Shockwaves are reverberating across Yorùbáland and the global Yorùbá diaspora following the sudden death of the Baba Ọba (King’s Father) of the famed Oyotunji African Village in South Carolina, USA. The late Baba Ọba, Lukman Arohunfale, a revered socialite and traditionalist, passed away under circumstances already sparking fierce controversy. His death comes just days after he publicly accused the newly installed Alaafin of Oyo, His Imperial Majesty Oba Akeem Adéyẹmọ Owoade, of allegedly ordering his courtiers to beat him mercilessly during a recent courtesy visit to the Oyo palace in Nigeria. In a widely circulated voice recording, the deceased recounted how what was meant to be a simple homage turned violent. Although the Baba Ọba had reportedly battled ill health in the past year, growing insinuations suggest that the alleged physical assault may have aggravated his condition, ultimately leading to his untimely death. The palace in Oyo recently denied that s...
A nurse has rescued a four-year-old boy who was tied to a tree for about thirty-six months and fed like an animal by his grandmother.
The community health nurse, who does not want her name mentioned, discovered the hidden horror last week at Balansa-Sanwaasa, a community in the Builsa North District, Ghana during a house-to-house measles-rubella vaccination campaign.
According to reports, every morning, before the old woman left for the farm or the market, she tied the little boy with a rope to a mango tree surrounded by shrubs and kept a plate of food by his side. Naked all the time and always at the mercy of the weather, the malnourished boy had no one to play with under the tree except the leaves and the insects that fell from the treetop.
Throughout the years he ought to have spent at a nursery school, he was in exclusive bondage. There he learned on his own how to scribble with his dehydrated fingers— not on paper or slate but on the soil within the area to which the black cord, which was always around his leg, restricted him.
The facts gathered by Starr News are that the boy’s mother was taken ill and died months after the boy was born. His father, too, disappeared even before his mother’s low-profile funeral was performed. Looking at the unfortunate circumstances that greeted the boy’s arrival into the world, the grandmother drew a rigid conclusion that the boy was a ‘chichiruk’— the name for a ‘spirit child’ in the locally spoken Buli dialect.
Those circumstances formed the basis of the horrifying treatment she dealt out to the boy. And she resisted every attempt by an outsider to liberate the boy from her shackles until the nurse encountered the boy and threatened a police arrest if she did not release the child at once.
“The grandmother believed it was the boy that killed the mother,” said Derrick Abakisi, a nurse and staff of Sandema-based Radio Builsa. “Besides, she was saying that she would not take care of somebody’s child only for the parents to come and take him away later. She also said the boy liked roaming and she always had a lot of work to do; so, the only way to prevent him from roaming was to tie him under a mango tree.”
At the time of the rescue, a prolonged hunger and a severe malnutrition already had hauled the boy to the edge of a shallow grave.
He looks so emaciated an x-ray machine is not needed to see some of his bones. He appears more or less like a mobile x-ray image or a famished orphan salvaged from a war-stricken third-world country.
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