Twenty-nine people, including 15 children, were killed as ritual sacrifices in Uganda last year, yet none the perpetrators has been brought to justice
CAROLINE LIKISO would have been nine years old this year. But on January 22nd, while she was playing with friends outside her home, a neighbour put a chloroform-soaked cloth over her mouth and disappeared with her. Four days later, her body was found dumped in the bush. Her throat had been slit and her tongue removed.
“We used to go to the same church as the neighbour,” says Caroline’s mother, Rose, a Catholic. “But a factory owner offered them 18 million shillings (€6,500) to get the tongue. He needed a sacrifice to get his new wax candle machines moving.”
Ritual murders are on the rise in Uganda and, according to a US state department report released this month, children are commonly the victims. The number of people killed in human sacrifice increased from three in 2007 to 25 in 2008 and 29 in 2009, say the Ugandan police. Of those 29, 15 were children.
They include Moses Ogen, aged one. In April last year, he was found in Paromo village in Gulu district with his face mutilated. In August, the castrated body of Solomon Otiti, aged three, was discovered in Apac, northern Uganda. Both were the apparent victims of ritual sacrifice.
They are just a few of the many cases. A study conducted by Uganda’s ministry of gender, labour and social development late last year revealed that most cases of child sacrifice do not find their way to the police. And even when they do, the perpetrators are rarely punished. Caroline’s alleged killers were released on a police bond of four million shillings (€1,400). And the factory owner, although he went into hiding, is back in Jinja, untouched by the authorities.
By the end of January this year, 125 suspected perpetrators of human sacrifice had been arrested and 54 taken to court, charged with criminal offences such as murder and kidnap. However, there have yet to be any convictions, despite the fact that Uganda’s 1957 Witchcraft Act prohibits acts of witchcraft which involve threatening others with death.
“I thought the police would put them in a national prison for a long time” says Rose, sitting by a sewing machine in the front room of her red-brick bungalow. “Now I feel I can do nothing. I have lost hope.”
On the walls, there are four Catholic calendars, three of them showing images of the Ugandan Martyrs, a group of Christians burned to death by King Mwanga II between 1885 and 1887 for refusing to renounce their religion. One of them, St Kizito, was just 14 years old.
Poverty, weak legislation and an influx of violent Nigerian films showcasing the rich rewards on offer to anyone sacrificing a human being have all been cited as reasons behind the rise in cases of human sacrifice. But the problem can also be linked to traditional healers or witch doctors, whose numbers have sprouted in recent years and who are keen to offer brutally simple solutions to people’s problems. “Every two kilometres you see a sign for a traditional healer,” says Haruna Mawa, a spokesman for the child protection agency, ANPPCAN. “There are no rules governing them, so you even see Nigerians and Congolese coming into the country claiming they are healers.”
IN A MUD HUT, decorated with crude clay paintings of hyenas, camels and other animals, Matia Sabath, 27, is summoning the spirits with a blackened elephant tusk. The ceiling is made out of cardboard boxes, and in the middle of the room is a variety of shillelagh-like sticks. On top of one is a voodoo doll, which looks not all that dissimilar to a Barbie figurine.
“This is a clinic,” he says, shuffling seeds in a woven basket through the palm of his right hand. “People come here for healing when they are sick.” Sabath, a Christian, says that: “God will not take me as a devil worshipper as the spirits I use are accredited by God.” However, he admits that “competition is high”. And with competition come unscrupulous traders.
“Uganda is a very poor country,” explains Trevor Solomon, a local journalist. “People look for easy ways out of their situation, and there is no shortage of traditional healers willing to help them. And that means that there is a lot of competition for customers.”
Once consulted only at night and in secrecy, witch doctors are now an open part of Ugandan society, advertising in newspapers and on radio, and becoming increasingly media-savvy.
It’s 8.30pm on Sunday, and Dr Ssdiamo Nukassa is the main guest on African Culture, a phone-in radio show broadcast by Bugos 96FM in Jinja, a town more often associated with adventure sports. Dressed in a grey Umbro shirt, white runners and a baseball cap, the 28-year-old belies the conventional image you might have of a witch doctor. But as a succession of calls comes in, it is clear that Nukassa, despite his youth, is not lacking in fans, or confidence in his own abilities. To all questions – “Can you heal my wife, she bleeds?”, “Can you heal madness?”, “Can you protect my livestock from being stolen?”, “Can you cure HIV?” – he responds yes.
“The powers from the spirits help me heal people,” says Nukassa, sitting down to talk after his radio appearance. “To make the right selection of herbs, the spirits torment me and tell me the right ingredients to cure disease.”
With no legislation governing people such as Nukassa, it’s impossible to say whether his work is genuine or not. He says he is appalled by child sacrifice, and that the people who perform it are out to discredit the work he and others do. “Those people, when they fail to cure someone, they say kill a person, thinking they won’t do it,” he says. “It is a gamble.”
But given the number of calls Nukassa has received, it is clear that Ugandans hold traditional doctors in high regard. One reason for this is poverty.
Although the number of people living below the poverty line has decreased in Uganda, the majority of people still work as subsistence farmers. Around Jinja, that means using their six acres or so to grow sugar cane for local plantation owners, at 40,000 shillings (€14) a tonne. It’s not an easy life, and people are open to manipulation.
Moses Waligo grows sugar cane and potatoes on a small patch of land about 10km from Jinja, and would grow more but for the amount of money he has spent on witch doctors. In 1997, his father, Kabelega Lawrance, 40, went missing following a bust-up with his daughter. Since then, his son has been paying traditional healers to try to bring him back.
“People said, if you pay money he will come back,” he says. “We tried four times, but nothing. I spent 100,000 shillings (€35) the first time. The last time we had to sell our land and pay 200,000.”
Waligo is now looking for another 200,000 shillings, after he saw a friend become possessed with a spirit around a camp fire last year. “They said it is the spirit of your father. The spirit is talking. One person used sign language and another person interpreted. They said he was killed and his tongue cut out so he couldn’t talk. That’s why he was using sign language.”
Waligo believes that unless he goes to the witch doctor, who will tell him here to find his father’s body, neither he nor his children or grandchildren will ever settle. “We failed because we have no money,” he says.
Last year, the US spent $500,000 (€375,000) training 2,000 Ugandan police to investigate offences related to human trafficking, including human sacrifice. But as long as there are no convictions, unscrupulous witch doctors will think that they can act with impunity, according to Haruna Mawa. “What kind of message does that send out?” he asks.
With a lack of political will to tackle the problem, many parents have taken the protection of their children into their own hands. Witch doctors don’t kill children who have had circumcisions or their ears pierced, says Mawa, so many parents have taken it upon themselves to make sure their children have both.
For Rose, protecting her three remaining children is now her top priority. She keeps them mostly in the house, even though the family who allegedly killed Caroline have fled the area, chased away by an angry mob. Denied justice, she says she has forgiven them in her heart. “Now I have to leave things in the hands of God.”
