For a glittering glimpse of tough-dug gold, there will be blood

My parents arrive, Deet-drenched and eager, on fire with expectations but justifiably half-broken by their first taste of African heat.

I want them to feel safe. But in a misjudged moment of truth, I reveal that a woman I know in Accra has day guards, night guards, armed guards, panic buttons, guard dogs and sensors set off by a cotton moth’s gossamer wings.

They look around for our security staff, spotting caretaker Jonas, ex-pro footballer but lately all bulging hernia and crooked leg. He’s wearing cracked spectacles he’s too proud to have us replace. “We’re fine with him, he says nothing happens round here,” I say.

Jonas flops the papers onto the breakfast table. “Bloody Weekend: Boy Beheaded, Woman Killed & Four Armed Robbers Gunned Down” reads the splash.

My timing for the safety chat seems wide of the mark. I make a hurried concession, announcing plans to buy a dog, and we look at the photos in the paper.

Here is a handcuffed man, in whose lap is cradled a dead 6-year-old boy. The child is his nephew, whose eye and ear he pierced before beheading him.

Next to it Rita Baah, 30, raped by her priest when she went to receive “spiritual soap to make her make her more beautiful and extraordinarily attractive to men”. He finished her off with a mauling hammer, then draped her body across his tiny moped to dump it.

Under these, four dead men, faces uncovered, shot by police following an armed robbery in the Ashante region in central Ghana.

“I thought Ghana was a happy place” says my mother. By the end of her stay, she’ll be in no doubt that it is, but for now, she’s focussed on the papers.

I try to think of a time in the past two weeks that The Daily Graphic has arrived without pictures of the dead, but it’s a struggle.

Days earlier, the paper was the first to publish a photo of 14 women and children from Dompoase in western Ghana, laid out still-clothed in a mortuary when an illegal mine where they worked collapsed as they clawed into the hillside for gold.

Ghana police called it the country’s biggest mining tragedy, but the data doesn't seem to verify that. In 2007, 18 miners were killed while 30 others went missing when an illegal gold mine caved in west of Accra. In total 15 bodies were found at the latest accident at Dompoase, but the police said more would be recovered.

Everyone’s heard of Ghana’s gold (it accounts for more than 90% of the country's total mineral exports with revenues last year reaching $2.2bn), but less known is the human cost as small scale, artisanal miners known as Galamsey tear at the gold beneath their feet to recover small portions of the riches exiting the country in multinational hands.

For while the ground is rich, just 3% of the profits it generates are thought to come back into Ghanaian hands.

Many of the Galamsey were once farmers, working fertile land that could support harvests of tomatoes, plantain and cocoa for generations. When Ghanaian officials sold the rights to the gold to multinational companies, the farmers were evicted for the price of a single harvest.

Now they claw back what they can in rivers and makeshift mines owned by small local operators, some licensed, some not. The mine at Dompoase was illegal, but the owner died with the others so no questions could be asked.

Much of it happens in the river basins, rich with alluvial gold, using mercury which seeps through food and water causing mutations and afflictions so scarcely understood its witnesses claim evidence of witchcraft, its victims ostracised or killed.

In the mines, people work, eat and sleep in stifling conditions, in humidity and darkness with temperatures hovering around 38°C and brutality from mine owners rampant.

There was shock in Ghana was it emerged that almost all who died at Dompoase were women, but in the 45 African nations where this activity happens, up to 50% of the miners are thought to be female, according to Community and Small Scale Mining, a networking group chaired by the UK’s Department for International Development.

In some places, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, CASM says the participation of women is much higher. There, it’s illegal for children to work in the mines, but one million of them do, their mothers subjected to some of the worst rape and sexual abuse in the world by security forces and militia that control the extraction activities.

Last month, the Minister for Women and Children's Affairs in Ghana, Akua Sena Dansu, called for a clampdown on women’s participation in Galamsey. In a statement to parliament, she touched on the NGO’s findings, putting it bluntly saying the “major contributing factor to the involvement of women in illegal mining activities, is the irresponsible nature of some men”.

The women mine in backbreaking, filthy conditions, frequently with the twin load of young baby and unborn child in the cycle of relentless pregnancy that dominates poor communities.

To supplement the family income, they take second jobs. CASM found that in one mining community in Kenya, 70% of the women have sexually transmitted diseases from sex work to boost earnings because their husbands spend the money elsewhere.

That inescapable sex inequality’s rampant throughout Accra. We watch it as we take a cab that afternoon to visit an American who’s selling Alsatians.

Amid our congealing trail of traffic, women street vendors come with heavy burdens of necessities. They're carried on heads in baskets and buckets that load multi-kilo force on bodies already bearing infants on front or back.

The men carry light loads of commercial long shots: chest expanders, Barbies and Santas wrapped in warm red coats for the 34 degree heat. I can’t recall seeing one with a heavy headbasket of anything.

Interviewed by the BBC, the women who sell in these conditions said they felt lucky they were not forced to work in the mine at Dompoase, but standing amid lines of crumbling tro-tros in thick-baked air, their lots don’t look much more fortunate.

Turning his gaze from this economic adversity, my father says: “Do you think the oil will be any different from the gold?”

He’s been an oilman all his life, and is in no doubt that the wranglings between China the UK and America for control of the Ghanaian oil discovered by an Irish company that promises years of work for riggers from the Middle East and India looks set to repeat the curse of the extractive industry that’s characterised the gold rush for years.

“Depends whether Ghana gets involved” I say, explaining the Ghana National Petroleum Company’s plans to scramble finance to keep the others out of the way.

A few yards on we buy three apples from a (male) street vendor, paying a heavily-inflated white man’s price and reducing his load by a third. As we sit in the snarl-up, we watch him return to a woman with a bulging bucket of apples on her head, twenty times his own load, to replenish his stock before moving back into the superheated, stinking, movable junkyard to sell them.

Why Olivia and the goat horn are making headlines near you

“I placed a goat’s horn into the stomach of my sister to prevent her from having children,” says Olivia, 19.

It’s not my usual morning reading, but it’s compelling.

It’s a news story about a girl who’s been a witch since she was 5, and is now being exorcised in a church whose congregation are “stunned”.

She continues: “They gave my mother’s heart to me to eat and our queen witch feasted on my mother’s head, as my culture demands.”

Hell that’s bad, though maybe Mama had it coming, having ignored Olivia’s wishes to be exorcised for 10 years, by which time it was too late.

“When I was 15 my mother took me to a Man of God in Ivory Coast…but a strong burst of smoke came out of my nose and mouth as the pastor faced me…he was not strong spiritually to face the witchcraft spirit in me, so we left.”

Olivia’s troubled, for sure, and she’s been on the rampage against her family.

Among ills inflicted are abject poverty (she has stored their savings in her cauldron), a lifetime of pain for her grandma, in whose stomach she has placed a shell, and the headless, heartless mother, eaten.

And the goat sister. For she has spent “the last ten years…going to all lengths to find a solution to her barrenness, wasting a lot of time and money in the process.”

I lack grasp of matters cloven-hoofed, but shouldn’t belly-full-of-goat-girl have mentioned it to her physician?

Luckily it doesn’t matter. A preacher, Prophet Michael Osei, can save her. He can make her vomit the womb-held horn (figure out the exit route for yourself, I am foxed), exorcising Olivia and stunning his (rural) congregation in one sweep. Thank God for men of God, for they can save the world, the witches and hell fire! even the football.

And their PR machine’s not bad either.

The story’s amusing, but I bristle, because I think it’s also pernicious. It’s running on at least two popular news outlets in Ghana and there is no indication that a journalist has done anything to question the legitimacy.

I check the reader feedback. It’s a mix of fear of “witches and wizards”, calls for “a proper journalist to investigate” (at last!) “who this queen witch is” (oh), and something sensible from Naa Shomey: “This is the kind of thing that makes such false prophets perpetuate such nonsense. Why is it that most accused witches are women and young children?”

Thanks to Naa. I think she has hit the nail on the head.

The likely origin of the story is a revivalist church, which confirm or "discover" signs of witchcraft, operate on a profit-making basis and most that practise exorcism will put on a performance like Olivia’s for the purposes of financial gain.

Promise double digit dollars to a teenager with her heart set on some slingbacks and a night out, coach her and poof! she’ll ham it up about the goat and the smoke and the bloke who couldn’t fix her. The crooked bombast of a preacherman gets a quick return on investment, winning the support of troubled families who have no access to basic social services, and use the church as their moral reference point. Pass the collection plate!

The knock-on effects are felt as far apart as Tanzania and Tottenham, Angola and Hackney, Congo, Tower Bridge and Harlesden. You name it.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo alone, Unicef estimates that there are 25,000 abandoned children in Kinshasa and more than 40,000 country-wide. More than 70% have been accused of witchcraft.

One of those children is Cedric, who was 8 when he watched his village, just outside Kinshasa, turn against him after his father was killed in an accident. He and his brother, denounced as sourcerers, were beaten with stones and chased away. “I knew I was not a witch. They only did that because they did not want to look after us,” Cedric said. They sought refuge in an aunt, who gave them to a pastor to be exorcised. Together, the aunt and the pastor beat the children until they ran away. Cedric lost his brother along the way, joined a gang and slept in “stinking alleys, oozing untreated waste”.

Pastor Michel Kabi, who runs an organisation set up to counter witchcraft, says accusing children of sorcery is an easy way out: “People are too poor and desperate themselves and are frightened of having to look after children too.”

Children who are uncomfortably close to your doorstep.

They include Victoria Climbiè, an Ivorian girl who was tortured and killed in Tottenham due to witchcraft accusations. Boy Adam, whose mutilated torso was discovered floating in the River Thames, and Child B, an 8-year-old child brought to the UK from Angola, who was beaten, cut and had chilli rubbed in her eyes after her aunt and two others believed she was a witch.

All of these cases had their origins in Africa.

I called one of the media outlets to ask about their editorial policy. Is it appropriate to publish a story with no reference to the possibility that the facts might not stand up? And that ultimately mask a practice that in many other cultures would be called child abuse?

“Our editorial policy is our own business and is not for public knowledge,” says someone there. He’s a journalist. I ask what he thinks of it, personally. “It’s not right,” he concedes.

Western media stands rightfully accused of using large-scale suffering and backwardness as a means of reporting Africa (I feel dangerously close to falling into that camp, too).

But here are popular, urban Ghanaian media outlets giving credence to practices that demoralise Africa and give the rest of the world the idea that for this continent, there still is no hope.

Quite sticks a goat horn in my Hallowe’en spirit.