Kate Chisholm

Ju-ju injustice

‘Do you think that Africa is ever going to be free of these superstitions?’ asked the reporter Sorious Samura in the first of his four-part series, West African Journeys on the BBC World Service (Mondays).

issue 25 April 2009

‘Do you think that Africa is ever going to be free of these superstitions?’ asked the reporter Sorious Samura in the first of his four-part series, West African Journeys on the BBC World Service (Mondays).

‘Do you think that Africa is ever going to be free of these superstitions?’ asked the reporter Sorious Samura in the first of his four-part series, West African Journeys on the BBC World Service (Mondays). Sorious has been travelling round Ghana with Cletus Anaaya who works for a charity which is trying to stamp out the practice of killing ‘spirit children’, their fate decided by their parents and the soothsayers who declare them to be filled with evil spirits. Sorious was told by one man he talked to who had just killed a child, ‘I have ju-ju to help people. So when people come to me to kill an evil spirit I do not see anything wrong in that.’

The Concoction Man had given the ‘spirit child’ not just one but three doses of fatal poison.

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