A grisly find is leading London police into the horrific world of an African cult that kills for body parts. PAUL VALLELY reports.
The torso of a 5-year-old child is found in the Thames. A murder investigation begins. Then evidence emerges of something chillingly sinister - ritual killing and mutilation.
Has a dark cult of African magic taken root in Britain? Until two weeks ago, police could not be sure. The body had been found several months earlier in the river near Tower Bridge. The child had been decapitated and his limbs had been removed after the violent blow to the neck that killed him.
Could it be, detectives wondered, a family crime? Or the work of a murderous paedophile? Or was it an attempt to disguise an accident?
Then, two kilometres upstream, on the foreshore near Chelsea Bridge, they found a white sheet with the name "Adekoyejo Fola Adoye" written on it three times in blue felt-tip pen.
With it were seven half-burned candles on which "Fola" and "Adoye" had also been carved with a sharp knife.
The dead boy was black. Might this be - and the thought formed only slowly and reluctantly in the minds of the hardened police investigators - a ritual killing of the type they had only heard about from Africa?
It was then that they sent for Professor Hendrik Scholtz of Johannesburg. The pathologist from Witwatersrand University is an expert in so-called muti killings, in which adherents of traditional African magic take human body parts and grind them down to make potions which they believe bring good fortune to those who drink them.
Last month, Professor Scholtz went to Britain and performed a second post-mortem on the torso that has lain in Wapping Mortuary for the past five months. He told them what they most dreaded hearing. They were dealing with what is believed to be the first muti killing in Britain.
Muti is the Zulu word for medicine. In its everyday form, its adherents - who include more than 80 per cent of the population of South Africa - use potions made from the country's indigenous herbs and plants to cure headaches and stomach ailments.
More complex complaints call for animal parts such as crocodile fat, hawks' wings, monkeys' heads or dried puff adders. In a gruesome extension of this principle, some muti followers believe human body parts can be used to heal them or imbue them with special powers.
Human hands burned to ash and mixed into a paste are seen as a cure for strokes. Blood is given to boost vitality. Brains are used to impart political power and business success.
Genitals, breasts and placentas are used for infertility and good luck, with the genitalia of boys and virgin girls being especially highly prized as "uncontaminated" by sexual activity and, therefore, more pure and potent.
Conservative estimates are that at least 300 people have been murdered for their body parts in the past decade in South Africa. Some investigators there suspect the figure might be as high as 500 a year. One child has gone missing every three days in the country's four northern provinces, and police fear many are muti victims.
All of which has brought about a significant change in the attitude of the South African authorities. In the years after apartheid, reports about muti killings were downplayed as the legacy of an era in which Johannesburg's newspapers thrilled and disgusted their readers with stories that reinforced white perceptions that the nation's blacks were not ready for freedom, let alone power.
But six years after the fall of apartheid the phenomenon moved from the rural areas and into the townships. In a spate of killings in Soweto, boys aged between one and six were kidnapped as they played in the township's dusty streets. While they were still alive they had their genitals and thumbs cut off and their eyes gouged out and were left to bleed to death on wasteland.
Not long after, the Government set up a Commission of Inquiry into Witchcraft Violence and Ritual Murders to investigate the problem.
Its report revealed a grisly catalogue of hard-to-believe facts: of human skulls embedded in the foundations of buildings to ensure that the business there thrived; of body parts buried on farms to secure good harvests; of severed hands built into shop entrances to encourage customers.
And of a thriving trade in which a testicle could raise $250, a kidney $650, a heart $1300 and brains and genitals up to $13,000. The organs of white men were fetching more since whites were more successful in business.
Most shocking of all was the ghastly belief that body parts taken from live victims are rendered more potent "by the screams of the victims", according to Anthony Minnaar, a researcher for the South African Police Service Research Centre in Pretoria.
And now something as bizarre as this has apparently taken place in a location as banal as the lee of Battersea power station in London.
"The nature of the discovery of the body, the features of the external examination including the nature of the wounds, clothing and mechanism of death are consistent with those of a ritual homicide as practised in Africa," said Professor Scholtz in the language of forensic pathology.
What he meant by that was that the boy's throat had been cut and his blood drained from his body - almost certainly for use as a tonic to impart strength and vitality.
And his neck had been severed from his spine to remove the first vertebra, which in mythology is said to be the bone with which the giant Atlas held up the world. In muti, according to Colonel Rebus Jonkers, who has retired after investigating South Africa's worst witchcraft and black-magic crimes, the Atlas bone "is believed to be the centre of the body, where all nerve and blood vessels meet".
The genitals of the Adekoyejo boy in the Thames had not been removed, however, suggesting that his killers needed muti potions for some specific purpose for which the sex organs were not required.
That provided another clue. The boy had been circumcised at an early age, hinting that he might have been from West Africa rather than South Africa. The name on the cloth found upstream of his body is not unusual among the 20 million-strong Yoruba-speaking community based in Nigeria, who form the majority of Britain's Nigerian community.
"These rituals are also very common in the Ivory Coast and Ghana," says Anthony Minnaar.
It is not just the wide geographical spread that makes things difficult for the British police. The bigger problem is that muti killing grows out of something far more widespread.
The word muti, which derives from umu thi, meaning tree, has become a byword for any traditional medicine, good or bad. It is practised by sangomas (known to colonial powers as witchdoctors).
Research by the Pietermaritzburg Institute of Natural Resources found that 84 per cent of the South African population consult a sangoma more than three times a year, after or instead of going to a Western medical doctor.
Economists have estimated the sangoma economy to be worth about $650 million a year.
Most Western doctors are dismissive. One clinical professor of medical toxicology claims that poisonous muti medicines kill more Africans annually than does Aids.
But others are ambivalent. A pharmaceutical company has just signed a deal with the African National Healers Association to package a range of sex-related products, including treatments for impotence and sexually transmitted diseases.
And the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, with the aid of traditional healers, has launched a "bio-prospecting" investigation to unlock the secrets of the nation's 23,000 indigenous plants. They have already identified an appetite suppressant, a strong sweetener and a mosquito repellent.
The sangomas say that where Western doctors cure by correcting chemical and physical faults or eradicating infecting organisms, they concentrate on the psyche and on altering, improving and stimulating the patient's immune system. This holistic world-view is beginning to appeal to sections of the white community.
Whites are increasingly responding to discreet mail and phone-order services run by sangomas who frequently take out advertisements in newspapers promising to boost salaries and enlarge penises, to increase fertility and ensure exam passes and lottery wins, even to protect car-owners from being hijacked.
The South African national football team use lion fat and hippopotamus grease to enhance players' performance. One South African newspaper has even used muti to try to counter low staff morale and flagging circulation.
What makes this so alien, and dangerous, is that it inhabits a different metaphysical universe. There is more than myth to creatures such as the dreaded tokoloshe - a short, hairy creature with a huge penis whose insatiable sexual appetite forces women to raise their beds on bricks - or the Lightning Bird - a creature some person has harnessed when lightning strikes, a person who has to be rooted out and eliminated before the community can be safe again.
In such a world-view, a person is more than a mind, body and soul; he or she is the personification of past, present and future relations between the living and the dead. And hence afflictions that seem to have no evident cause, and cannot be rectified by normal methods, are considered to originate from fractures in relations between the living, or between the living and the spirit world.
What also grows from this is the belief that there is only so much luck in the world. When one person does better than his neighbours, they suspect he is employing supernatural means to secure his good fortune.
It is believed that luck can run out, or be used up, for each person has a limited supply of it. But young children have not yet had to use their luck, which can be transferred to whoever takes the medicine derived from their remains.
One peculiarly horrific manifestation of this grim logic is the idea of some muti followers that sex with a virgin girl can cure them of Aids. The younger the girl, the more powerful the transferable power of her virginity, which is why, a few months ago, six HIV-positive men in South Africa's Kimberley province took it in turns to rape an 8-month-old baby girl.
Could such a nightmarish belief system now be gaining a grip on the streets of Britain? Certainly there are shops offering cures for bad luck and spells against black magic among the African communities in Tottenham, Finsbury Park, Brixton and Birmingham.
And death threats have reportedly been made to a health inspector in north London who uncovered what he believed was a muti network bringing children's amputated limbs into Heathrow Airport from Africa (as well as hands and legs, the body parts have included severed heads). Police investigating the Adekoyejo case are preparing for the worst.
"There is some suggestion of ceremonies taking place and strong rumours that body parts are used," says Commander Andy Baker, of Scotland Yard's Serious Crime Group. "The rumours are it is opening up. More and more people are telling us they have heard of ceremonies."
But rumours are all they have to go on. After five months of talks with members of ethnic communities there is still no sign of an identity for the murdered child.
Detectives have laboriously checked council records and the attendance registers of 3000 nurseries and primary schools, hoping to spot a missing 5-year-old. Despite a nationwide search nothing has been found. And no one has come forward to report a child of similar description missing.
That in itself offers bleak confirmation of police fears. The body of Adekoyejo was well-nourished and showed no signs of abuse, sexual or otherwise. Analysis of his stomach contents showed that someone had taken the trouble to give him a cough linctus not long before he died.
The South African pathologist Professor Scholtz told detectives that the boy was likely to have been the child or close associate of a member of the group that killed him. The classic muti scenario is of an otherwise well-treated child being "volunteered" for sacrifice by his family, with his distraught mother being told the child would have a "better life" with a "new soul".
And this only adds to the difficulty of finding the culprits, police say. Worse still, it could mean the case will not be an isolated one.
"I don't want to raise the fear factor," Commander Baker has said, "but if it is a ritualistic muti murder, others will follow."
If so, the Western inclination to dismiss muti as mumbo-jumbo or primitive superstition will only hamper the search for the killers, argues the South African police expert Anthony Minnaar. Church missionaries and the apartheid government tried that time and again and failed.
The phenomenon of muti murder can only be tackled only if police accept the assumptions of the belief system and act accordingly.
- INDEPENDENT
Black magic murder in London
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