Evil seeks the closeness of the good, harasses it hard, flatters itself with whimpers and lies. It constantly reaches for the hand of Uwe Okwong Uwe, 40, the taxi driver of the village. It touches him with the fingertips, which are small and delicate. “What should I do?” the man whispers in the door frame of his house. Evil looks up to him, from gentle eyes, behind which lurks everything that people fear damnation for. “I don’t know any advice,” he complains, who has lost all his existence in the past six months. The woman, the job, most recently his ailing youngest son. He buried it a week ago in the garden between two bananas. The family house in front of Okwong is abandoned. He looks down apathetically on his arm, where disaster adheres to him like an ulcer. I tried everything. It’s the demon, says Okwong, saying the six-year-old child who finally manages to enclose the man’s hand with his own. His eldest son. Soon the taxi driver Okwong will have no choice but to lead him out of the village, into the forest, where there is more shade than light, and kill him there. It’s a Sunday at the end of the rainy season, the singing of divine services lies over the country like the sound carpet of bird chirping.
The churches in the villages and cities of the Nigerian state of Akwa-Ibom are filled with believers who throw their hands at the Lord, ecstatically twist their heads and plead in tears. Uwe Okwong Uwe, the father of the child, drove the moped in front of the house after the service, a serious prudent man. He rarely lets himself be carried away, weighs up carefully in discussions, is not drunk from palm wine today like most in the village. He wants to feed the child, because no one else dares to approach the six-year-old. The neighbors avoid the house since everyone knows that there is a curse on it. Naked, in short black trousers, the child squats on the porch, it’s called Uwe like the father, a boy with anxious eyes, almost as big as the head. I don’t recognize my child in him. He has changed so much.” The little one came running by the neighbor boy in December 2009, an eight-year-old who bewitched him out of malice, with secretly enchanted rice porridge. That’s what the son told the father. The rumor quickly circulated in the village, it could no longer be stopped, and the world of the Okwong family collapsed. Madness spreads like an epidemic, can be transmitted from person to person, a pestilence that broke out in southeast Nigeria about ten years ago. It has never existed in Akwa-Ibom before. It began in individual villages, here and there, scattered quickly and has since eaten itself into entire regions. Parents are at war against their own children.
Thousands of them kill them. Love for them turns into hatred. Children’s carcasses float in the streams of the Niger Delta and rot in the bush. There are places in the forests where you will find real skull sites. “Beware of the witch children!” evangelical pastors preach. Every day, the priests infect people anew. This drama is not represented at any UN urgent meeting. No human rights court takes sides. The rulers seem untouched, and world public opinion does not take any notice, as is usually the time. Only a local aid organization opposes the murder, CRARN, the “Child’s right and rehabilitation network” – which is a big name for no more than a handful of activists. Two of them happened to drive through the village of the Okwong family today, which saves the six-year-old. The mayor, the chief, also drunk this Sunday, had shown them the way to the house, who told them about the demon in the village with a heavy tongue. “Help him!” he asks her, referring not to the son, but the father. Jehu Ebuk Tom nods with a hanging head, a routine action, the 28-year-old is the rescue officer of the child protection organization. He is one of the four young men who founded CRARN years ago. One with a quiet, haunting voice who is getting smaller and smaller than his interlocutors, black imitation leather jacket, in it a notepad on which he writes down the horror in keywords. There are so many demons in the village of the Okwong family, on the short drive through the village the chief shows him the obsessed. “He,” he points his finger at a little boy crouching under a tree. “Die,” he says when he discovers a four-year-old girl playing alone with a ball on the roadside.
However, the worst of all devils live with the Okwongs. The father sits on the terrace, his boy cries because he sees the arrivals; he tries to run away from tear himself away, then a crowd closes around both. He didn’t actually intend to, but he has to take the child with him, Jehu is quickly convinced of that. He looks more and more alarmed in the course of the conversation. Okwong wrestles his hands. The villagers behind them mock, tug, hiss. They cut grimaces. “We are afraid of you!” they roar to the child who wants to free himself further howling from Father’s hand. “I took him to five pastors,” he says. Everyone has confirmed that he is infected. He did everything for the salvation of his son, sold two fields to pay for the devil expulsions, plus his car. It didn’t help. The boy is no longer the old one. He no longer obeys, he rebels.” Okwong has no choice. If he tried to defend the boy, he would put himself in danger of being denounced by the village as a witch. Uwe excluded his school’s teacher conference from class a few months ago. So that his evil spirit does not infest the other children. Uwe’s father’s business went worse rapidly. The stepmother left the house, it fell ill and died of her nine-month-old son.
“He is allowed into our children’s home,” Jehu finally says. The only asylum for witch children in the country.One last time the father washes the son. He rubs him off with palm oil, which is supposed to drive away the evil spirits. Dress him, wordless, in the darkness of the hut. He puts on the Sunday state he wears in the churches during the devil’s expulsions, white shirt, black vest. He avoids the gaze of the little one, who now lets everything happen mutely with him, buttons his vest, button by button. Smoothly strokes his shirt collar, folds it over the vest, then tightens everything again, hesitates for a moment, holds his forehead and then leads him out by the hand into the gaffling crowd, waiting for Jehu’s minibus. “One day you have to come get him up,” says the social worker, who leaves his phone number before closing the car door. It’s your son.Uwe’s nose on the disc slides into his new life, over bumpy sand slopes full of children who happily screeching behind the minibus. Seriously, the boy looks out, the car drives from his village to the next, from the side streets to the highway, 65 kilometers away, and usually the fronts of the church halls shimmer past him outside. They are called “Winners Chapel” and “The King of Kings” and the “Church of the Redeemed”. Their large billboards line up the paths, lined up like the casinos in Las Vegas, they compete for believers. As in Vegas, there is nothing for nothing in them.Nigeria is experiencing a wave of burning religiosity in these years.
The multi-ethnic state is shaken by ethnic conflicts and distributional struggles, especially here in the south, where the oil is extracted, Shell produces and Exxon/Mobil. Nigeria is considered the fourth largest supplier worldwide. The industrial age crashes into the land of farmers and small traders with brute force. High-tech refineries grow next to straw huts. Few become rich through the oil, and many remain poor. In the southern states, armed militias fight for a greater share of prosperity, kill and kidnap them. Villagers tap the pipelines to smuggle the oil, in hundreds of places, the earth turns gray in Akwa-Ibom in many places, the water black. Pastors are the parasites of the crisis, like bloodsuckers they are tens liable to the villages. They feed on the little that people possess. These priests have never studied, the blessing of no regular church. They give themselves their titles, they have created their faith communities themselves. They are sources of income. Competition is fierce among pastors, and more impressively they have to prove to their church that they are closest to God. The more demons they identify, the more often they cast them out, the more hopeful come to them. With all this, they earn money, and they have learned to earn the most money with the love of parents for their children. This love has now become a curse for the children. The car door opens when the social worker Jehu and his protégé reach the children’s home at dusk. Uwe hangs out and steps silently into the yard where some boys are playing soccer.
“Welcome, little man,” Sam Ikpe-Itauma, President of CRARN, receives him, a jovial 35-year-old who actually wanted to become a teacher, studied English and literature. The center of the aid association consists of two residential buildings, the left for the boys, the other for the girls, six classrooms and a ring of orchards and vegetable gardens from which they care. Fortunately, it is a place that does not exist a second time in the world. Refuge of currently 225 children, all of whom their families are considered witches and wizards, the real Hogwart, as bitter as no novelist could have invented. When Sam Ikpe-Itauma accommodated the first ones here in 2004, the neighbors threatened to burn down the home. On their arrival, the children firmly believe that they are what they are all calling for. They usually don’t understand exactly what that is. Witches. Can you fly at night? Then fly!” Sam Ikpe-Itauma provokes the new ones. Can you turn into a lizard or cockroach? No? Then how can you be a witch?” For some children, he helps himself with a trick. He gives them a piece of bread to chew and says they should put all evil in these crumbs.
He then has the bread spit on his hand and chokes it down. “It’s over,” he explains decisively to the children. Sometimes it works, this cleaning procedure. Six-year-old Uwe is assigned registration number 375 and a bed that he has to share with another boy. Sam is trying to hijack with him, but Uwe doesn’t hijack. He remains silent. Don’t laugh. Don’t cry either. “The first days were the worst,” says 14-year-old Felix, who takes the new one by the hand. Felix has been living in witch asylum for two years. An uncle accused him of being a wizard in the village. After the death of the father, the child had inherited larger lands, which the uncle envied him. Five young men with knives and machetes led Felix into the bush one morning to help them with the field work. They cleared a small parcel, dug a hole for hare hunting, as they said. “Look if it’s already deep enough,” they urged him to get closer.
“Make a pit and throw him into it. Cover them with darkness.” Enoch 10.4. In this way, the priests teach their community to deal with demon children. Felix ran away, they chased him for half an hour until he stopped a motorist on the street who knew about the witch’s home and took him there. “When I grow up,” says Felix, “I will return and fight for my father’s land.” The inhabitants of the center have all such or similar stories to tell. The youngest is two years old, the oldest 15. The faces of many are destroyed by scars, they draw traces of knives. They were burned by acid, burn marks cover their bodies. Some lack finger links that parents cut them so that they confess. His father drove a nail into the skull of a 13-year-old girl. Only one miracle can explain that she survived. Sam tries to give normality back to the children in the center, a piece of it. He hired eight teachers. Built classrooms in which 28 students share four benches, sends older people like Felix out to secondary schools, let some learn their desired professions from master craftsmen. There are fixed meal times and a parade in the morning at 7 a.m. in which they compete in blue and white school uniforms in front of the Nigerian flag. UNICEF supports the project. From England, the small aid organization “Step for Nigeria” gives money. But otherwise Sam Ikpe-Itauma depends on himself and supporters on site. Who are not so numerous. No one is happy about us. The governor of the state of Akwa Ibom accuses him in television interviews of battering the country’s reputation. He threatens arrest warrants. The local newspapers he controls accuse CRARN of trafficking in children, but without mentioning even one case. Pastors hired civilian police officers, complains Sam to threaten him. In September, he fled over the roof of his house, the children he called backed him. They roared and boxed against the armed attackers, crushed the tires of their motorcycles. Sam is extremely nervous these days. He spends every night in a different house. In order not to provoke the authorities even more, he initially refrains from expanding the center. Only in exceptions does he accept new children. It is now Felix who takes the place in the minibus on which little Uwe sat two days earlier. For the first time since the escape, the social worker Jehu drives him to his old village. The visit is part of the reintegration program, which is intended to reconcile parents and their offspring.
150 children have returned to their families in this way in recent years. “We check whether they are not killed,” says Jehu, who visits the reunited families every few weeks. He pays them help for a living, gives them jobs, helps them move if the neighbors continue to attack the supposed witches. As the car approaches the village, a large group of young men are on the street. Jehu stops on a hill, Felix stares forward between the front seats. The men are starting to run towards them, with sweaty shirts, blood-widened eyes. They wave long machetes, rusty blades that they otherwise use for field work. Jehu locks the doors. “They belong to my uncle’s village militia,” the boy tells him. The visit was announced to the grandfather by phone, Jehu hopes not to have fallen into any trap. But the men race past them, Felix sees the white foam on their mouths up close. A witch hunt again triggered by an inexplicable death in the village. But this time they don’t hunt Felix. They are after a goat,” the grandfather is uncomfortable with questions about the incident. Felix hugs his siblings, they pat him on the shoulder, but the visit remains short. Speechless, he and his grandfather sit opposite each other. The social worker informs him about his statutory duty of care that children should not be discriminated against or injured. Shares CDs with songs against the stigmatization of child witches. “He can come at any time,” says the old man at the farewell. They would kill me. I’ll stay in the children home,” says Felix on the way back. The devil is booming. People are fighting shadows.
A bishop recently claimed in front of a running television camera that he killed 110 witch children in exorcisms. Felix withdraws in the center for the next few days, Uwe is still wearing his Sunday suit. He climbs on the only tree in the yard, climbs obsessed higher and higher as if he wanted to climb out of this world. But the tree does not carry it far, on the thin top it dangles only at the height of the adults. The boy makes friends with another newcomer, Sam makes an exception again. “This is Benji,” a CRARN employee takes him to the home. A seven-year-old who is always sad in a far too big black wool sweater. He reaches for the hands of adults as soon as they reach. “His father doesn’t know that I work here,” says Sam Itauma’s employee. He offered me a hundred dollars if I kill him. He took the money and took the child to the center. “How did you kill him,” the father inquires after a few days. “I shot him in the head,” he answers him. “Then it’s good,” says the father. Uwe and Benji become friends, in rough home life they need each other. It is the somehow conspicuous ones who are rejected by their parents, the particularly beautiful or ugly ones. The particularly clever or stupid ones. The victims always come from poor families.
Most only have one parent because the other died or left the family. The self-proclaimed pastor Helen Ukpabio wrote an instruction manual for finding child witches. In book form, it is available in all major markets. A demon-obsessed child, she writes, becomes “unusually cheeky from the age of two, it tells many lies, steals, becomes very unruly and invents stories that tell it as if they were true.” The church woman also identifies fever attacks and sleepwalking as a sign of obsession. Like many pastors, Helen Ukpabio has teamed up with the Nollywood film industry. She has textbooks turned as dramas. Their greatest success so far, “End of The Wicked”, gave the light for the chase in 1999. The film is still not prohibited in Nigeria. Sam Itauma has gone underground, strangers drive through the city on motorcycles and inquire about him. Rumors are also circulating that the governor has written out a bounty and scheduled contract killers on him. The work in the center continues. Once again, the social worker Jehu sets off to save a life. Witch children live in packs in the fishing port of Ibaka, an hour and a half by car. The parents expose them here in the hope that diseases will provide what they do not bring to their hearts. Jehu and a companion run into the tangle of people, narrow mud paths wind through the hut maze. The earth is soaked in faeces and fish noise. Like hunted animals, the children crouch at the walls of the jetties, hectic breathing, the eyes wild. Some are running away. Adults are their natural enemies. They feed on raw fish waste that seafarers leave them. Jehu kneels down to the boys and girls, examines them, assesses her state of health. The day before, an informant indicated on the phone that a girl at the harbor suffers from life-threatening diarrhea. Jehu finds her between two nets, in the middle of fish noise. Her name is Stella Afiong, she is nine years old. When she stands, she trembles all over her body. The stepmother, the child tells, accused her of being a witch after the death of her mother. The father brought her here two months ago. She suffers from epileptic seizures that return daily. She looks at Jehu hostilely, soon anxious, then curious. A woman appears at the car when she let Stella get in. She holds her four-year-old son by the hand. His face is covered with scab. A small bag with its belongings is stuck under the woman’s arm. “Please take him,” she pleads. He is an evil spirit. Jehu closes the door. Mother and child look silently after the car that disappears behind the next bend.- Toby Binder – Copied from https://wolfgang-bauer.info/…/11…/kinderhexen.html– Automatic German-English translation – Also published on https://crarn.net/media/
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