SHOCKING: Abuja Communities where Twins are Born for Sacrifice

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On a fact finding mission, Chineme Okafor journeyed into some remote villages around Abuja where twins are sacrificed to gods because it is considered a taboo to be born a twin in such communities, though the Scottish missionary to Nigeria, late Mary Slessor led a crusade that stopped the barbaric act decades ago
Away from the hub of civilisation in Abuja, a neigbouring dry and dusty community on a string of semiarid topography within Kwali and Kuje area councils has become infamous for its centuries-old traditional practice of killing twins and children whose mother dies at childbirth.

The Bassa-Komo-Gbajingala indigenous clan in Abuja will no doubt be on a very close public scrutiny for a long time to come. The agrarian clan with a lifestyle built around subsistence farming, fishing and hunting has a cultural belief that loathes multiple births by its women just as the death of a woman during childbirth naturally puts the life of the baby bornby such women on ‘death row’.

Last Friday this reporter walked through the various communities where the practice still exist for several hours and truly there are signs that the birth of a twins in these community is a risky adventure by its women as it is considered a bad omen. Likewise, the death of a woman at childbirth exposed such children born alive to the practice that makes them a sacrifice to a god generally referred to as Tuwa.

Though the villagers claimed the practice as discovered had persisted for centuries and was allegedly stopped in 2006, the CMF Coordinator said he rescued twins from being killed in the community only last November.

Without prejudice, our source visited the closed community such as Tubudu along with the North-central Coordinator of the Christian Missionary Foundation (CMF), Olusola Stevens, whose decades of missionary expeditions in rural hinterlands across Nigeria has been a mixture of joy and pain accepted by him and his wife with warm hearts of contentment.
Albeit doubts of such claims, Stevens whose efforts have seen about 49 children that were once labelled “evil” saved at various times from 1999 up until as recent as November 2012, from such practices, proved extremely useful in getting first-hand narrative of what transpired in the villages and thought-provoking story of a tribe’s “ignorant” disposition to its offspring.

Discovering the Practice
Discovering the practice amongst the Gbajingala clan did not come so easy for the CMF which was founded in 1982 by the late tele-evangelist, Bishop Idahosa.
As narrated by Stevens, it took him and his wife about 18 years of constant investigation to discover thatthe clan was frequently engaged in deliberate murder of its twin offspring as well as children it considers to have come through questionable circumstances like the death of a woman at childbirth.

According to a narrative that was confirmed by an indigenous missionary who is locally known as Gambo but has now taken up a new name reflecting his voluntary acceptance of the Christian faith, we gathered that the clan had often sacrificed its offspring to the god, Tuwa for bountiful harvest from their farms. It was when an indigenous woman refused to give-up her child for such sacrifice, that the long-held communal secret was revealed as she gave outher baby to Stevens and his wife for custody to help save the life of the young girl.
Gambo whose name translates to mean a male child after twin birth, also said that while children were regularly sacrificed on false charges that they were responsible for the death of their mothers during childbirth that the clan equally experienced frequent mortality deaths occasioned by the practice of traditional birth method. He indicated that there could be possibilities in proportionatedeath and burial of infants with their dead mothers.

“Because the women often die at childbirth due to traditional delivery modes and following the wide beliefand practise of killing and burying babies that come through the dead mothers, there is every reason to believe that the practice is still predominant in some of the villages amongst the clan,” Stevens contributed, prompting further questions on the status of such children.

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