The world of business is ever-changing. One day we’re buying motorbikes with money, the next we’re paying with our parents’ bones.
Not your preferred method of payment? Against your morals? Well, it looks like this African man needs a reality check.
The gentleman, from Mozambique, found himself in the hands of the local police after going grave-digging.
Police detained a man, who has not been identified, in the northern Nampula province on suspicion of exhuming the bodies of his parents and an uncle.
The man was driven to dig up his parents’ grave after a businessman made him a bizarre promise: for the price of bones from people ‘who died without getting sick’, the man would be reimbursed with a motorcycle and more than $300 (£234) in cash, the MailOnline reports.
The gentleman said:
The boss told me to look for bones from people who died without getting sick. In exchange, you will get a motorbike. I went to a family cemetery, dug up the bones from my father’s, my mother’s and my uncle’s graves.
The man is reported to have travelled to meet the businessman, allegedly involved in the exploration of mineral resources, but he was not there.
According to a police spokesman, it’s the fifth incident of its kind this year, with most believed to be linked to witchcraft.
Belief in witchcraft is commonplace across the African continent – just recently, Gambian woman Matty Sanyang told The New York Times of being forced into a truck by soldiers and stripped, due to the fact she was ‘a witch’.
Witch hunts were a scarily regular occurrence during the reign of Yahya Jammeh, the former president who ruled for 22 years before fleeing abroad in 2017. Critics say he orchestrated the hunts as a ‘way to divide his country and consolidate power’.
However, commenting on witchcraft in Nigeria, Olabisi Deji-Folutile described it as a ‘complex issue’ with myths in need of deconstruction.
Writing on Sahara Reporters, Olabisi Deji-Folutile explained:
Already, different societal ills resulting from government’s failures at various levels are being attributed to the activities of witches and wizards by some folks in this country. There is the need to change this narrative.
It is disheartening how some Nigerians quickly conclude that spiritual powers are at work whenever they are faced with difficulties that they don’t seem to have answers for. Unfortunately, religious groups take advantage of this and make people go through many harrowing experiences all in a bid to finding solutions to problems that ought not to be in the first instance.
Rarely is there any city in this country where there are no fetish things otherwise called ‘sacrifices’ supposedly prepared to appease the gods, witches or wizards placed in some corners or major T-junctions.
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After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.