LAST week I came across a rather disturbing article on various news websites that in Nigeria, a Danish aid worker had rescued a desperately emaciated two-year-old boy who could barely stand.
The boy was abandoned by his family, who accused him of being a witch, according to the aid worker who found him in Uyo, southeast Nigeria.
Danish aid worker Anja Ringgren Loven says the boy, whom she calls ‘Hope’, had been living on the streets and surviving on scraps from passersby.
When she found him, she says, he was riddled with worms and had to have daily blood transfusions to revive him.
Writing on her facebook page as she appealed for funds to pay for food, medical bills and schooling, Loven claims: “Thousands of children are being accused of being witches and we’ve both seen torture of children, dead children and frightened children.” 
Loven is the founder of African Children’s Aid Education and Development Foundation, which she created to rescue children labelled as witches.
Posting on her facebook page on February 12, Loven says: “Hope is getting so much better.
“Already gaining a lot of weight and looking so much more healthy.
“Now we only need him to talk.
“But that will come naturally when he is out of the hospital and starting his life among all our children.
“Children become stronger together.”
It is a criminal offence in Akwa Ibom State, where Hope was found, to label a child a witch, but the practice persists.
Belief in witchcraft thrives worldwide.
Human rights organisation Amnesty International has said in 2009, about
1 000 people accused of being witches in Gambia were locked in detention centres in March and forced to drink a dangerous hallucinogenic potion.
In 2014, a report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees stated that human rights violations were taking place in Nepal, leading to violence against women, children, disabled people and the elderly.
In 2010, CNN reported on the plight of children in Nigeria who undergo frightening exorcisms and are sometimes killed by their own families.
One five-year-old boy, named Godswill, had been accused of being a witch and neglected, beaten and ostracised by his own family and community.
At the time, an Akwa Ibom State official acknowledged some cases, but said reports of child-rescues were exaggerated.
Sam Ikpe-Itauma, of the local Child’s Rights and Rehabilitation Network, which rescues children like Godswill, told CNN: “Once a child is said to be a witch, to be possessed with a certain spiritual spell capable of making that child transform into, like, cat, snake, viper … a child could cause all sorts of havoc like killing of people, bringing about diseases, misfortune into family.”
Ikpe-Itauma doesn’t believe in witchcraft and tries to raise awareness in communities gripped by hysteria.
He believes poverty is a key factor that drives the belief in witchcraft.
He says: “Poverty is actually a twin sister to ignorance.”
Very often we complain about how Africa is depicted as a savage place ravaged by war and drought and in need of the whiteman’s intervention to bring relief.
We point out that there are other stories that positively reflect the continent and its development.
My problem with the Nigerian report is that it reinforces the notion that Africa is the ‘dark continent’ and Africans are so backward they believe a three-year-old is capable of harming entire communities through witchcraft.
What image are we presenting as a continent at a time when the rest of the world is moving forward?
Why do we continue to drag ourselves back to the dark ages?
Are we as a people not validating the racists and superiority mentalities of Westerners that Africans should be treated as children who need massive hand-holding and strong guidance?
Surely, how can a whole community provide a Danish woman with a platform to tell the ‘civilised’ world the story of a continent where people are so gripped by fear they leave helpless and harmless children to die for absurd reasons?