Nigeria police hold 'robber' goat

Have you laughed yet today? Or at least grinned? Oh, dear, I did all of the above after reading the report in Nigeria that a car thief took shapes of different animals in order to carry out his nefarious duty. A Nigerian vigilante group arrested a goat for planning to steal a car! How does that sound? Shape shifter not in fiction, but in raw factual reality, or at least, what is supposed to be factual reality.

I am taken back to my days growing up in my village, Orji, near Enugu, hearing and believing such tales. I used to believe, as did my parents, that human beings could take the shapes of animals. Some powerful juju man could transform you into a snake, a goat or a fly. This is however a fraction of the larger mythological world that strongly shapes the average African mind. It is the belief that magic controls African existence as much as the "pursuit of of happiness" does the average American. This is further exacerbated by the the spread of the message of miraculous healing among different Christian denominations, including Western educated priests, who rather than enlighten people, claim to possess the power to counter the evil of juju doctors. That, of course, implies granting the existence of these magical powers.

A number of people have been lynched for allegedly stealing some other person's vital parts such as scrotum, by mere looking at the potential victim.

I am not subscribing to what some eighteenth century philosophers said about Africans: being prelogical, prescientific, but given the abundance of such instances, I am often tempted to rethink this assertion. Or at least to believe that African intellectuals have not yet undertaken as much effort as the European Enlightenment thinkers such as Immanuel Kant did, to encourage Africans to embrace critical, scientific thinking. I heard sometime ago that a certain South African leader believed that you could avoid contracting AIDS if you took a quick shower shortly after having sex with a potentially HIV positive person. Good luck, bro.
This is of course, no longer funny when such persons occupy policy-making positions. Not funny indeed.

By the way this is the LINK to the original news. Enjoy.