last week someone got lynched on our block...
Frank
2,373 Posts
The early evening last Thursday we had heard some yelling and screaming for quite a while and figured it was just the usual enthusiastic crowd that had gathered around some soccer match on the empty lot near our house. After a while it got really loud and close so I peeked over the wall of our garden. I saw a huge group of kids from 6 or 7 years old to teenagers and some adults streaming uphill on the dirt track besides our house. They were talkative but not overly excited and since they were talking in their native language, I couldn't understand what they were talking about.Lately, there have been a lot of cases of child abductions in Conakry. There are rumors that a gang of Nigerians is snatching up young girls right from off the street.Yesterday the local newspaper confirmed what we had already heard as rumors:A few blocks away from our house, a group of guys tried to pull a girl into their car. A teenage onlooker intervened and tried to help the girl but was knocked to the ground by one of the would-be kidnappers. The scuffle however drew the attention of more people and soon the car was surrounded by an angry mob. The guys tried to run away and supposedly 2 of them got away but one was beaten severly before dropped off at a near-by police station. A second child-snatcher managed to get away at first but eventually was captured on the lot below our house where he was beaten to death and left hanging from a tree.
Comments
Shit, I'm sitting behind a desk feeling sorry for myself as I've got a stinking cold. Thankyou for this slice of reality. I feel better already.
crazy thing is, i'm not sure that its wrong for a community to defend itself like that.definitely not ideal, though.
Right there with you. Sends a loud message to rest of the child snatchers at least.
Actually, the story is a bit different. What happened was in relation with politics and patriotism. The word was out that girls from Burkina Faso was sleeping over at the main train station in Abidjan because train wasn't running all the time and some women didnt manage to catch the train on time. They ended up sleeping on benches and shit...waiting for the next day so they could catch another train. But they did that for too long, so long that it became a habit. Around 2000, there was some huge problems that eventually led to a coup d'etat. During that time, respecting the laws wasn't the main concern of the day. Gangs of people started to hunt down people from Burkina as they are the scapegoats for immigration problems over there.
Snatching girls at the train station was a sport. Literally kidnapped, they was used as sex toys. Left without clothes in the middle of nowhere at best, or sliced up in body parts. They found 156 girls dead while i was over there. Many are still MIA because they didn't find all the areas where they got buried. Thanks God this thing has stopped after 2002 and the new president. But it was some shit to see that happening right under your eyes...
Good luck with everything Frank...
true indeed.
more people need to stand up and say THAT SHIT IS WRONG
I was there same time as you by the sounds of it. A very dark time.
That shit was unfiltered, dawg.
2002 also marked 274 murdered women over nine years at the US/Mexico border at Ciudad Juarez-El Paso. Many of them workers from area factories, etc.
Were these women in the Abidjan train station also traveling to and from work?
Wow
Perrier
He'll get 25 years and be out in 8......I think he needs killin'
Not a single person in this board wants to live in a territory where the law is that of the mob. Some people may talk as if they do, but only a moment's reflection reveals how fortunate we are to have some measure of due process and inviolate rights.
SAYS THE MODERATOR!!
Yea...Thing is they mostly live in small villages not so far from Abidjan. If you take the train. They mostly sells fruits and vegetables, either right off the street or in markets. They are good fresh prodcuts providers. Oranges, mangos, pineapples, bananas, all types of stuffs. When i said the story, i forgot to mention that since they are workers, they all carry a bulk of money. So kidnapping them was also synonym of getting your hands on some cash. The rape part is secondary i guess. Because the money is ALWAYS more important than anything else over there...
As for the people talking about the mob justice, y'all dont want that. And most cats wouldnt stay more than 3 days in such places. I've seen the toughest dudes from US and Europe cry in front of me because they was scared. Shit scared. They never understood how i made it over there. It's not by luck. I can tell you that. It's all about strategizing your survival, even if you're not the fittest or the toughest.
Where was you staying at? I did so many places over there...
Ha! This isn't the rule of the mob, this the rule of me! Watch yourself or BAN!
(Touche!)
People have always disappeared around here. I've heard stories from various sources about the military picking people up at road blocks, forcing them out of taxis onto military trucks, people had their cellphones and money taken, were beat up and or got raped. There were rumors about mutilated corpses being found, some saying they were the result of human sacrifices. These rumors spiked during the crisis last February. Maybe it was just the overall increasing atmosphere of lawlessness that led to this, maybe it was something else: Human sacrifices around here are not too uncommon if you want to believe some of the locals. It is said that if a person in power fears for his position, he can maintain his power or even gain more by taking lives.
The idea about a Nigerian gang of child snatchers sounds a bit like scapegoating to me. Why should Nigerians come to Guinea to snatch up kids? If you look at it out of their perspective, kids are an abundant, never ending resource wherever you turn your head. Why make the long way from Nigeria to Guinea just to snatch up kids?
A recent report by Human Rights Watch said that forced labor (aka slavery) is not uncommon behind the walls of the mansions of Guinea's middle and upper class. If you see the conditions kids around here grown up in and then have to imagine that they must even fear for worse that is to be snatched up by whoever for being abused in whatever way is just nauseating.
During the crisis last February, there was a mutiny in Conakry's main army barracks. There were severe fire fights inside the barracks that lasted for several days and nights. As a result, the ruling elite brought in ex-combatants from Sierra Leone and Liberia which they at least partially armed and put into uniforms to strengthen their support should the revolting part of the military attempt a coup d'etat.
These actions proved unnecessary because the fighting in the barracks ended with the regime-supporting troops regaining control (no dead or wounded ended up in any morgue or hospital, the death toll remains unknown to this day).
Soon later, the crisis was over, some cosmetic changes within the government were made, Conakry returned to its brooding, humid, paralized calm. No-one knows what happened to the ex-combatants from Liberia and Sierra Leone who had already entered the capital of Guinea. It would not be unthinkable that at least some of them didn't just return their guns and peacefully walked back to where they came from. You can bet that none of those people who had brought them inside the country with their trucks saw any personal interest in taking care of them being transported back home.
The possible result of this could be an unknown number of armed and ruthless individuals, many of them former child soldiers, stranded in a foreign city with no means to support themselves.
Very, very few Guineans speak English and those who do would not be able to distinguish between Nigerian, Liberian and Sierra Leonean English.
As far as mob justice goes. It is very easy to feel supportive toward the killing of people who do harm to children. It is even easier to understand such acts if there is no working police force and no functioning government. But once this pandora's box is opened, all sorts of things are possible. My friend Amadou who grew up in Sierra Leone once said "the Guinean people have a dirty mouth but they cannot stand the sight of blood" it looks like this is changing and I doubt that this is a good thing.
Based mostly up north in Korhogo and also spent a lot of time in Abidjan (Cococody and just across the bridge from Plateau into Treicheville), Bouake and Sassandra. Was based there for almost two years so covered quite a lot of ground. How about you?
Seems like we walked in the same streets and ate the same food. Remember the Lucky Luke? John Pollolo? Princess Street? Picking your fish? Drinking bissap (the red one)??? The record store in Treichville (the old man with his dusty tanks full of vinys)?? Mapuka shows? Ndombolo concert when people get bashed outside? Man...It's all good memories. The best time of my life.
Wow - I'd forgotten so many of those names! I lived just across the bridge from the Plateau into Treicheville for a while so spent a lot of time on that side of the lagoon. Also stayed up at the University campus now and again and had a flat above the market in Cocody.
In Treicheville I remember Whiskey- Go-Go, mad concerts (Earth Wind and Fire, Gaie Victor, Lucky Dube, Alpha Blondy, Stevie Wonder and loads of local stuff), tapes and records from bars and shacks, getting robbed, getting high, drinking bengui, and meeting some of the nicest, most terrifying and most bizarre characters I've ever come across. A couple of really good food spots out on the Bingerville road too, as I remember, with some serious poisson atieke. Man was pretty much out of bounds by the time I got round to thinking of going there, with fighting over control of the diamond business... the end of the Houphouet era was a crazy time.
Was thinking about those station disappearances - one rumour at the time was that it was the army. In 1989-90 they were regularly cleaning up the streets with murder squads in the run up to Houphouet's 30th anniversary celebrations. The week I arrived 50 or 60 guys living under the other bridge into Treicheville were found shot dead. On the campus and in Cocody during the street fighting we saw police and soldiers shooting people on an almost daily basis.
You ever make to to Yamoussoukro? President's home town out in the middle of the scrub complete with a two miles of six lane motorway starting and ending with a single lane dirt road, an 18 hole golf course, tower with revolving restaurant and the worlds largest cathedral set in a lagoon. Not to mention the vast palace with the crocodile infested moat. Surreal.
I didnt witness the Houphou??t era, i was too young. When i was there, Bedi?? was the president. I left during the infamous coup d'etat. The squads you talked about, they came back in 2000. Mad murders. Dead bodies left in the streets for weeks. The whole shabang. I went back in 2003 with wifey. It wasn't the same. I didnt go back since but i plan to go before 2010. I need to see all my people over there. One very good friend of mine in Abidjan moved in Washington. I'm gonna pay him a visit too. Where do you live now yourself?
False accusations that lead to death?
If you steal people will chop you to pieces.I've witnessed a 12 year old boy
that stole a spice bun off a push cart vendor get chased down by the vendor with a halfalass(machete)
and get cut up mercilessly.In the rural parts just 3 miles out of kingston they still like chopping up people
and burning them with a tire around them(usually when they're still half alive).
And with all this extreme vigilantism it does NOTHING to dissuade stealing
crime(Praedial larceny: unlawful taking of things attached to the farm,ie crops) is now higher than it has ever been,and the murder rate is skyrocketing.