The Pope in Africa

Doc Farrell

Sometimes the level of my ignorance knocks me for six. Here's an article about the Pope speaking to kids in Benin. The part that shocked me was that according to UNICEF tens of thousands of children are tortured or killed as part of witchcraft. Each year. On top of this boat loads are still being sold into slavery.
God bless the Franciscans.

http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/homepage/world-news/detail/articolo/10087/

lmaopml

I was watching the address on TV the other night Doc. It's hard to believe, but these things are happening to children still...

One of the children addressed the Pope - my goodness the length of the speech.....she was excellent! Anybody who is out there helping, fair play to them. There was a documentary not so long ago actually showing the lives of children who are sold into slavery by their own parents - very sad.

tommy2bad

Poverty sucks.
I'm not shure about

tens of thousands of children are tortured or killed as part of witchcraft.

sounds exaggerated to me.
Alternative view here http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2010/01/12/adam-kuper/bizarre-rumours/comment-page-1/

Benny_Cake

I don't know if children are being killed by witches or not - it all just sounds a little too much like they hysteria surrounding "Satanist" activity in some countries,but children have been killed as a result of being accused of witchcraft ( http://www.steppingstonesnigeria.org/).From personal experiences,there is a lot of fear of sorcery among many West Africans - it's a sincerely held fear too. It can be such a cruel world sometimes.

soterpisc

It happens all the time... There is a lot of ignorance in Africa (sadly) And the worlds media does not care.

http://www.nigerianbestforum.com/generaltopics/?p=17212

Doc Farrell

I'm having some difficulty finding exact numbers for children killed. Here is the UNICEF report.
http://www.unicef.org/wcaro/wcaro_children-accused-of-witchcraft-in-Africa.pdf

It would seem that there are definitely tens of thousands tortured but how many are killed is difficult to say.

The report also mentions that child trafficking is the third most profitable crIme after drug trafficking and economic fraud in Nigeria.

Anyway, I found the report on a website called Religiouschildabuse.blogspot.com which doesn't hold back on Christian and Catholic torturers and perverts either.

I should warn some readers that the UNICEF report makes tough reading.

prinz

tommy2bad wrote: »

I'm not shure about sounds exaggerated to me.

Unfortunately it won't be too wide of the mark. For example dozens of albino kids alone have been murdered in Central and Eastern Africa in recent times, so that their body parts could be sold for riualts/withcraft/cures etc.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/swaziland/7956458/Albino-girl-11-killed-and-beheaded-in-Swaziland-for-witchcraft.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-11614957

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7726743.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7527729.stm

Meanwhile, a former witch-doctor who now campaigns to end child sacrifice confessed for the first time to having murdered about 70 people, including his own son.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8441813.stm

He told us that clients had come to him in search of wealth.
"They capture other people's children. They bring the heart and the blood directly here to take to the spirits… They bring them in small tins and they place these objects under the tree from which the voices of the spirits are coming," he said.
Asked how often clients brought blood and body parts, the witch-doctor said they came "on average three times a week - with all that the spirits demand from them."

http://news.sky.com/home/world-news/article/15125431