Makeni, Sierra Leone — a quiet town shrouds a brutal trade rooted in fear. An 11-year-old boy, Papayo, vanished while selling fish; two weeks later his mutilated body was found at the bottom of a well, with vital organs removed. His mother, Sallay Kalokoh, tearfully told BBC Africa Eye, “Today I’m in pain. They killed my child and now there is just silence.” In Sierra Leone, cases tied to juju or black magic spark alarm, yet many go uninvestigated or unproven as ritual killings, and the authorities’ limited capacity compounds the tragedy. The police do not always confirm such killings as ritual acts, a gap that leaves families fighting for answers with little closure. Only a single pathologist served the country’s 8.9 million people in 2022—highlighting a crushing forensic deficit that hinders evidence-gathering and accountability.
BBC Africa Eye’s undercover investigation exposed two self-described juju practitioners who claimed to be part of far-reaching networks. One, calling himself Kanu, greeted our team in a secret shrine near the Kambia border, wearing a red mask and boasting of political clients across West Africa. He displayed what he called evidence—“a human skull,” dried and ready for use—and pointed to a back‑yard pit where he insisted bodies were slaughtered and their blood channeled away. When pressed about a specific target, he declared, “The price of a woman is 70m leones,” roughly £2,500 or $3,000. A second contact, Idara, claimed to coordinate up to 250 herbalists and admitted, “There are no human parts that we don’t work with.” The investigators then heard a voice message vouching for nightly searches for victims.
Police cooperation in combating this underground trade is inconsistent. Commissioner Ibrahim Sama said raids would be organized with the involvement of Tarawallie, head of Sierra Leone’s traditional healers’ council, yet officers acknowledged a reluctance shaped by superstition and fear—an obstacle when risking confrontation with hidden networks. The broader forensic and legal environment compounds the challenge. Emmanuel Sarpong Owusu of Aberystwyth University notes that ritual murders in Africa are seldom officially classified separately, often misrecorded as accidents or other causes, and that “most perpetrators—possibly 90%—are not apprehended.”
The investigation also situates these acts within a wider social context: traditional healers play a central role in community health in Sierra Leone, where estimates indicate roughly 45,000 traditional healers versus about 1,000 registered doctors. This gap helps explain why families seek juju-based remedies even as communities fear abduction and ritual harm. Fatmata Conteh, a 28-year-old mother of two from Makeni, was murdered in May; her body was found near a road following a recent funeral, with authorities unable to confirm a ritual motive. Post-mortems were constrained by cost and access, and no arrests have followed. The pattern — cases unsolved and families left with unanswered questions — underscores a broader failure to deliver justice in a context where belief systems and power dynamics intersect with crime. As the BBC investigation shows, the networks behind these killings may be broader and more entrenched than publicly acknowledged, yet evidence and prosecutions remain frustratingly scarce.