Lamentation of Dehumanisation: Theological Resistance and the Sacredness of the Accused Child

Atlanta, Georgia

“If there’s somebody out there like that has him, I just wish they knew that somebody here loves him; that a whole lot of people love him. This whole community loves him and they want him back, too.” Camille Bell.[1]

On the 21^st of October 1979, nine-year-old Yusuf Bell ran an errand for an elderly neighbour at a nearby grocery store. He never returned home to his mother, who called out for him. His body was later found in an abandoned school building eighteen days later.[2] His cause of death was classified as a brutal hit on his head and strangulation.

Yusuf was one of the thirty African-American children brutally murdered within the space of less than two years, and their deaths occurred successively within days and weeks in an unrelenting downward spiral. As James Baldwin noted in his book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen …dedicated to these murders, “Some of the children have been shot, some stabbed, some strangled. Some are naked, some are clothed, some are decomposing.”[3] Their bodies were discovered in refuse sites, riverbanks, and derelict buildings.

Eventually, 23-year-old African-American Wayne Williams was arrested, but was only charged with two of the murders.[4] However, in several accounts, he was linked to some of the murders. His prior record seemed to make him the perfect suspect.[5] Williams continued to maintain his innocence even in the two cases connected to him. Everyone knew, however, that these deaths were racially motivated, and the suspect was just a scapegoat.[6] Some claimed these children were used for medical experimentation, as some of them had the tips of their penises missing.[7] Today, forty-three years later, the case remains unsolved.[8]

Nigeria, Multiple states

“My husband’s attitude changed recently. He kept saying I should not look at him like a poor man anymore…His co-workers were surprised…he told them his money was very near. We never knew he had such a dangerous plan.” Emmanuel Ovwarueso’s wife.[9]

On the 25th March 2025, a newspaper report stated that, in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, seven-year-old twin sisters, Chizaram Onuche and Chidinma Onuche, were lured to an uncompleted building by a 27-year-old man, where he gave them a drink called Black Bullet, killed and collected their blood in a bottle before he dismembered their bodies. Four people were arrested, including a traditional native doctor.[10] On the 6th May, 2011, there was a report about a nine-year-old girl, Taiwo Ajibode, who was sleeping by her mother’s side in a family home in Tata community in Ogun state when she was snatched away by unknown persons and beheaded.

Her headless body was later discovered after a frantic search. Her killers remain at large.[11] Another report on the 12th March 2024 was of Emmanuel Ovwarueso, a father who deliberately tied up his wife and beheaded his little daughter (age unknown) and buried her body in a shallow grave. He was carrying her head in a bag to an unspecified destination when the community vigilante group apprehended him, and he confessed to killing her.[12]

All the Nigerian cases share one trait: money ritual killings. These incidents are nothing compared to the enormous increase in ritual killings, where the majority of them are connected to the quest for the procurement of easy money, and it is becoming so epidemic that several states and the federal government are organising protests to put an end to it.[13]

The Atlanta child murders and ritual killings of Nigerian children shared a devastating commonality: dehumanisation. As Judith Butler asks, “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives?”[14] This essay explores lamentation as a critical theological and sociological framework for understanding systemic violence against children in contemporary Nigeria. It examines how children can be rendered not only socially disposable but spiritually abandoned.

Dehumanisation in this context is not merely a material or legal phenomenon—it is a theological act, stripping children of innocence, sacred value, and communal belonging. Drawing on traditions of lament in both biblical literature and African communal spirituality, the paper argues that lamentation functions as a sacred protest—an embodied cry against cultural, religious, and institutional complicity. It contends that the absence of theological lament in Pentecostal responses to accusations represents a dangerous silence, one that conceals rather than confronts violence.

Building on this, the essay offers a lamentation of dehumanisation as a decolonial, justice-oriented framework that centres the grief of marginalised communities as a diagnostic and a prophetic force. In doing so, it reclaims lament as a practice of rehumanisation—where naming pain, bearing witness, and resisting silence become deeply theological acts.

Defining Lamentation of Dehumanisation

The notion of lamentation of dehumanisation (LoD) draws upon Judith Butler’s account of grievability as a political and epistemic act,[15] extending it into the realm of the communal and theological. In resonance with Kathleen O’Connor’s reading of the biblical lament considered sacred protest,[16] or Emmanuel Katongole’s framing of lament as the origin of hope in the face of systemic violence,[17] LoD encounters mourning not as a passive expression of sorrow but as decisive theological resistance to violence, abandonment, and systemic erasure.

Thus, the LoD refers to the communal and theological articulation of grief not just caused by acts of violence or loss but also by systems that have denied the full personhood of the dispossessed and vulnerable individuals, particularly children. It captures the affective and emblematic protest of communities who mourn not just death but the violation of humanity that occurs before, during, or after death. Within the African and biblical traditions of lament, it interprets mourning as a form of resistance against silencing, social erasure, and spiritual abandonment.

This lamentation is not simply an emotional response; it is a public theological indictment. It critiques the establishment – religious, cultural, legal – that seeks to render some lives ungrievable, unprotected, and spiritually suspect. In the case of child witchcraft accusations among Nigerian Pentecostals, the lamentation of dehumanisation presents itself as a call to the Divine and a human condemnation for intentionally denying and refusing to uphold the ordained dignity of the child.

Epistemologies of Power and Silence

The Atlanta child murders and the killing of children for money ritual in Nigeria both involve state neglect, incomplete justice, and contested narratives. The struggle over “what happened” becomes a struggle over who defines truth and meaning  — a space ripe for theological and sociological interrogation. The sense of inevitability surrounding many Atlanta deaths cannot be overstated. When these children started disappearing one after another, their families began raising alarms, calling for help from the authorities without much response.

Yusuf Bell’s mother, Camille Bell, set up the group known as STOP: Committee to Stop Children’s Murders (Founded 1980), which should not have been allowed to go that far had the official listened.[18] Pleading for help in a city ‘on the move,’ despite its Black leadership, revealed how deeply Black communities remained marginalised.[19] It was after the thirteenth death, which was the murder of Clifford Jones, who was strangled and whose body was found behind a dumpster, that the official authorities acted.[20] Likewise, in the Nigerian cases, many victims remained unsolved because of a lack of action from the law enforcement agencies and other authorities concerned.

Take, for instance, Ajibode’s killers were never found.  All the above raise the question: Why would no one care to help these grieving families? There is no straightforward answer, though it might be that these people are not relevant in the eyes of the authorities. What cannot be ruled out is the long history of Black child endangerment in American culture.[21]

As Butler puts it, “If certain lives do not qualify as lives or are, from the start, not conceivable as lives within certain epistemological frames, then these lives are never lived nor lost in the full sense.”[22] Here, silence functions in each case as denial, as complicity, or as a space where marginalised communities craft their own truth-telling practices.

Furthermore, in both cases, no specific age or gender necessarily protects individuals from these killings. However, their social status speaks out. Like the Nigerian children in this case, especially the father who was eager to get wealth after killing his daughter — the Atlanta child “came, mainly, from Atlanta’s lowest economic stratum…strangers to safety, for, in the brutal generality, only the poor watch over the poor.”[23] Although the majority of victims in the Atlanta cases were boys,[24] in the Nigerian context, females were primarily targeted. Nevertheless, anyone can become a victim. Women and girls are often preferred based on the belief that their reproductive organs possess esoteric properties capable of conferring wealth and blessings.[25]

What these cases revealed was that these children were harmed at their point of isolation. Their killers first isolated them before harming them. Isolation provides the perfect opportunity for abuses, as seen in several crimes by perpetrators, as it is at that point of being alone that protection is stripped of its power, as the victim is now at the mercy of others. The Nigerian father who killed his daughter first recognised he needed to tie up his wife, otherwise she would have stopped him from carrying out his atrocities. In the Atlanta cases, the children were taken out of their protective cocoon. One girl was forcibly removed from her house because it would have been impossible to take her life right there in her home.

In both cases, the dehumanisation occurred when they were exposed psychologically or physically, signalling that the victims cease to be persons of importance. On the dehumanisation as seen in the Atlanta cases, it was simply because they were black, and as if to ‘punish’ their parents for giving birth to them.[26] With the Nigerian children, the dehumanisation happened when they were stripped of their clothes, exposing their bodies at the mercy of their killers before being exterminated.

In both scenarios, the killers needed to expose and mutilate part of their organs; as such, they first needed to dispose of their covers that embodied their innocence, humanity, and childhood. It was in these cramped settings that these children were deprived of their rights to live, their spaces to thrive, and their memories to flourish.

They were snatched at their primes, away from their dreams, aspirations, loved ones, and their lives. They were nobody in the imagination of the killers because they were never perceived as humans. When someone takes a life, they are no longer seeing that life as having the right to be among the living. At that moment, that victim is condemned to the void of inexistence and consigned to oblivion’s refuse heap.

Children, Rituals, and the Price of Wealth

Wealth is more than material: it dictates whose life is allowed to thrive.[27] For the majority of Atlanta murder victims and the suspect, being born male seems a curse, then — as, tragically, now— given the continual racial profiling of the Black male in the United States. As Baldwin observes,

“It is a disease that attacks Black males. It is transmitted by Mama, whose instinct — and it is not hard to see why — is to protect the Black Male from the devastation that threatens him the moment he declares himself a man.”[28]

Furthermore, the prosperity-gospel messages disseminated over the decades by Nigerian churches, especially Neo-Pentecostal churches, have exacerbated today’s culture of money-ritual killings among our youth. Even if pushing back can be conceptualised to some degree, the chronology is clear: from the rush to prosperity churches, to their waning influence, to Yahoo-419 scams, to kidnapping for ransom, and now the evil of ritual killings.

Each of these stages reflects deepening desperation for sudden wealth, with its rationalisation sanctified in sermons that link ownership and wealth to divine favour, and poverty to a curse. Uroko rightly contends that Nigerian church leaders are not only complicit; they have legitimised vile aspirations toward dubious wealth and have celebrated ostentatious lifestyles.[29] Ministers who ought to desire moral idealism and ethical living have, somehow—or by intent—facilitated greed, materialism, and the commodification of human life. Therefore, it is not merely about society collapsing; it is about profound moral deficiency within religious institutions.

The prosperity gospel did not stay outside of everything; it was, and remains, inscribed in the articulation of blood-money ritual. The previous account now leads to a final theological verdict. As we name Yusuf, Chizaram, Chidinma, and Taiwo, we do not simply name data; they are God-bearers—their blood still cries. Until the Church learns to pray, naming the dead and lamenting their erasure, its pulpits will continue to echo with silence.

The Church’s unwillingness to lament is an indication of its reduced concern for social justice.[30] The repeated erasure of Black and African children—as seen in Atlanta’s forgotten boys and Nigeria’s ritual victims—presents a theological crisis: where lament is silenced, dehumanisation is celebrated. Here, I have proposed Lamentation of Dehumanisation as a disciplined, public form of grief that refuses silence, names the sin of structural inequality, and reclaims the sacred worth of the child accused by their social location. Regaining lament as protest allows the Church to move beyond passive sympathy into complicity-breaking action: interrogating prosperity narratives, insisting on accountability in criminal justice systems, and standing with grieving families until justice is achieved. In brief, where lament is restored, hope is birthed; where hope lives, the commodification of children must die.

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[1] Foggy Melson’s Breakdown. “The Disappearance of Atlanta Child Murder Victim Yusuf Bell; Camille Bell Interview (Oct. 23, 1979).” YouTube video, 2:09. Uploaded July 25, 2023.

[2] James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (New York: Owl Books, 1985), 39.

[3] Ibid., 8.

[4] Ibid., 16.

[5] John Douglas & Mark Olshaker, Mind Hunter … (New York: Scribner, 1995), 227.

[6] Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, 12-15.

[7] Luisah Teish, “Patriachy in drag: Sexual Imperialism in Africa, and Delusional Revisionism in the African-American Communtiy,” In  Female Erasure…(Pacifics Palisades: Tidal Time Publishing, 2016), 249.

[8] Tim Darnell, “Families of Atlanta chidl murder victims call on city to release DNA testing results,” December 12, 2022, https://www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2022/12/13/families-atlanta-child-murder-victims-call-city-release-dna-testing-results/?outputType=amp

[9] Michael Egbejule, Man nabbed for allegedly killing daughter for money ritual, March 12, 2024, https://guardian.ng/news/man-nabbed-for-allegedly-killing-daughter-for-money-ritual/.

[10] BBC, “”Family of Seven-year-old girls wey suspected ritualists kill and rain dia blood for Rivers state dey mourn,” https://www.bbc.com/pidgin/articles/cly345j21lyo.

[11] PM News Nigeria, “Ritual Killing: Girl, 9, Beheaded; Student Rescued,” May 6, 2011, https://pmnewsnigeria.com/2011/05/06/ritual-killing-girl-9-beheaded-student-rescued/.

[12] Michael Egbejule, Man nabbed for allegedly killing daughter for money ritual.”

[13] Bertram Nwannekanma, “Group condemns ritual killings by Islamic clerics in Yorubaland,” February 21, 2025, https://guardian.ng/news/nigeria/metro/group-condemns-ritual-killings-by-islamic-clerics-in-yorubaland/; Adejoke Adeleye, “Ogun Assembly calls for Amotekun after murder of pupil by suspected ritualists,” February 1, 2024 https://pmnewsnigeria.com/2024/02/01/ogun-assembly-calls-for-amotekun-after-murder-of-pupil-by-suspected-ritualists/?utm_source=auto-read-also&utm_medium=web.

[14] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London, Verso, 2004), 20.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Kathleen M. O’Connor, Lamentations and the Tears of the World (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2002).

[17] Emmanuel Katongole, Born from Lament: The Theology and Politics of Hope in Africa (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017).

[18] Douglas & Olshaker, Mind Hunter. 212.

[19] Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen. 3-7.

[20] Ibid., 40.

[21] Teish, “Patriachy in drag,” 249; Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, 10.

[22] Judith Butler, Frames of War : When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2016), 2.

[23] Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, 62.

[24] Teish, “Patriachy in drag,” 249.

[25] Patience Ogbo, “‘Get Rich Fast’ Syndrome and the Ritual killings of Women in South West Nigeria,” African Jn for the Psychological Study og Social Issues . 27, 3 (2024): 300-301. 

[26] Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, 6.

[27] Ibid., 38.

[28] Ibid., 19.

[29] F.C. Uroko, “Have we lost touch with the prophet Amos’ warning? Church leaders and blood money rituals among youths in Nigeria,” Acta Theologica 43, no. 2 (2023): 247.

[30] Katongole, Born from Lamen 183.

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© Claire Princess Ayelotan, 2025.

This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Cover Image: Provided by the author.