TWO WORLDS AWAY

In Nigeria recently, an angry mob demanded that police jail a goat. Vigilantes insisted the animal was a human car thief who transmogrified upon being apprehended.

Nigerian law doesn't recognise magic, witchcraft, or voodoo. Yet, faced with an angry mob, police acquiesced, arresting the goat.

This story was used as an object lesson for a Practical Reporting 101 class taught to Nigerian journalism students this spring.

There was just one problem: Some felt the goat was guilty. "These things actually happen," one woman protested.

In Nigeria, the sharp line between fact and fiction is badly blurred by centuries of animism and occultism that infects contemporary Muslim and Christian thinking as well as secular thought.

A reporter's religious beliefs, no matter how odd, don't necessarily preclude good journalism. But when those beliefs clearly interfere with basic fact-checking and verification, then it's worth examining how collective belief in magic can impede the civic development that good journalism fosters.

Black magic, malevolent curses, and witch doctors are woven into the fabric of West African society. "I don't believe in witches, but I know they exist," one student said.

Television soap operas feature a villain sprinkling green powder on the doorstep of the woman next door. The following day she is shown writhing in agony. Great swathes of Nigerian society take these curses seriously.

Not infrequently, police hear reports that a man claims someone cast a spell to capture his spirit. In Nigeria, tradition holds that if you sleep in bed with your feet at the headboard, you are communing with witches. Criminals buy charms from witch doctors to become invisible and escape arrest.

A hairdresser tells of a client of another customer who reported a snake in her house that turned into a young woman. When the girl was taken to a church service she turned back into a snake.

TV coverage lends currency to rumour. Take the story of four thieves apprehended by vigilantes who tied and bound them. According to dozens of village witnesses, there was supposedly a puff of smoke and the bound villains became four tethered crocodiles.

Africans often look for an unknown element to blame for disasters, floods, and crop failures.

Our TV screens are full of charity requests for this African country or that African country but how many adverts actually have Africans asking for the help - it is always White liberal types running Oxfam and other misguided charities.

Yes it is horrible to see small children starving to death. But you know I believe that there is now across West Africa a culture of dependence on aid and that helps no one at all.

We keep being told that if we send £3 per month then the village will have clean water, so if digging a hole is all that is required to find clean water then why are these people not digging all day as that would solve ‘their’ water problems.

I suggest that what needs to be done is that all foreign aid should be stopped immediately. And all the foreign debt owed to us written off as they repay us roughly as much as we lend them.

These countries would then be free of debt and able to use the debt payments to improve their lot. If these countries can develop an infrastructure and increase their GDP then they would be able to approach the World Bank for example for a loan which they would be able to reply.

The West can not longer subsidise the countries of Africa - the good times are over and we must look to ourselves to survive.

Charity in this case really does begin at home. The National Front has a policy of stopping ALL foreign ‘aid’ and spending instead on British needs….

Tom Linden