Many women are shaved from head to toe. Others have to ingest a mixture of their own toenails, hair or menstrual blood. The curse ties them to the priest who performs it, who then transfers that power over them to the mamans in Nigeria who recruit them for the sex trade, and then those mamans give the power to the madams in Italy who will eventually pimp them.
JuJu is often incorrectly considered the same as voodoo, which is a form of “white magic” in many African cultures. Despite its sinister connotations in popular culture, voodoo is generally thought to be used to help people. JuJu, on the other hand, is strictly sinister and meant only to harm. Both practices play on superstitions and fear, which makes them harder to break since those under the spell tend to associate anything untoward that happens to them with the JuJu itself. When women on the street in Castel Volturno have any sort of psychological problem, the other women assume it is the JuJu curse at work.
The curse is usually administered in Nigeria before the women depart, but there are at least two witch doctors that perform the curse in Castel Volturno. One makes house calls to the connection houses where new arrivals and non-compliant women live. The other works out of the ground floor of one of the abandoned Coppola complex apartments next to the Catholic Church. The walls have been painted with scenes from Africa, including flowering trees, mountains and rivers. Piles of firewood, broken bottles and paper litter the concrete floor. There is a distinct smell of cat urine and dead animals.
Once I followed an African man on a bicycle as he carried a live chicken by the legs to the abandoned apartment, which is under heavy guard when the witch doctor is in. When he’s not there, all that’s left are remnants of his rituals, including stones around burnt areas of the concrete and paintings on the walls.
The man with the chicken was coming from a small African market run by an elderly Nigerian woman with platinum hair, whom her customers call Mamma Lucky but who introduced herself as Pamela to me the first time I went in. The tiny store smells like cardamom and pipe smoke and looks like a normal alimentari, or traditional Italian grocery store, with dusty boxes of pasta and tins of tomatoes on the low shelves near the front entrance.
An old-style deli case along the left wall is filled with closed plastic bags with African names scrawled on them in royal blue marker. Mamma Lucky generally sits behind an old wooden table at the back of the store that is not visible from the door. A bell tied with a red ribbon to the glass door chimes when someone walks in, giving her plenty of warning to shuffle things around on her table if she needs to.
Nigerians can buy any number of spices and prepared foods from their home country with euro or Nigerian naira. There are postcards from Nigeria taped to one wall and a faded and torn Nigerian flag on the other.
Mamma Lucky also sells little plastic relics of African gods and live reptiles and small mice that she keeps in shoeboxes with tiny air holes near her table and which can be used for the rituals. When the bell rings, the little rodents scurry around, making scraping sounds inside the cardboard boxes.
The larger animals are kept in little cages in a small storeroom in the back of the store, which has a door that opens up to the shared courtyard in the back. There is no cash register or receipt book on Mamma Lucky’s desk, just a drawer where she keeps the money in neat stacks. An elderly African gentleman who appears to be deaf often sits across from her at the worn wooden table. Sometimes others are there playing Eléwénjewé, a popular Nigerian card game that dates back to the slave-trade-era.
Mamma Lucky is friendly enough, but questions about the prostitution racket happening on the streets near the store are clearly not welcome. She says the girls are out there by choice, that they do it because “they like the sex – you know, it is very natural.”
The local undercover police officer who pointed me to Mamma Lucky’s store says she is a retired madam who still makes money off the racket. He says the witch doctors have often performed the curse in the back room of her shop, but since black magic is not illegal, there is nothing to be done to stop it. The cops watch her store to see who goes in and out, more to keep an eye on the status quo than to look for illegal activity.
It is no secret at all that Mamma Lucky sells relics and animals for the curse. Many of the girls who have been saved from the streets know of her store because she also sells products for women with black skin and hair, which are difficult to find in the Italian stores in Castel Volturno. I inquired once if she could help me witness someone taking the JuJu curse, but she said that there is no way to watch it without being pulled under the spell, unless I paid at least €400 to protect myself, maybe more when I got there. In fact, she said the price would vary and couldn’t be set ahead of time. The police officer advised me against it, warning that they couldn’t do much to protect me if I paid cash to be involved in something that could ultimately end badly. Curious as I was, I took his advice when he refused to go with me.
Women agree to take the JuJu curse because they truly believe in it. They know that they are promising fidelity, but they have no sense of the real brainwashing that awaits them. Women who swear to the curse believe they risk insanity, infertility or even death to themselves or their families if they break the bond. But none of the women who take the curse truly understand that they are really being shackled to a pimp. Most think that they are promising to be true to a generous sponsor who cares about them, not a sex trafficker ready to exploit them.
The omertà, or vow of secrecy, attached to the curse, similar to the code of secrecy invoked by the mafia, keeps women from talking about it. As all authors of propaganda know, keeping people silent will generally stop them from joining forces to revolt.
A key feature of the Nigerian sex trafficking networks is that women control women, making it a more difficult network to break because of the hold the madams have over the girls they effectively own. That may be why only women have had the most success saving them.
Princess Inyang Okokon is an exception to most of the known rules of sex trafficking. She came to Italy in 1999 on a commercial flight on the promise that she would work as a chef in a new restaurant featuring African cuisine near Turin. Like nearly all the women who come over, she thought that the woman who recruited and “sponsored” her was a Christian and a good person, not someone connected to a pimp who would exploit her. She was among the first wave of trafficked women coming to Italy, and she is amazed how many thousands have followed the same footsteps in the last twenty years, despite attempts to get the Nigerian government to do something to stop the trafficking of women out of the country.
Princess was trafficked to one of the first madams who moved from Castel Volturno to northern Italy, and she ended up in a small town called Asti, near Turin, which was emerging as a northern hub for sex trafficking in the early 2000s, catching men looking for sex while on ski holidays or in Turin on business.
She eventually escaped sexual slavery through the help of a local priest and an Italian lawyer named Alberto Mossino, who was in the process of setting up an NGO called PIAM Onlus after noticing an influx of young Nigerian women being forced into sexual slavery in the area.28 Alberto hadn’t had much luck until he met Princess, who was able to help him reach the women. On his own, he seemed too much like a client. But before she could help him she had to pay off her madam, which she did with Alberto’s help.
Their mission was noble. They offered a safe house for a few women at a time who wanted to escape. Princess knew exactly what they were up against and they hired guards who would keep the madams and their henchmen from stealing back their prized sex workers.
Princess and Alberto eventually fell in love and later married in what is truly a story of trust and faith. Together they have saved more than two hundred women off the streets around Turin.29 Now Princess and other women whom she and Alberto have saved try to go to meet the rescue boats when they arrive in the southern Italian ports to warn as many Nigerian women as they can that their sponsor is a pimp.
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sp; They have to work fast because the traffickers are waiting in the refugee camps to ferry the girls to their madams, often within the first week of their arrival. If they can convince the women to stay inside the camps or try to get them moved to safer places, they might be able to escape a life of forced sexual slavery. It is much harder to rescue them once they have met their madams.
If the young women have the name of their madam, Princess reports them to the police. But, more often, the girls are too naive and unaware to ask for a real name when they are promised a new life. The phone numbers they carry are often automatically forwarded to intermediaries or to the madams’ unlisted numbers, making them impossible to trace.
Nuns and women like Princess may be able to save a handful of women from sexual slavery, but the madams are the only ones who will truly be able to break the cycle. The madams are the most secretive and least understood in the entire racket. They act as both mother and pimp, as both jailor and savior. Many are also invariably victims of trafficking themselves who have found justice only in inflicting pain on others in revenge. Madams are women who were conditioned or bribed or coerced or somehow convinced to inflict the same horrendous pain they suffered on younger women. They are often still exploited, just now by higher-level criminals.
In 2012, a woman in her late forties known to be a madam was murdered and left to bleed to death on the beach in the old Coppola Village. She was naked and showed signs of sexual violence. She had cigarette burns on her thighs and vagina and she had torture injuries from the tip of a knife around her breasts and neck. According to the autopsy, she also had old scars where bits of her skin had been removed, likely from her own experience with the JuJu.
She bled to death from a wound to her neck that paralyzed her but did not kill her instantly. Her death was not mourned in Castel Volturno, but it caught the attention of police who could not identify signs of Camorra involvement. In the end, even though she was a madam known to police, she was also an undocumented migrant and finding justice for her death was not a priority. She is buried in the cemetery in Pozzuoli, in a section paid for by the state and designated for missing persons and those without families.
Police rarely chase madams, but in 2016, the anti-Mafia division of the state police (known as the DDA) conducted an operation called “Skin Trade” that uncovered one of the networks set up to get women out of the CARA Mineo camp and onto the streets.30 Among those arrested were Tina Nosakhare, twenty-eight, Faby Osagie Idehen, twenty-three and Cynthia Samuel, twenty-four, who worked with what were termed “connection men” inside the Mineo camp.
Also arrested were several women thought to be madams in and around Castel Volturno, including Gift Akoro, twenty-eight, who called herself Madam Pamela, and Toyin Lokiki, thirty-one, who called herself Madam Juliet. Among their possessions were relics and powders attached to the JuJu curse.
For me, the most interesting arrest was that of a woman called Irene Ebhoadaghe, forty-four, who called herself Mummy Shade, who was waiting for three young women who had arrived at Mineo in 2016, one of whom was Joy, the young woman whom I had met outside the CARA Mineo camp a month earlier.31 Joy was named specifically in the arrest warrant as a victim of trafficking even though, at the time we met, she had no idea that was her fate. She was given asylum and moved to northern Europe to join a relative after cooperating with the police.
I learned later that an undercover police officer who had been tipped off by one of the aid agencies working inside CARA Mineo had eventually picked her up on the road leading through the citrus groves and convinced her to help them catch the people who had trafficked her. Without her cooperation, the “Skin Trade” arrests would have likely never happened.
I caught up with her by email thanks to a local anti-trafficking advocate in Sicily who took an interest in her case and acted as a liaison with the court. She remembered our conversation outside CARA Mineo and she wrote back that she had been a fool.
“I was so stupid,” she wrote in her first email. “How could I have been so trusting? How could I have been so dumb?”
I wrote back to console her, telling her not to worry, that many women fell into the same trap.
She wrote again. “You knew about this. Why didn’t you tell me what was going to happen?”
I had tried, I thought, but obviously not hard enough.
“I asked you if you knew about the girls like you who had to be prostitutes,” I wrote in a feeble response, and then I admitted that I hadn’t known exactly what to do, that I didn’t want to cross the “ethical boundaries” of journalism. In fact, I was more concerned that I might be wrong or that, even if I was right, I had no idea how to help her. I was also selfishly scared that if I intervened, I might get caught up in some sort of retaliation act, that someone might harm me or my children for taking one of the madam’s precious “assets” off the streets.
She wrote back a third and final time. “You could have saved me.”
And she’s right. I should have, no matter what journalistic ethics or fear I thought were guiding me. But, like everyone else, I just turned away. I wrote back and said I was sorry. I never heard from her again despite countless attempts to reach her.
The “Skin Trade” operation that, thanks to Joy, netted arrests is a rare success. More often, the madams are not a priority and not on the most wanted lists, not least of all because they use false names. In many cases, they are well known to local authorities but they have been able to convince them to protect them, often through the gift of sex. They are masters at evoking fear from the black magic JuJu curse from the women they own, which is the primary reason Nigerian women do not leave the sex trafficking racket.
Superstition and witchcraft are a well-documented part of the Nigerian culture. In 2016, a toddler named Hope from the wealthy, oil-rich southern state of Akwa Ibom in Nigeria made headlines across the world when his family rejected him because they thought he was a witch.32 They left him to die on the streets of Uyo until Danish aid worker Anja Lovén, who runs the African Children’s Aid Education and Development Foundation orphanage for children who are thought to be witches, saved him from death. She was able to raise over a million dollars for his medical bills, which included surgery from birth defects and the drastic effect of malnutrition on his internal organs.
Not all the women who undergo the JuJu ritual in Nigeria are destined for sex trafficking abroad. Many fathers and husbands subject their daughters and wives to the curse as part of a culture of obedience in Nigeria. Others volunteer to take it to ward off bad luck or infertility. Rituals have long been used in Edo state as a form of manipulation between men and women in marriages and between parents and children in families, but in the 1980s, black magic priests in Nigeria started working more commonly with human traffickers and extended the reach of the curse.33
The curse is a daunting obstacle for those who try to save women from sexual slavery. The nuns, like all devout Catholics, are well equipped with spiritual tools to fight off the devil, but they have had to tailor the standard Catholic teachings against evil to ward off specific JuJu magic in their struggle for the souls of the Nigerian victims of trafficking. The sisters must not only convince the women that they will be safe if they leave their madams, they must also convince them that the JuJu curse won’t follow them.
One of the reasons the Catholic nuns have had success getting women to stay off the streets is easily due to the nuns’ familiarity with fighting evil. Many of the women who are trafficked are Christian, so they can be helped with the Bible. But most aren’t Catholic, which does create an obstacle since nuns are trained in the Catholic catechism. The nuns often ask the women to pray for salvation against the curse, but letting go of the fear that their madams will come back for them, or that they will be killed, is almost impossible, which is why so many still feel they must pay off their bogus debts even after they are saved.
Even after they escape the street, the hardest part is trying to convince the woman that the
curse won’t follow them. Father Hyginus Obia is a Nigerian Catholic priest at the Santa Maria del Monte Verginella church near the main train station in Naples.
The church’s delicate white facade seems out of place between two oppressive ochre colored apartment blocks. Even the square bell tower looks as if it has been stuffed between the buildings, jutted up against someone’s apartment, as if no one knew where else to put it.
During the week, the narrow street in front of the church is lined with tables where vendors sell trinkets, household goods, second hand books and “Made in China” plastic toys under faded umbrellas. On Sundays, the tables give way to badly parked cars and scooters.
The church is known locally as the “ethnic” or “black” church because most of the parishioners are African. On a blisteringly hot Sunday morning in July 2016, I sat in on one of the masses. The men wore suits and the women wore colorful African dresses with matching headdresses. Despite the stifling heat and lack of air conditioning, the church was full and the mass lasted well over an hour. Afterwards, everyone went up to the altar for a group picture with Father Obia. I went back several months later and the same thing happened, including the photo shoot at the end. It was as if just surviving another week was enough reason to celebrate and commemorate the event.
On my second visit, after the photo session was finished and everyone had shaken hands and thanked Father Obia, he told me that there aren’t many Nigerian women in the parish. They are hard to convince to come, he says. Even those who have escaped sex slavery feel embarrassed and looked down upon by the other Africans who attend mass. Most of the parishioners are from Ghana and former Italian colonies Ethiopia and Eritrea. Father Obia is from Nigeria. He trained in Belgium and Rome before coming to Naples. He works together with Father Tonino Palmese, the local priest in charge of Neapolitan charities for the diocese and an ardent anti-Mafia champion for the local community.
Roadmap to Hell Page 9