Human sacrifice, devil worship are symptoms of bigger problem

What you need to know:

Hard times to blame. The rise in hard times across society has promoted this pluralism, which allows the population to split their bets between the mushrooming outlets of retail evangelism, the traditional mainstream churches squeezed in the middle with falling attendances and the dark third world.

The Lake Victoria region is in the middle of a fresh wave of kidnapping, human sacrifice, and genital mutilation. Randomly, young women and children are kidnapped at all hours. In some cases, kidnappers request for ransom although in many instances, its ransom for where to deliver the body. Few of the kidnappers have the capacity to move or incarcerate a person incognito for more than a few days. In other cases, the violence occurs immediately - bodies are hacked, mutilated or even sexually abused - and dumped in the bush for passersby! There are also other cases where the body is driven around and dumped on the periphery of populated areas.

Children, girls, and boys are another major target. Three years ago, domestic help was part of the problem; domestic maids entrusted with children would turn on them and deliver infants, toddlers to gangs, who in turn would request for huge ransoms from their parents. There were also other instances where children would be pummelled by the domestic help. Then the bigger gangs have formed to carve body parts from the children.

The third wave are hardcore criminals who invade villages pillaging life and property as if they were bought from shops. These criminals, in the words of an MP from central Uganda, Sarah Temulanda before a hushed parliamentary committee earlier this month, deserve to be “executed” rather than tried in the courts. These gangs drop off leaflets identifying bounty to be collected. A smaller group of these hardcore criminals have concentrated on more gory crimes, practicing human cannibalism, an abhorred practice nearly stamped out in the last century. In one village in Rakai District in the southwest lake region, a family was found with human bones stored in tins.

This state of affairs has baffled law enforcement, which temporarily appears to stall the problem before it breaks out. Numerous barazas have been held by police calling upon citizens to speak out on these horrendous atrocities. The President has been one of those holding barazas - he held one in the Entebbe sub-region where more than 40 women lost their lives last year. His former Inspector General of Police Kale Kayihura did the same with the same results.

In this deadly wave, a few other aspects of life in society have cropped up. First is the open practice of witchcraft. Sorcerers have gone mainstream, including divining on public radios, prompting the communications regulator, UCC, to ban a number of programmes where actual radio producers go to sleep living the traditional medicinemen and women to vend their wares through hours’ long infomercials. In many villages in the central district, the village witchdoctor or healer is a place of prominence. His or her guests in search of riches, good fortune or sometimes stroke of luck to bear a child, may arrive anonymously or openly with open offerings to pray for whatever it is.

In other cases, desperate a situation common in HIV, mental health or other terminal cases, patients arrive for “treatment”, at which they will be asked for all sorts of offerings so as to be healed of their ailments. Patients are kept in expansive secretive compounds. Superstition long common in the lake peoples to explain all sorts of bad omen, famine, drought, plagues has fuelled demand for these traditional doctors (basawo).

The rise in hard times across society has promoted this pluralism, which allows the population to split their bets between the mushrooming outlets of retail evangelism, the traditional mainstream churches squeezed in the middle with falling attendances and the dark third world.

The mainstreaming of these horrendous practices are in effect a negative evolution of society responding to capitalism, poverty and distress. While the police and government community outreach is justified showing up at funerals, we must accept that it is a failure of values. In fact, we should be preaching to the well-dressed men and women filling the pews on Sundays.
Mr Ssemogerere is an Attorney-at-Law and an Advocate. [email protected]