Cultural Conundrums: Preserving Traditions While Upholding Human Rights

Since the beginning of my sociopolitical awakening, I have been irrevocably swayed by the argument that seeks to preserve and extol culture in the face of vacuous homogenization and synthetic mass production. In the hard-line games of power politics, however, this notion has long been forgotten, cast aside as a “soft” issue, unimportant in the arsenal of statecraft and industrialization. Culture was the argument of the weak and marginalized idealists who dreamed of a just, diverse and representative system of governance. And so, with zero appreciation for culture and its associates, the Bush Administration launched a myopic war into Iraq. From the innumerable tragedies and immeasurable flaws that followed we can draw the poignant lesson that culture and identity politics are not only part of the conversation, but play a pivotal and crucial role in international relations. Beyond the realization that understanding a people’s history, religion, traditions and values is as serious and necessary as geopolitical strategy, the appreciation for the beauty that every culture offers is becoming widely accepted throughout global civil society. Last November I had the privilege of being invited to participate at the annual SCUSA Conference held in West Point. As students from all over the world gathered to discuss global challenges and propose innovative solutions, we met several panelists who offered their own insight in the hopes of inspiring our work in the days to come. Dr. Azzam Karam of the UNFPA spoke on this issue in particular. I must admit that her argument troubled me deeply. Culture, she said, must be absolutely, unflinchingly, and totally respected. She made the point, for example, that genital mutilations, common in many African societies, are a right of passage for pubescent girls and cannot be replaced by any other ritual. It seems that, in our well-intended desire to preserve identities and empathize, we have somehow come to guise what can be described as nothing less than an atrocity in the regalia of culture, where it becomes untouchable and unquestionable. While craft, music, food, ritual and oral tradition must not be allowed to die out but be celebrated and perpetuated, we must all nevertheless learn to be discerning and condemn those aspects of culture that do not enrich, but humiliate, persecute and murder the innocent.

In this post, I will focus on one example of the problematics of culture. On March 18 Amnesty International revealed that an estimated 1,000 people in the Gambia had been imprisoned and tortured by paramilitary “witch hunters.” Amnesty suggested that the government has been laying charges of witchcraft against opposition members, rounding them up and forcing them to drink “hallucinogenic concoctions to confess witchcraft.” While news of government sponsored witch hunts is novel (though not surprising, since President Jammeh has also claimed to have found an herbal cure for HIV/AIDS), witch hunts that target children - even babies - have been occurring in Nigeria for some time now without Western advocacy groups taking notice. This long-held belief in witchcraft or "juju" has been manipulated and transformed by fear and ignorance into a powerful weapon against human rights. West Africa is a land of rich traditions and a societal fiber so fiercely solid that it has survived in spite of brutal civil wars, military dictatorships and unrivaled poverty. People guard their history and instill values and traditions in the younger generations, that they may be passed on and never forgotten. A belief in witchcraft is not new to this region. In recent years, however, children have become victims of their communities’ fear and the scapegoats for endemic poverty, illness, death and are even blamed for causing droughts and poor harvests (see above image). In the Niger Delta region of Nigeria this has become astonishingly widespread; with an estimated 15,000 children targeted in the Akwa Ibom province alone. Many blame the arrival of fundamentalist Evangelical groups to the region for these unprecedented witch-hunts. One of the country’s wealthiest preachers, Helen Ukpabio has even produced a film End of the Wicked in which children become possessed by demonic spirits and are pictured being “inducted into covens, eating human flesh and bringing chaos and death to their families.” She has also authored a book instructing parents to look for warning signs of possession such as crying during the night, fevers and poor health which are commonplace throughout the impoverished nation. Ignorance and hunger, if fueled by fear are an explosive combination. When this is exploited by preachers who charge up to $400 dollars for performing excruciating exorcisms (over half of the country’s population lives on less than $1 a day) we have a corrupt structure of abuse that must be called into question and destroyed.

Reports of children being mutilated, burned, stabbed with nails and savagely beaten by their own parents are easy to come by. Children who are accused of witchcraft are ostracized from their communities and often have nowhere to go. “Many of those branded "child-witches" are murdered - hacked to death with machetes, poisoned, drowned, or buried alive in an attempt to drive Satan out of their soul.” In a documentary, reporters from the Guardian taped the confession of a man calling himself “the Bishop” who claimed to have killed over one hundred and ten witches (he has since been brought to trial). Last week, a seven month old girl and her ten year old sister were accused of being witches and banished from their town. Some groups like the Child Rights and Rehabilitation Network (CRARN) and Stepping Stones have created shelters for the brutalized and abandoned children whom they can find (see above image). Governments must of course be held accountable, although corrupt regimes are seldom responsive to such internationalist demands. More importantly, however, the religious institutions promoting this insidiousness must be reached and called to recant and lead believers down a truly righteous path that respects the life of children. Local religious leaders hold an authority which no distant government can counter, and therefore are the cornerstone of any coherent solution.

It is unseemly for me to imagine mothers who burn and mutilate their own infants, and fathers who douse their sons with petrol and set them aflame. It is equally difficult for me to believe that these people act out of hatred. The weight that they bear in such extreme poverty, with death looming around every bend is too much for any person to endure; and so they turn to spiritual leaders who offer them a tangible answer to their suffering, exploit their lack of education and through the unmatched fear wielded by the power of religion drive these men and women, who are themselves victims of perverse systemic violence to commit the unthinkable. Advocacy groups such as Amnesty must look beyond the ranks of government and into the quotidian realms in order to also question and shine a light on the plight of these children. Tragically, some traditional beliefs are being twisted and turned criminal, not being revered and imparted. While we must strive as determinedly as ever to preserve the things that are vanishing and uplift cultural identities against the monolith of modernity, we must also question and sound an alarm when death and destruction come in their place.