Voldemort is an African

A guy was arrested last week with a bucket of body parts – an old man’s head, a baby’s torso, and arms and legs from another infant.

These were to be sold for muti.

People in Europe and America will be shocked by such things, but here in South Africa the story was on page 5 of the paper.

In Angola, albinos are hunted because sangomas – witchdoctors – pay big money for their limbs, which are believed to hold magical qualities.

The Oxford dictionary defines muti as a Zulu word that means traditional African medicine or magical charms. It specifically means African medicine using body parts.

A report by Under The Same Sun reveals that if the body parts are taken from a live victim, it is believed the screams enhance the muti’s effectiveness or magical qualities.

Muti is said to solve anything from money troubles to health issues, and body parts are traded across African borders for large sums of cash.

Muti is big business.

This evil underworld is, obviously, incredibly secretive; but earlier this year it was discovered that “you get just R10,000 for coming with a person”, Simon Fellows, project manager for the Mozambique Human Rights League, told the Argus in March this year of information received from the sister-in-law of a victim in KZN.

The sister-in-law said that the person’s eyes, nipples, clitoris and tongue were removed.

"Based on the accounts we received, there is internal trafficking and cross-border trafficking, but it is difficult to establish where the body parts are going. There is talk in South Africa that witchdoctors come in from outside." Fellows said.

There is a UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, but this barely covers organ trafficking. The Under The Same Sun report states that “in essence the protocol prevents human trafficking in the event that the victim is alive and the purpose of movement of that victim is to remove body parts. The protocol does not cover the issue of movement of body parts that have been removed without any… coercive elements…”

This problem does not have a legal solution. At the risk of sounding ethnocentric, this can only be solved through a massive change in cultural beliefs, and with so much anti-Western sentiment on this continent it is not something overseas human rights organisations can tackle – the change must come from within.