Human Muti: Ritual Killings And Organ Harvesting For Luck

ms-mutipurchase300.jpgIn 2005, an Australian news agency put together a lengthy news report on Sangomas, or traditional healers in Southern Africa, and the folk medicine called muti. For the most part, muti is all about roots and herbs, asking for help from ancestors, and good luck charms. But there’s also a vicious minority of practitioners who use human parts, usually harvested from victims while they’re still alive because the pain is believed to make the medicine more powerful.

Around the 8:55 mark is a horrible story of Peter Sello, a child who lured into an ambush, possibly by a neighbor who is a local healer, then “harvested” by a group of attackers. He was found still alive, but missing several body parts and part of his brain, and later died.

The Independent has an article about muti and ritual killings from August 2004, centered around the attack on the Sello child:

How the body parts are used varies with what customers want to achieve. They are eaten, drunk or smeared over the ambitious person. Various parts are used for different purposes. A man who had difficulty in producing children killed a father of several children and used his victim’s genitals for muti. In another case, a butcher used a severed human hand to slap each of his products every morning before opening as a way of invoking the spirits to beckon customers.

Mathews Mojela is the head teacher at Sello’s primary school. He has worked in rural areas for nearly a quarter of a century and says muti is founded in the archaic belief that there is only a limited amount of good luck around. If one wants to increase his wealth or luck, then it should come at another’s expense.

The screaming of a child while his body parts are being chopped off is also regarded as a sign calling customers to the perpetrator’s business, Mr Mojolela said. It is also believed that magical powers are awakened by the screams. Eating or burying the body parts “capture” the desired results. Robert Thornton, an anthropology professor at the University of Witswatersrand in Johannesburg , who has done research in traditional healing, says children like Sello are targeted because it is believed that the power of the virgin is greater than that of a sexually active adult.

The main motivating idea is what Professor Thorntorn describes as “symbolic logic”, the idea that another person’s penis will strengthen the perpetrator’s, or that the perpetrator’s far-sightedness will be improved by devouring the victim’s eyes. Blood is thought to increase vitality.

Wikipedia’s entry on muti links to more recent ritual killings and evidence of harvested body parts—like the story from December 2006 of the discovery of human body parts found in the walls of a beauty salon that was still being built:

Police armed with sledge hammers, angle grinders and chisels hacked at the ash brick walls of Ngoveni’s salon after two sniffer dogs indicated several areas – which two State witnesses had earlier pointed out – from which the scent of rotting flesh emanated.Ncube’s mother collapsed in hysterics as police began pulling chunks of cement, mixed with what seemed to be human flesh, from the broken walls.

Police filled three evidence bags with the dark brown and black chunks.

[tags]muti,ritual killings,religion,south african,africa,zulu,sangoma,murder,organ harvesting[/tags]

Posted on January 16, 2008 by Chris Walters |
 
Filed Under Crime • Places • Religion • Ugly Humanity 

 

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