Nigerian fleeing relatives’ curses to avoid becoming a shaman. For the Commission, he was not credible Here we are. There is everything. There is the shaman capable of killing anyone who stands against him, the son destined to succeed him, the asthma attacks, the spiritual powers. There are also the family evils, the unexpected deaths, the Mediterranean Sea capable of “constituting an obstacle to the evil spirit.” Migration. It may sound like a quaint story, and perhaps it really is, but this is exactly how a Nigerian man in 2018 was granted a residence permit for humanitarian reasons by the Court of Bologna.
Abdul, as we will call him, is a Pentacostal Christian, studied only in elementary school, and is illiterate. To survive in Nigeria he makes wood carvings, the kind that in Italy some street hawkers try to sell on the street. Abdul lives an existence like any other, at least until his father kicks the bucket in 2010. Aside from the pain of being fatherless, the semi-supernatural nature of the man, a shaman priest with unremarkable spiritual powers, emerges. A death like this certainly does not go unnoticed. And it easily becomes a “family” issue. Indeed, at the news of the death, Abdul’s relatives gather and invite him to take over the role of his father, as he had done at the death of his grandfather. “I, however, did not want to,” Abdul will recount before the Italian judges, “because I am a Christian and I would have to kill someone who turned against me or take the things I wanted from him. With spiritual powers.” The family’s insistence continued the following year as well, complete with threats and promises of death. To make him take the hint, the relatives-serpents cast a kind of spell against him. What is it? An impairment? A condemnation to endless suffering? A tumor? No: asthma. The evil spirit of asthma.
The bad business goes on for a few years. Abdul’s mother intercedes for him, gets worried, asks family members why “that evil spirit.” Bad idea. In response she gets a threat as well: either Abdul becomes a shaman, or she will be the one to die. As it happens, the woman in 2014 falls ill (“her foot swelled a lot”), although she recovers shortly thereafter. Everything okay? Not at all, because evil spirits are infamous. And so in 2016 the poor lady dies “with stomach pains, vomiting and dysentery.” Mom dead, Abdul has no one left to defend him. He takes some inherited money, leaves Nigeria, arrives in Niger, moves on to Libya, and finally, thanks to funding from a brother-in-law, embarks, comes to Italy, and seeks asylum.
The Cesena-Forlì Territorial Commission finds the account “not credible” because it is “generic and incoherent, especially in reference to the fact that he suffered threats for at least six years before leaving the country.” Also implausible appears to be the fact that they are no longer afraid “of the evil spirit present in Nigeria only because the Mediterranean Sea now separates them.” The Bologna court, however, thinks otherwise, criticizing the commissioners’ deductive reasoning with a (personally) incomprehensible passage on determinism, scientistic reductionism, metaphysics, gnoseology, postulates and Euclidean geometry. In short, given that in Nigeria “the population is strongly believing in and conditioned by witchcraft,” the migrant’s account would be all in all credible and deserving of humanitarian protection. Writes the judge, “Not only is there a danger to the applicant’s life in the event of repatriation, as he could be sacrificed, but also because his life would be severely compromised because of the fear he had of the evil spirit in Nigeria, which he moreover holds responsible for the death of his mother, who according to him became ill to protect him for absorbing all the evil spirit’s curses.”
