The ‘ghost children’ of Abuja

The baby’s mother was a woman in Kiyi, a farming village in Kuje area council, where Chinwe did missionary work and national service as a youth corps member.The woman smelt trouble and ran for help. “She said, there is this practice in their culture, that when a man needs a bountiful harvest during farming, he […]

The baby’s mother was a woman in Kiyi, a farming village in Kuje area council, where Chinwe did missionary work and national service as a youth corps member.
The woman smelt trouble and ran for help. “She said, there is this practice in their culture, that when a man needs a bountiful harvest during farming, he has to sacrifice a child of his to get such harvest,” Chinwe recalls.
“She said, our husbands use our children to make sacrifices for the harvest and my husband has used more than six of my children for this sacrifice.”
The life of her seventh child was at stake. Both women prayed. “But I gave the child back to her and told her I was not married, and I will not be able to keep the child, and that Jesus will save the child for her, and that she will not die,” Chinwe says.
“She believed me. From time to time, she will come to church and we will pray for the child, and today the child is in SS1 and she is doing fine.”
That’s Precious-the first and eldest living child Chinwe would rescue from death. [Names of children in this story are changed to protect their identity]. The youngest are four months old. Nineteen years on, the categories of Abuja’s children put to death for the crime of breathing has expanded.
Marked for death
Children sacrificed for bumper harvest is one. A second group is children born as twins. Albino children can be abandoned to die. But children whose mothers die during childbirth are considered evil for having sent their mothers to an early death. And when they survive and make the mistake of growing an upper tooth below a lower one, they are still considered an evil that must be wiped from the face of the community.
Chinwe didn’t take Precious into her care until she was married years later. “After that, [Precious’ mother] had two set of twins-that is four babies-and the villagers killed them, just across the river from here,” she says, pointing toward the rear of her compound in Kiyi.
Precious’ mother wanted to keep her babies alive. She gave birth during rainy season, even though she had been helped to register for antenatal clinic at Dagiri in nearby Gwagwalada.
“I wanted to prevent the killing of those babies but before I knew it she delivered during the rainy season and there is no boat to cross the river so I could not cross to help her, so they killed the babies,” says Chinwe.
“The second time again, she got pregnant and she delivered across the river, again in the village and again they killed the babies.”
Catch-44
Such practice is not confined to villages in Kuje alone. They first came to light some two years back, when newspaper and television cameras followed the first informant, Chinwe’s husband Olusola, into jungles where infanticide was practised, according to the National Orientation Agency’s account.
He counted 44 villages, and NOA sampled half of them for verification.
Its latest campaign went to 24 communities in Kuje, Abaji, Kwali and Gwagwalada-four area councils dominated by farming and fishing communities of Gbagyi and Gwari. Its report has since gone before the FCT’s minister of state and prompted inauguration of committees to change minds.
On-the-air campaigns started on radio, followed by a torrent of transistor radios into the communities to enable them tune in to campaigns that aim to pull remote residents out of the “dark ages”, according to Moses Abah, director of NOA in the FCT.
“Some people have confronted him, [Sola, asking] ‘why are you exposing us, but he says ‘my interest is to save the lives of children’, and we are on the same page. Our interest in this matter is the life of these children must be saved, must not be sacrificed for anybody’s interest,” he told Weekly Trust recently.
Harsh push and underground
Government agencies like NOA tread with caution, conscious of stomping all over communal beliefs. The agency has been working with the Stevens since the first stories emerged.
A panel has combed through the communities to verify claims and put up recommendations to end the killings. But the going is slow and careful, amidst concerns that being “harsh or pushy” might force the practice underground, says Sola. “[The NOA] should try and convince and persuade them, because if you force them, they go underground. The NOA has begun using drama to teach them as well.”
Precious didn’t die, no knife pierced her skin. The sacrificial death is not physical. Residents themselves are reluctant to talk about what and how it happens, but advocates against child deaths living in communities as Kiyi have given evidence how the deaths are made to happen.
“What they do is that they will get a goat as I was told, that it is always a black goat, and a native doctor will place their hand on the head of the goat and call the child’s name and make some incantations and after that they will slaughter the goat and when the goat dies, the child will die.”
Twins would have been covered under calabash to suffocate, or nursed on poisonous concoction until death. Without that, their families would suffer consequences for keeping them alive, the belief went. The only sign of twins put to death is a simple mark, an altar of sorts dedicated to the spirit of the twins, on the family’s rhombus-the earthen storage where farming families store their grain harvest.
Rescue home
Precious’ mother lost 12 children. Precious didn’t die. She is among 72 children now living with Chinwe and her husband in a rescue home the couple run on land gifted them by the Kiyi community. Today, children from communities beyond Kiyi are also there.
The couple’s single child is among the 72-impossible to tell apart. All bear the same surname, sleep in the same place and eat from the same pot.
Meal time in the Stevens household is like cooking for a party of 72. Three-legged cauldrons boil over roaring fires. Children stream from double bunks. Older children make their beds. Live-in helps make beds for the young ones. Dozens of mouths wolf down breakfast and pour into a white 18-seater bus for the ride to school. Sometimes a younger child sits on the lap of an older one.
The youngest children stay home, tended by a live-in help-bathed, put to bed, cooed through brunch, put down for another nap. The naps are short in the hot and humid air of February. A lazy fan whirls in the room. Among them is an albino child, and the twins Martin and Matilda.
The toddlers wake up bleary-eyed, are rushed through a cool bath. A dusting of methylated powder and a fistful of cabin biscuits later, they are calm for the afternoon.
The tiniest children are in a nursery. Seven babies, the youngest only four months old, lay in tiny cots. One sucks his thumb. The next is awake, tiny feet pumping in the air. The third infant has soiled her diapers. Esther, the nursery hand who’s come down to help while on school break, rushes in to clean her up.
The cleaning routine involves a dusting of medicated powder. Then she hands a clutch of cabin biscuit to the seven-month-olds squatting in a nearby cot. A slobbery grin shows a tooth creeping out of their gum. A tooth in the wrong gum could have earned them certain death.
It has been difficult to change attitudes that threaten children like Precious. Her new parents-through the dozens of children they have taken in since her-make it clear they are not orphans. By right, Precious and the other children have biological parents. Their life in the rescue home is a statement that the gods haven’t smitten them and their parents for circumstances their communities perceive as evil.
Says Chinwe: “We don’t give out any of these children for adoption. We want to use them as examples to these communities that these children are normal, initially when they give us these children they will tell us that their gods will kill us, because we are committing an abomination, and the gods will also kill the parents and the parents afraid to release their children. These communities like Kutara and a few other ones that have changed, they now know that these children are gifts from God and they are normal.”
Precious didn’t feel normal when her new parents told her how she came into the home.
“She felt bad, but we told her that what God has done for her through us is to save her from death, to make sure she is alive and it is not the fault of her parents but a community thing,” says Sola Stevens. Since he married Chinwe, the couple have continued their missionary work, braving danger and comfort.
“Later she came to appreciate the fact that if we had not done this she may not have been alive.”
Spreading interest
Since their story began spreading, residents from Kuje and Kwali to Gwagwalada and Abaji have known them as a couple “interested in the evil children,” he says. “So some on their own the village heads will call us to come a pick the children when they are born.”
But not all children are brought easily. Communities can hold onto their children “because believe that giving them means that you are allowing the evil children to survive that will still come back to their root,” says Sola.
“It is not one person’s decision it is a community belief sometimes if people want to give and their community leaders say no there is nothing you can do than to leave them alone.”
Remote, rural communities in the area councils scream of neglect, abandoned by local representatives in the frenzy of Abuja to become a world-class capital. Government presence is scant. For their proximity to the centre of Nigeria’s power, the communities contain pockets where residents have no healthcare centres, water or schools.
Kaida Sabo, in Gwagwalada area council, is one such pocket, where water is dirt brown, drilled from bare river beds. Even there, twin babies are dreaded.
Experimenting by sending children back to their communities could lead to their death, the Stevens fear, especially when residents firmly believe time and distance cannot wipe out the wrath of the gods.
But it is a risk that’s paid off in Kutara. Six years ago, just as FCT authorities became officially part of movement to stop child killings, the Stevens chanced on a set of twins. Police was brought in and photos snapped as evidence. The family and the village head were threatened with arrest if anything happened to the children. They pleaded that the children be taken away. The family already had six altars to twins-that’s 12 babies killed in the household.
The Stevens refused, and the children still live with their families in Kutara, says Chinwe. “There are two sets of twins that were delivered toward the end of 2014, and they are living in that community, and no one has killed them. What we do is we go there to give them drugs, we have medical doctor, a nurse, so they go there to treat them when they are sick.”
Evening approaches, and Sola departs on his evening chore: after bussing the children to school, it is time for their ride home. He takes the second of two white buses, donated by a couple marking their wedding anniversary. The couple also built the new dormitory where the big boys now have rooms, where they will stay until the gods come for them.