MR AGBO, a community warden, spotted her; a young girl shivering on the steps outside a dreary apartment block in Hackney, east London. She was barefoot, scantily clad and painfully thin. There were bruises and a large swelling on her forehead. Her eyes were inflamed, red and weeping.
What emerged over the next weeks as the police gently interviewed her was a shocking tale of abuse and torture by her “mother” and two other adults. The girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, had been systematically beaten and cut with a knife.
Chilli peppers had been rubbed in her eyes. She had been tied up in a sack for days. They had threatened to throw her off the third-floor balcony or drown her in a nearby canal. Finally they had booted her out.
In their minds there was good reason for behaving in this way: the child was a witch. The torture was intended to exorcise the evil from her. Failing that, she and the evil spirit she harboured would be killed.
This is not some tale from the Dark Ages. This is modern London. On Friday the woman purporting to be the girl’s mother, who also cannot be named for legal reasons, and Sita Kisanga, 35, whom she knew as her aunt, were convicted at the Old Bailey of cruelty charges.
Sebastian Pinto, 33, Kisanga’s half-brother, was also convicted. All three came as asylum seekers from Angola or the Congo. They will be sentenced next month.
I was an expert witness at the trial. With many years’ experience in the Congo rainforest, I was first called in to help by the police investigating the murder of Adam, the torso of an African boy found near Tower bridge in 2001. Soon after the girl, then aged eight, was found in Hackney in 2003, the Metropolitan police child protection unit also sought my advice. The beliefs they were encountering were so strongly held, and so unlike anything they were used to, that they needed guidance.
Kisanga’s son had apparently woken up one night saying that the girl had visited him in a dream and threatened to fly with him back to the Congo.The three defendants believed absolutely that the girl “had witchcraft” and tortured her.
This appears to be part of a rising tide of abuse involving children, witchcraft and exorcism. I am working now on five more cases involving exorcism on African children suspected of witchcraft. Everywhere I go, the communities tell me there are hundreds of similar cases unknown to the authorities.
I appear to be witnessing the birth of a new and frightening religious phenomenon: child abuse masquerading as exorcism. Before last week’s case the Victoria Climbié atrocity in north London was the most high-profile of these tragedies. The bitter irony is that this is not traditional African belief at all.
Most African people inhabit a universe in which the spirit world is much more immediate than in western culture. They take it for granted that the spirits of dead family intercede with the living. Sometimes these spirits are welcome and sometimes not.
Traditionally, if a child is affected, the parents consult a local healer, in the Congo known as a “nganga”, who makes charms to ward off the unwanted spirit. The nganga would not perform a violent exorcism. Africans are indulgent of their children and rarely even smack them.
Exorcism in Britain is a product of the fundamentalist Christian movements sweeping Africa and African communities worldwide. Sometimes these scenes are enacted in church, or what passes for church, by professional exorcists, often itinerants who wander from Christian splinter group to charismatic church, casting out demons from helpless and terrified children.
The fundamentalist Christian groups they serve meet in warehouses and private homes and garages. There is no check on their activities. It is a Frankenstein religion that nobody knows how to control.
In Britain, there is a shortage of professional exorcists, so some African children are being sent back home to face exorcism. One reliable informant tells me that he knows of 15 children sent back to Africa for exorcisms in the past few months alone — and that at least one of them has died.
Some families try to deal with the problem of witchcraft themselves with church encouragement. Kisanga attended a church from the Congo: Combat Spirituel. A note in her Bible said it was confirmed in a prayer meeting that the girl “has witchcraft”.
Even when the churches don’t offer encouragement, families can still go it alone. Do-it-yourself exorcism videos are on sale in Brixton market, mainly from Nigeria.
The worrying signs are that the situation is spiralling out of control. During the Adam inquiry, police discovered that of 300 African children who arrived at Heathrow during one three-month period, only two could later be traced. And that is just those who came through Heathrow. It does not count other airports and seaports.
The authorities have no way of knowing what has happened to these missing children or to the many thousands more who perhaps go missing during the course of every full year.
Many of them may have been genuinely fostered with aunts and uncles. But perhaps they have not. Perhaps they have been brought here for other purposes: benefit fraud, sexual or domestic slavery. Or perhaps they have been settled with “aunties” like Kisanga or Victoria Climbié’s appalling guardians, who left her tied up in a plastic rubbish sack in the bath.
There is no check. Unofficial fosterers need not register or provide proof of any family relationship with their charge.
I am calling on the government to establish a taskforce to investigate this issue. Registration of private fostering should become mandatory. There need to be more stringent checks that unrelated children are not simply being brought here by unscrupulous adults. And the taskforce should consider whether churches need to be regulated.
For there may be worse to come. In the Congo, where Aids has created tens of thousands of orphans, and feral packs of them roam the streets, children have become the scapegoats for desperate poverty and disease. The shockwaves of what is happening in Africa are being felt here.
Richard Hoskins teaches African and African-derived traditional religions at King’s College London
