With the shock, anger and general revulsion that followed the gruesome killing of 20-year-old Sofiat Kehinde, allegedly perpetrated by her boyfriend and three of his accomplices in Oke-Aregba, Itoko-Tuntun, Idi-Ape in Abeokuta, Ogun State on January 29, 2022, an end ought to have naturally come to our naivety about the pestilence that ritual killings for money has become among us. Or oughtn’t it?
In virtually all parts of Africa, albino-hunting is a pastime. This species of nature’s creation with defects in skin pigmentation is a sought-after delicacy for rituals for money. Given so many names which range from Igbo’s– ghost – in Tanzania, so many myths of supernatural powers are woven round albinos.
The murder of Sofiat was particularly grotesque. It must have alerted both government and the governed that our society had gone past the stages of pretences and innocence. Her abductors, four teenage suspects of between 18 and 20 years, had allegedly killed her, severed off her head and burnt it almost into ashes in a mud pot, with her remains already packaged in a sack to be disposed off by the time they were arrested.
In 1912, the British Governor General, Lord Lugard, in a letter to his wife, Flora Shaw, said he had just dealt with a file that contained 744 murders by ordeal. Ordeal by innocence is a very severe or trying experience that was prevalent in pre-colonial Africa. It was a method of trial where the guilt or innocence of an accused person got determined by first subjecting them to a tedious physical danger.
Unless we want to deceive ourselves, those four headhunter boys who murdered Sofiat in Abeokuta, the hunchback hunters, the albino scavengers of Tanzania mirror who we are as Africans. Centuries of preaching on the sacredness of the human body and the visible monumental strides of technology have not succeeded in impeaching our ancient beliefs in spiritualism and metaphysics and their manifestations in ancient primitivism and barbarism.
Those days, if you didn’t have money but have character, you were given a pride of place in society. Today, character without money is dead. Get-rich race has become pandemic. Politicians, governments and Nigerian leaders in general are patrons of this social order. It began first with theof money and then, a huge war waged on the merit system. Uneducated and unskilled hooligans are suddenly made rich by the system, simply because they are anvils in the hands of politicians.