The witchcraft industry
Written by Obi Nwankanma
Sunday, 16 November 2008
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....
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