AFRICAN ODDITIES
Viral video purports to show a ‘mermaid’ on an African beach, while one brave man takes a stand against superstition
KENYAN MERMAID
In mid-April, a video claiming to show a real beached mermaid went viral on TikTok and other social media platforms, initially in Kenya, and then across the rest of Africa. The video shows what appears to be a creature with the upper body of a human child and the lower body of a fish lying on a beach, still alive and sporadically twitching, surrounded by curious onlookers. Most posts claimed it was filmed in Kwale, Kenya, but police there swiftly stepped in, saying: “Reports indicating a mermaid has been spotted in Kwale are fake.”
In fact, the first posts, made on 6 April, claimed that the creature had been filmed in Muizenberg, South Africa, and later there were also claims it was in Uganda. Some people have speculated that the scene shows a child who has been partly swallowed by a fish, rather than a mermaid, but none of the crowd seem to show any concern for the child, and the two bodies appear seamlessly joined rather than one being stuck in the mouth of the other. South African police also poured cold water on the story, saying “Please note that Muizenberg [police force] has no reports of a mermaid that was washed up by the beach nor reports of a child bitten by a fish.”
Investigating the video, the long-running fact checking site Snopes.com said: “This video is a digitally altered composite featuring genuine footage of a dying fish and digitally added images of a child or doll. In fact, upon close examination of this footage, you can see that the sand loses texture as the ‘mermaid’s’ arms move across the beach. At one point, the fingers even disappear, indicating that the ‘mermaid’s body’ was digitally inserted into this footage”. snopes.com, 12 Apr; coasttocoastam.com, 13 Apr 2022 .
GBENGA VS JUJU Meanwhile, in Nigeria, 24-yearold Gbenga Adewoyin is fighting a one-person war against superstitious belief. Staking out markets around the country armed with just a megaphone and a knife, at each stop he announces: “Anyone that can provide any evidence for the existence of the supernatural, be it juju or voodoo magic, will be offered 2.5m naira [£4,650]”; his knife is for anyone who believes that juju can make them invulnerable to blades.
Belief in traditional spirits and the accompanying juju are strong in Nigeria, with many people holding them alongside their official religion of Christianity or Islam, accepting the idea that witches can shapeshift into cats, or that charms can protect bare skin from sharp blades or cause money to appear in a suitably charmed clay pot.
Adewoyin has his work cut out for him. Dr Olaleye Kayode, a senior lecturer in African Indigenous Religions at the University of Ibadan, has said that money-making juju rituals using human body parts really work, explaining that the money doesn’t just appear out of thin air but the notes “are gotten by spirits from existing banks.” Jude Akanbi, a lecturer at the Crowther Graduate Theological Seminary in Abéòkúta, says “This ability to transform yourself to [a] cat, to disappear and reappear, these things are possible within the dynamics of traditional African religion. Although [it] sounds illogical, like old wives’ tales, however from what we have seen and heard, these things are possible.”
Adewoyin, though, is doing three national tours, offering his cash prize, crowd-funded via Twitter, to anyone who can publicly demonstrate juju powers, saying: “If the money ritual worked, we would have seen a massive inflation in the economy for the decades that we have believed in it.” Recently there were banner headlines and widespread horror after three men allegedly killed a 17-year-old girl in Ogun state and used her body parts in a money-making ritual. Adewoyin denounces people who carry out killings to obtain body parts for such rituals saying: “I feel horrible to see young people engage in these ritual killings.” He is concerned that such murders are now a common feature of Nigerian society, with regular media stories reporting them, accompanied by gruesome images of the mutilated corpses.
So far, no one has successfully claimed Adewoyin’s cash, and Nigeria’s Information Minister Lai Mohammed has blamed Nigerian “Nollywood” movies and social media for the upsurge in juju killings. Adewoyin believes the problem is much deeper and that the education system needs reform to persuade people that juju and the supernatural are not real. “For a reasonable human being to believe that a human with all his biological components can turn into a yam or banana is illogical, and worrisome,” he said. BBC News, 21 Mar 2022.