turned out into the streets and accused of witchcraft.
The story appears in the London Telegraph newspaper written by David Harrison and later shown this past Thursday on London's Channel 4 of about 150 of such children who now live in a refugee camp founded by a British charity.
Some of these children have endured the harshness and intolerable viciousness of a society that bays for blood in sacrifice to their Moloch - that god that answereth by fire - which many invoke to their domain and worship fiercely.
What other demonic will can make a parent beat his or her child; slash them with knives, burn them with fire, or pour acid on them just to force them to "confess" to being possessed and to being witches and wizards? This is the story that must awaken Nigerians to the utter fraud of these practices.
The Telegraph report again tells of the story of the girl who had a three-inch nail driven into her skull in one of these horrifying Christian rituals of deliverance, in which these children are "shaken violently, dragged around the room, and have portions poured into their eyes" to effect exorcism. The saddest part of this is that many parents are complicit with their pastors in these most remarkable ceremonies of death and disavowal.
They are parents who claim to be Christians. They belong to the extreme, right-wing versions of fundamental Christianity, whose hearts are hardened to the utter cries of these innocent victims. In driving the nails into the skull of their children; in pushing them into vagrancy, in branding them, and stigmatizing them with witchcraft, they turn from the cardinal injunction of the author of the faith, that they never hurt the hair on a child for children reflect the truest nature of the divine.
The problem all over Nigeria is the witchcraft industry which many prophets, pastors, healers, miracle seekers, and the ignorant have bought.
It is time that the government puts a stop on this idiocy, and step up to the plate this one time to protect these vulnerable children who have been cursed by the likes of this witch hunting preacher and her like. The laments of these children certainly have reached the ears of the state through their protests in the front of the Governor's lodge.
Their bold placards say: "We are not witches and Wizards. We are children!" No seen change may come by these, and it may not even douse the tragic ignorance of their tormentors, but it is an act of courage for these children to speak out now.
A curse is upon the land that violates its innocent. But it does seem that we have learnt nothing: many years ago, it took Mary Slessor to fish children out of the bushes into which they had been cast. Today, another British charity is providing succor to the children thrown away into the wilderness. The cycle continues.
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