The spotlight has been shed on poor Nigerians who are sold by their parents, cursed by juju spells and then trafficked across the seas to Europe. Grace, a victim of sex trafficking in Nigeria’s poverty-blighted Benin City - where women are routinely sold like cattle
N*ked and terrified in the sweltering gloom of a Nigerian voodoo shrine, the young woman knelt as a chanting witch doctor slashed her with a razor-sharp blade. As blood dripped from her arm on to the altar, she was made to pledge a black magic oath to the human traffickers who had led her there. Speaking in a safe house, the pretty 22-year-old, named Grace, told The Sun:
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“The traffickers told me I was now a prostitute — their property.
“They told me it would cost them £18,000 to send me to Europe and that I would have to sleep with men until I paid off my debt.
“They said if I ran away, the spirits would catch me and drive me insane or kill me. I was very frightened.”
“They told me it would cost them £18,000 to send me to Europe and that I would have to sleep with men until I paid off my debt.
“They said if I ran away, the spirits would catch me and drive me insane or kill me. I was very frightened.”
For here, in southern Nigeria’s poverty-blighted Benin City, women are routinely sold like cattle. A lucrative 21st Century slave trade is flourishing, and Britain is both a destination for those enslaved — and a base for traffickers.
So it is little wonder that Theresa May — who has made fighting international sex slavery a personal crusade — insisted on meeting victims as she toured Africa this week.
At a Salvation Army shelter in Nigerian capital Lagos, the Prime Minister told two trafficking survivors as The Sun looked at:
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“There are terrible people who do these things.
"We have to not only support survivors like yourselves but also make sure we catch the traffickers and make sure others don’t suffer the way you have.”
"We have to not only support survivors like yourselves but also make sure we catch the traffickers and make sure others don’t suffer the way you have.”
In dirt-poor Benin City, the opulent mansions of traffickers tower over their neighbors’ rusty corrugated iron shacks. Some impoverished parents in the teeming city sell their daughters into prostitution, colluding with traffickers and witch doctors to curse the young women with voodoo spells — known as juju in West Africa — to ensure their obedience.
Some juju priests take nail and hair clippings, knickers and sanitary towels as offerings to vengeful slave goddess Ayelala.
Another young mother at the safe house run by Catholic nuns, biology student Peace, 25, told me:
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“The juju man took hair from all over my body, including my pubic hair, and put it on the shrine.
“I drank a potion and swore an oath. The traffickers said that instead of getting a job as a babysitter in Europe, I was to be a prostitute.
"They said that if I didn’t pay back my £2,300 smuggling fee, the spirits would drive me mad.”
“I drank a potion and swore an oath. The traffickers said that instead of getting a job as a babysitter in Europe, I was to be a prostitute.
"They said that if I didn’t pay back my £2,300 smuggling fee, the spirits would drive me mad.”
Like tens of thousands of others, Grace and Peace joined the trail of tears across the Saharan wastelands to Libyan capital Tripoli on the Mediterranean coast, where flimsy vessels would ferry them to Europe and safe havens in Britain and elsewhere. It was a journey by bus and pick-up truck that almost destroyed these vivacious and intelligent young women.
Taxi driver’s daughter Grace said:
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“The traffickers left us hungry and thirsty as we crossed the desert. "In one place the only water to drink was from an oasis with a body floating in it. “When I got to Libya I was beaten and raped multiple times. "I fell pregnant and have no idea who my child’s father is.”
However, as with many women like Grace, her imagined comfortable new life in Europe never got beyond the barbarities she suffered in anarchic Libya. Time and again, traumatized returnee migrants I spoke to in Nigeria told of being bought like livestock on the smuggling route.
Mum-of-four Rosemary Ubogu, 28, now an anti-slavery campaigner, saw her best friend die of thirst in the Sahara.
She recalled:
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“I was sold three times in Libya to different men. I had to go with them. If you argue, you die.”
Computer engineer Charles Nweze, 27, left Nigeria last year for the UK, dreaming of studying fibre optics.
His smugglers told him his near-£1,300 travel fee would see him in London in a fortnight. Instead, he was double-crossed by his traffickers in Libya and sold as a slave.
Showing me a picture of his bloodied, beaten face from his time working in a Libyan car wash, he said:
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“I had to buy my freedom from a Cameroonian man who had bought me. It’s normal in Libya, it’s just a business to them.”
A big business, whose tentacles reach Britain.
Last year NHS nurse Josephine Iyamu was arrested at Heathrow returning from her home in Benin City.
Police found 30 SIM cards linking her to German sex slaves — plus a list of items needed for juju ceremonies.
Iyamu, 51, a Liberian-born British citizen, was officially earning £14,500 a year as an agency nurse. Yet she splashed out on a £400,000 home in Bermondsey, South London, a rambling £200,000 mansion in Benin City, complete with servants’ quarters, and had a taste for £700 designer shoes.
Known on Benin’s streets as Madam Sandra, she was, in fact, a trafficking kingpin who enslaved five women aged 24 to 30. In a juju ceremony, the women were beaten naked with bloody chicken carcasses and forced to eat chicken hearts, drink blood containing worms and to swear oaths.
Later they would have to pay back “travel fees” of up to £33,000, sleeping with as many as 15 men a day at a German brothel. Madam Sandra, 51, took snippets of her victims’ hair and told them: “You have now eaten from the devil and if you do not pay, the devil will kill you.”
Last month Lyamu was jailed for 14 years after becoming the first person to be convicted under Modern Slavery Act laws passed in 2015, allowing prosecutions of British citizens for segxwal trafficking which has taken place overseas.
A video of the juju priest reversing the curse was sent to her victims in Germany.
Nigerian sex slaves have been found in brothels in London, Cardiff, and Birmingham.
This year Mrs. May found a perhaps unlikely ally in her fight against slavery in Ewuare II, the Oba of Benin — the Edo people’s traditional and spiritual ruler.
In March he summoned 500 juju priests to his palace and warned of divine vengeance if they carried on aiding trafficking. He told them:
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“Whoever does it from today will face our ancestors’ wrath.”
A 50-strong mob of Nigerian prostitutes who have been mugging British tourists in Magaluf, Majorca, this year is also said to be under a juju curse. At a popular juju shrine in Benin City dedicated to goddess Ayelala, chief doctor Godwin Okeh, 48, claims he can cure diabetes, strokes, paralysis, and madness.
The witch doctor insists he never practices black magic to aid traffickers.
Seated on a throne beneath a statue of the deity, he told me: “The Oba is our father.
"Those who do not obey the Oba will perish.”
Britain has pledged £16million to Nigeria’s Stamping Out Slavery programme in a nation said to have more than 1.3million slaves. Mrs May said Britain is also working with France and Italy to end Saharan smuggling routes.
Speaking exclusively to The Sun, she said:
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“This is the buying and selling of individuals into slavery, something most people thought had been eradicated 200 years ago. And yet it’s going on today.
“We have to raise awareness so that people understand that this is not a route to a wonderful life and a great job "It’s a route to a life of misery.”
“We have to raise awareness so that people understand that this is not a route to a wonderful life and a great job "It’s a route to a life of misery.”
Some names have been changed to protect victims.
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