Yesterday, 14 people were rounded up outside Durban, South Africa, and charged with cold blooded murder of a 60-year grandmother who the gang claimed was a witch.

Witch-cleansing has not yet come to America. We’re still in the witch advocacy stage, and like so often American subintellectual naivete will likely be subsumed violently in witchy acts before we loosen gun control laws further so we can eliminate the yet-to-be determined vermin.

How liberally sarcastic, Jim! Alright, alright, cut off the vigilantism at the pass, and bring on Helen!

Nigeria’s notorious witch hunter, Helen Ukpabio, is coming to Houston’s Liberty Gospel Church. A call has gone out far and wide to us afflicted to join “Lady Apostle” Helen in March. In order to attend her assembly we must own up to suffering from one or more of:

- untimely deaths in the family
- barren and “in frequent” miscarriages
- health torture
- chronic and incurable diseases

… or if you’re doing OK healthwise, you can also qualify as a sufferer of:
- bondage
- bad dreams

… and if you’re healthy, not abused and sleep like a kitty, perhaps things aren’t going so well at work:
- lack of promotion with slow progress
- facing victimization and lack of promotion

… or ok, you’re healthy, not abused, sleep like a kitty and have a secure job, but maybe you just blow that paycheck every Friday, you suffer from:
- financial impotency and difficulties

No? You actually save a bit of your paycheck. Praise the Lord! Well, undoubtedly you might still in your heart of heart suffer from:
- stagnated life with failures, or an
- unsuccessful life with disappointments

All the above are caused by “witches, mermaids or other evil spirits.”

And Helen has come to exorcize them from us! Hallelujah!

All levity aside, Helen is a monster. Her church in Nigeria has through bribery or who knows what (certainly nothing supernatural) been able to cause mayhem in less educated communities, has kidnapped children deemed being “witched” by parents, and yet has been exonerated by Nigerian magistrates. The account of this victim is heart-breaking.

My point is that something as bizarre as this finds a place anywhere there is sustained suffering when victims reach their wit’s ends. And as many of the suffering credentials Helen purports above show, it’s almost always economic suffering.

Yes there are many situations of witchcraft in Africa, but also in Appalachia and close to where I grew up in the Ozarks. Anywhere where hard work and earnest direction leads nowhere.

And it’s very enlightening to realize that Helen’s outreach has reached Texas. That place where so many jobs were created under Governor Oops.

It might be fun to poke at Helen, but it’s time to get rid of her. And not by some hocus pocos, but simple social compassion. Like, maybe, more stimulus? Jobs bill? I better stop. I feel that mermaid spirit creeping in.

Economic instability always, always produces political instability, and Nigeria as one of the leading world oil producers has economic graphs with low and high points that are remarkable for their spread, showing extreme potential and extreme fragility.

During the relatively prosperous years of most of the last several decades, the country has developed significantly. In fact its economic development sped right past its social and cultural development, and this led in its own way to serious corruption that only recently was considered its greatest challenge.

No more. Nigeria’s challenge right now is to avoid self-annihilation. And tiresome as it seems, it is the classic battle between Christians and Muslims. One which permits no compromise. Accept, or die.

I’ve spent my whole life in Africa watching religion tear apart Africa and mostly as a battle between the world’s two greatest religions, Christianity and Islam, and now I even have to enduring watching it creep into the daily life of America.

One wonders what would happen if youth’s greater perception of the impoverished theologies of the world took hold. How fast can we hope this will develop? Yet if suddenly, miraculously, religion were removed from the bombs of the world, would something else take its place, like ethnicity or poverty?

That’s a question way too complicated to think about right now. In Nigeria, Boko Haram, the underground, illegal but increasingly organized terrorist group proudly affiliated with al-Qaeda, takes responsibility for much of the violence, today. Sharia oriented, today they demanded all Christians leave the Muslim north.

And Nigeria is far more developed than neighboring countries like Niger and Chad which also suffer from Christian/Islam battles. Many Nigerian Muslim clerics are screaming for peace, recognizing that all Nigeria has gained economically is at stake. But the economic gains, the level of prosperity, may not have been enough fast enough to help these clerics get their messages accepted.

The fuel inflaming this always simmering religious battle is the economy. The President of Nigeria has begun to eliminate fuel subsidies, and the scale of the reaction is unprecedented, even in this turbulent country. Many think these will now be rolled back, but it may be too late.

Religious conflict, pricked by economic decline, is happening round the world. In the more developed west fortunately the tone of the religious conflict is moderated into a less violent social/cultural one. Instead of Jesus fighting Mohammed it’s abortionists fighting evangelicals, but in the end it’s all the same.

It’s intolerance, a battle empirically governed by those who have the money and power and are fearful of losing it. When will we ever learn…

Near the Hilton Hotel, Nairobi.

The weekend’s successful end threw into stark contrast the saner religious leaders in Africa and their woealmostbegone American counterparts. Most modern religious Africans – and there are many, Muslim and Christian and may other denominations – despise hocus pocus. Americans thrive on it.

It’s such a switch from the stereotype of not too long ago where yes the American tourist was anxious to see lions but really wanted pictures of a “village” because all the primitiveness and … well, hocus pocus, of Africa was so thrilling.

Maybe one day it was, but ain’t no more.

Now in all fairness, if you really head into the boondocks, somewhere akin to Backwater, Appalachia, you might certainly find some old woman who knows exactly what part of her dead frog will relieve you of an undesired suitor.

But modern, mostly young African churchgoers have no time for American hocus pocus, (even though with pleasure they take their money).

Harold Camping, the now famous Prophet of Doom, founded and headed Family Radio, an impressive network of 68 radio stations with hundreds of thousands of duped American followers. But what is less known is the many radio stations and other services he funded in Africa.

According to London’s Guardian newspaper Camping spent more than $100 million worldwide of his followers’ money on radio stations, billboards and posters, financed by the sale and swap of radio stations in the U.S.

I snapped a photo of a billboard in Nairobi and an even bigger one in Dar, placed at the most expensive place in all of Dar, the matutu and bus terminal.

Kenyan religious leaders and radio station owners, funded by Camping, distanced themselves from the doomsday prediction long ago. They placed displays ads in newspapers around Kenya starting a year ago when the billboards first appeared. The most common one read:

“We wish to inform our viewers, listeners, partners and well wishers that we are not in any way or form affiliated to the US evangelical Christian broadcaster Harold Camping or family radio.com.”

(Of course that isn’t true. They got their money from Camping. But then obtuseness is a religious art.)

Kenyan religious leaders then went on to say certainly there would be a Judgment Day, but don’t alter your schedule for the first week of June.

There is, of course, a serious side to this so far jocular story. While most Africans like most Americans recognized the ruse for what it was, some didn’t. And those like Camping who were to be the saved ended up the lost. But to be lost in Kenya or other parts of the impoverished world desperate for hope is a much worse situation than Harold Camping likely finds himself in this morning.

And that leads to another less jocular aspect of this story. WHY do Americans surrounded by the best tools in the world to discover truth believe in such incredible nonsense? Why is an American so incredibly gullible?

It’s Monday. A week before vacation stretches before us. We’ll leave that to another day.