Religion

The breakdown of election results continues to reveal prominent divisions between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria, and all the while police brutality across Nigeria is exacerbating the situation.

Bomb blasts and sectarian violence are on the rise at polling stations and national elections commission offices in Nigeria in an attempt to disrupt three crucial polls taking place this month.

Will Christianity be a solution to the hardships that plague Niger?

With a tense presidential race this month, Nigeria is performing a delicate balancing act aimed at warding off a repeat of the religious conflict that nearly destroyed the country at its inception.

Fred de Sam Lazaro reports on the expectations and high hopes of the predominantly Christian southern Sudanese voters, who are heading to the polls in this historic bid to separate from Sudan's Arabic-speaking Muslim North. Rebecca Hamilton is interviewed in the piece.

In the midst of riots and cholera outbreak, Pastor Joel Sainton continues to minister to Haitians with HIV/AIDS.

The words cluster behind your teeth;
close in, the smooth patina, deep brown,
of your face is alight with the effort:
you, boy, carrying the weight
of an old man

Jason Motlagh recounts how he first teamed up with the Pulitzer Center, which kick-started his career as an independent journalist reporting in war zones in India and Afghanistan.

The Ugandan Police is hunting traditional healers who kidnap children to sacrifice them. And it's fighting against the greed of a new middle class, which rely on magic rituals to get richer.

Note: This article was originally featured in the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, which ran this story shortly after Marco left Uganda. Story by Arne Perras, photos by Marco Vernaschi.

Click on the image above to read the article in Italian.

To access Marco's photo piece on child sacrifice in Uganda for The Sunday Times, users will need to sign-up for a one month free trial.

Visit the following link and then scroll through the thumbnails to view his story, "Facing the Demons":

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/multimedia_library/Spectrum/

[Print edition published Apri 18, 2010]

Richard Omongole, a Ugandan lawyer and former country director for Amnesty International, is legal adviser to the Gideon Foundation, a small organization that was founded by the father of a child who was killed during a ritual sacrifice.

Job opportunities were low in Kampala so when a friend offered Paul Odida a job in South Africa the prospect of some money was encouraging. He sold his car, left Kampala on a bus, and headed for Johannesburg. What Paul didn’t know was that the job was to work as a “traditional healer”. Ugandan traditional healers are renowned throughout much of Africa as experts, but Paul had no idea of what the work was about.