Sitting on the floor surrounded by vials, animal bones and sheets stained crimson with blood, spiritual doctor Olor Elemian described how he scares girls into blind obedience with potions and spells known as “juju”.
Pimps, madams, smugglers and even parents bring girls to his shrine in Amedokhian village near the southern Nigerian city of Uromi, where they drink concoctions brewed with pieces of their own fingernails, pubic hair, underwear or drops of blood.
“I can make sure she never sleeps well or has peace of mind until she pays what she owes,” said the 39-year-old spiritual priest known in his neighbourhood as “Doctor”.
“Something in her head will keep telling her: ‘Go and pay!'”
Juju is a potent ingredient in a cocktail of coercion that keeps thousands of Nigerian women and girls in sex slavery in Europe, mostly in Italy, after making the treacherous journey across North Africa and the Mediterranean in search of better lives.
Combined with crippling debt and threats of violence, it helps perpetuate a cycle of exploitation in which many victims then become perpetrators, returning to Nigeria as “madams” to recruit more girls, police and rights groups say.
In Edo state – a southern Nigerian hub for human trafficking – many girls begin their journey into prostitution willingly. Most have little clue of the nightmare to follow.
Some even visit native doctors like Elemian of their own accord, hoping juju will help them prosper while selling sex in Italy.
“It’s not how hard a person works that determines how much money she will make,” he said, showing off his new mobile phone and modern bungalow, which stands out amid his neighbours’ mud huts.
These trappings of wealth are all funded by grateful clients from Italy, he said.