Witches and whales

What filthy, monstrous, perverted faith can drive a human being to drive a three-inch nail into a little girl's head? To set their own child on fire? Bury them alive, chain them up, starve them, beat them until their bones break?

I just watched the Channel 4 Dispatches programme Saving Africa's Witch Children, and it has to be one of the most distressing things I've ever watched. In short, certain extreme pentecostal churches in Nigeria have people convinced that millions of their own children are possessed by Satan and responsible for any misfortunes that befall, and as a result these "witches" and "wizards" are ostracised, tortured, and killed.

It is disturbing how a powerful blend of traditional beliefs and Christianity has people completely convinced - such that it's an embedded, unquestioned certainty - that the bad things that happen to you are never just down to chance. Deaths, illness, crop failures, accidents, miscarriages and all such stones upon life's road must have a cause, which is where the witch children come in.

What their parents and other adults do to them is horrifying, but based on a sincere belief that is able to flourish in an environment of ignorance, fear, and profound poverty. The people in this film who I truly wish could burn in the hell that they believe in and I do not are the pastors. With a few easy words they condemn children by the dozen, perhaps to physical torture and death, or the lucky ones who they "cure" to the lifelong mental torture of being feared and stigmatised. The children who are cared for in the shelter featured in the programme, having been abandoned or rescued, seem like the lucky ones, but they have to be helped through beleiving that they are witches and knowing they have been rejected by their families and communities.

Meanwhile, these pastors grow obscenely rich on the profits of torturing children to extract confessions and "exorcising" them - which a family will have to sell all it has to afford. So even if a child is successfully exorcised, it will be living in a family that has been pushed even more deeply into grinding, deadly poverty - something the programme didn't really explore so much, but every bit as pernicious as the other effects of these pastors' actions, I think. Oh yes, and at the top of the heap these operations are hardly unsophisticated - including making blockbuster gorefest films depicting exactly how possessed children eat human flesh and so on. Perhaps these pastors too are acting out of sincerely-held beliefs, but seeing them on the screen wealthy, complacent, and wilfully, happily ignorant or unmindful of the suffering of the children... At the very best they're guilty of failing to scrutinise their beliefs and the consequences of their actions, at the worst, well, there are no words strong enough.

It's distressing to see the terrible scars left on these children, worse to see their absolute, abject sadness. I swear it would melt a heart of stone to see Mary, five years old, cowering inside herself as an angry crowd beat on the metal walls of the shack she was sitting in with her eventual rescuers. They asked her name and what had happened, and then they asked if she thought she was a witch, and all she could bring herself to do was nod, once, slowly. They told her they didn't think she was a witch but a fine, beautiful girl, and they asked her what she wanted them to do to help her. It was a long time before she could find any words, and then she said she wanted to go to school.

There are many brave and good Nigerians trying to change the situation and care for these poor damaged children. There is a rescue centre and school, CRARN, where the children seem happy and full of life, able to smile again. There is also an English bloke called Gary, who went to Nigeria to do research on something else entirely and ended up founding a UK charity, Stepping Stones Nigeria, to support the centre. I have the sense of an ordinary person struggling with the chaos and horror of it all, maybe not getting everything right, but with immense courage and selflessness actually using his life to do something extraordinary.

At the end of the programme he took all 150 or so of the rescue children to the local state capital to protest directly to the governor that the state had not put the national children's rights act into law. At first it seemed like it was going to be a fiasco, but eventually he came out and the children sang to him and he spoke to them and seemed genuinely surprised that none of them lived with their families and had all been abandoned (and they are the tip of the iceburg), and he promised to enact the law, and visit them and see how he could help them. And so he did (at least on the legal side, they didn't say about the second). It's only a small step against the enormous problem of changing attitudes and culture, but it does at least mean that there is a valid legal means to prosecute abusers, and I don't think I've ever seen a more moving or a more effective example of the power of face-to-face protest.

I don't watch a lot of TV - I think this is the first time I've done more that flick through the channels since I got back from Mexico (yep, I do go for some upbeat viewing...). I was a bit startled by all the adverts that came up during the breaks for Chrismas foods and gifts and other crappy cut-price luxuries. The Stepping Stones website was down last time I tried, which I hope is because they're being overwhelmed by a deluge of donations. There are a thousand equally worthy causes, there always are, but as soon as it's up and running again I'll be donating the price of a few special seasonal gifts from WHSmith. If you happen to be wondering what to do with a few quid (and I'm sure you are, what with the economy being so outrageously healthy n'all), I think these people will make it go a long way. The Dispatches website has more information and more links, and you can watch some clips from the programme.

If you need cheering up after all that, I also caught some of BBC2's Oceans programme about the sea of Cortez. I found the programme itself incredibly smug and irritating and lacking in actual content (for the love of all that is holy, since when do wildlife programme's have a "cast"? Of people I mean, not animals), but the footage of a group of sperm whales socialising, taking time just to make physical contact, (an erect penis is involved, admittedly but only later when a male comes along to court them), is breathtakingly beautiful. You apparently have 42 days to watch it here (and if you're as easily annoyed as me you might want to skip to somewhere near the end).