24-year-old Gbenga Adewoyin has recently emerged as a rebel publicly contesting the powers of the supernatural in the deeply religious country of Nigeria. Belief in African traditional religions and its juju components are widespread in Nigeria, with many combining them with either Christianity or Islam, according to a 2010 report by the Pew Research Centre.
Many Nigerians believe that magic charms can allow humans to morph into cats, protect bare skins from sharp blades and make money appear in a clay pot.These beliefs are not just held by the uneducated, they exist even at the highest level of Nigeria's academia.
Dr Olaleye Kayode, a senior lecturer in African Indigenous Religions at the University of Ibadan, told the BBC that money-making juju rituals - where human body parts mixed with charms makes money spew out of a pot - really work. The curency that supposedly appear "are gotten by spirits from existing banks", he told the BBC.
Jude Akanbi, a lecturer at the Crowther Graduate Theological Seminary in Abẹ́òkúta, is also unequivocal about juju. "This ability to be able to transform yourself to [a] cat, to disappear and reappear, these things are possible within the dynamics of traditional African religion. "Although [it] sounds illogical, like old wives' tales, however from what we have seen and heard, these things are possible," he said.
Such beliefs, especially that human body parts and charms can produce money from a clay pot, have led to a recent wave of gruesome murders in the country, with single women often the victims. "I feel horrible to see young people engage in these ritual killings," said Adewovin. "If money ritual worked, we would have seen a massive inflation in the economy for the decades that we have believed in it."
Questioning the existence of supernatural powers is considered taboo in much of Nigerian society. To be openly expressing such thoughts, as Adewoyin is doing, could easily result in an arrest for blasphemy or a lynching by an angry mob.
The killing of humans to use their body parts for magic purposes gripped Nigeria in the mid-90s and led to riots in the eastern city of Owerri after the kidnap and murder of an 11-year-old boy in 1996. Now, with social media, hardly a day passes without reports of a missing person and pictures of mutilated corpses linked to juju.
There was widespread outrage last month after three men allegedly killed a 17-year-old girl in Ogun state to use her body parts in a ritual they believed would make them rich. They confessed to the killing after they were arrested by the police and have been charged in court. The oldest killer was 21, sparking the Twitter hashtag #At21, where users described what they were doing at that stage in life and bemoaning what they saw as societal pressures on young people to get rich quick.
The outrage over the girl's death made federal lawmakers debate juju in parliament and consider the "declaration of a state of emergency on ritual killings in the country." While the debate rages about who is to blame for the killings, a much broader conversation is to be had about Nigeria's educational system that fails to persuade people that juju and the supernatural are not real, says Adewoyin. He is hoping that his efforts can expose those he calls tricksters, claiming the supernatural powers of juju, and help put an end to the spate of ritual killings. "For a reasonable human being to believe that a human with all his biological components can turn to yam or banana is illogical, and worrisome," he said.
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