Uganda prepares for new law on ‘human sacrifice’: here’s what a case of ‘human sacrifice’ looks like

6 August 2021 · Carmel Rickard

Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni has just signed a long-anticipated piece of legislation into law. The new legislation, aimed to deal with ‘human sacrifice’, was originally introduced as a private member’s Bill but won widespread support in parliament. Among other tough provisions, the new law prescribes life imprisonment for anyone found to unlawfully possess human body parts as well as ‘instruments associated with human sacrifice’. As the law becomes part of the state’s options for dealing with cases like this, a recent decision of Uganda’s court of appeal, involving just such a matter, brings home the horror it involves.

Read judgment

A recent news story, showing Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni holding a Bill he had just signed into law, will have astonished many of its readers. The headline said that the Bill signed by Museveni was a law on ‘human sacrifice’, and that with the new legislation it would be possible to send someone to prison for life if they had been involved in killing people ‘for rituals’.

The reality of this story is, however, a lot worse than even this terror: the most popular victims for such ‘ritual sacrifices’ are children, apparently because they are easier to abduct and because they are seen as ‘pure’ and thus of higher ritual value.

According to other accounts of the background to the new law, the exact number of such killings is not known, and though it is especially prevalent in Uganda, it also occurs in other countries in the region.

Spike

Typically, such ‘sacrifices’ occur in response to someone’s desire to get richer, or be sure of a better job, and the numbers might spike just before an election, with some candidates believing that such a sacrifice will ensure a seat.

One major difficulty with stamping it out or prosecuting such cases successfully – the reason the new law is needed – is that the shadowy people in the background who pay for or order such killings are difficult to find and prosecute, and where they are found they may well be convicted of a lesser charge and be given a short term in prison.

Vulnerable

At the end of July, Uganda’s court of appeal handed down a new decision: Tomusange v Uganda. It exactly illustrates the horror of ritual human sacrifice, all the more so because one of the two victims in this case was Lasto Tomusange’s young son, Angello. The other victim was also particularly vulnerable – a migrant worker from Rwanda named Kato. Nothing more is known about him. Not even his surname.

Originally there were three accused, all brothers, but one was acquitted. Through the court’s decision it emerges that Tomusange had a relationship with a woman from which a boy, Angello, was born. The couple separated when the child was just a month old. A year later, the mother handed him back to the father.

One day the second brother went to Angello’s home and asked Tomusange, the father, if he could take the child ‘to town’. That was the last the boy was seen alive. The following day the boy’s stepmother reported to the police that the boy was missing and the uncle was arrested soon afterwards because he was the last person known to have been with the boy. Questioned by police he said he had taken the child, but had brought him back and left him at a neighbour’s home. His claims were found untrue, but there was no word about the boy.

Dismembered

Five days later a woman was tilling her plot some distance away when she found the dead body of a child. The body had been beheaded and dismembered. She immediately reported her find and the body was taken for a post mortem. After Angello’s family heard of the find on TV, they went to the mortuary and identified the child.

At that point, Angello’s uncle gave a full confession to the police, implicating himself and his two brothers including Angello’s father.

Sometime later, after two of the brothers had been convicted by the high court for both murders, the court of appeal, which by then had already heard the appeal of the brothers in the murder of Kato, commented, ‘(Angello’s) murder was committed by the same appellants within the same time-frame as the murder of a farmhand and the two bodies were found in close proximity to each other … and therefore appear to have been part of the same transaction.’

‘Conjured spirits’

A number of incriminating items were found in the home of the boy’s father including a wooden-handled knife with blood on it that was later shown to be that of the boy.

Convicted of Angello’s murder, the two brothers were sentenced to 47 years and nine months, and to 37 years and eight months respectively (the uncle getting the lesser time because he had cooperated with the police and pleaded guilty).

Re-examining the evidence led during the trial, the appeal court said the uncle had confessed that he and his brothers ‘conjured spirits’.

Waterproof packet

‘They claimed that the spirits asked for the sacrifice of two human beings, a man of about 20 years with no wife, and a child.’

After the boy was taken from his home the two men travelled with him to another area and then looked around for a deserted place. They hid behind a bush with the child, and his father then killed him, removed the body parts to be used ritually and folded these in a white cloth that he put in a waterproof packet.

The uncle later tried to retract his original incriminating statement, but neither the trial court nor the court of appeal was impressed by the reasons he gave for backtracking.

Riches

Having dismissed the appeal against conviction, the court turned to sentence. The trial court had had some strong words for the father and uncle about their terrible crime. The killings of Kato and the boy had been carried out ‘in the name of looking for riches’.

The father should have protected his child but instead he ‘heartlessly cut him like slaughtering an animal and carried off his blood in white pieces of cloth for the rituals.’

He showed no remorse even when the child’s mother broke down in the face of evidence.

‘While I appreciate that the convict has a family, he demonstrated that he can be a danger to his very own that he is supposed to care for and love. … (H)is family would be safer without him.’

Rampant

Quoting sentences passed in earlier ritual murders, the high court had decided on the sentence the judge thought was correct, even though the father was a first-time offender, saying a strong message had to be sent to would-be perpetrators ‘of an inhuman act of child sacrifice which has become rampant in the county.’

While the father’s sentence was unaltered by the appeal court, the judges reduced the uncle’s sentence for killing Angello by five years. The two are however also serving sentences of 42 and 30 years for killing Kato; as with Angello, their motive for this murder was to carry out a ritual ‘sacrifice’ with the aim of ensuring ‘riches and having happiness in this world.’

‘A Matter of Justice’, Legalbriefs, 3 August 2021

Carmel Rickard

About the author

Recent articles by Carmel Rickard

‘No justification for the unjustifiable’: Lesotho’s ombud slams grand-scale torture, assault in Maseru prison

22 March 2024
Carmel Rickard

Lesotho’s national ombud, Tlotliso Angelina Polaki, has issued a scathing report on massive-scale torture and assaults that took place in Maseru’s central correctional institution during December 2023, leaving about 95% of the inmates of the prison injured, one dead and one who is now wheelchair-bound and will never walk again.

Major court decision on image rights benefits Ugandan soccer players

21 March 2024
Carmel Rickard

Members of Uganda’s national soccer team from the period around 2007/8 have just been awarded a payout against MTN Uganda by the commercial court. The telecom giant had a year-long contract with Proline, the players’ originating development soccer club, allowing it to use the players’ images for advertising. But MTN had continued to use their images even after that contract expired on the basis that it had a sponsorship agreement with Fufa, soccer’s governing body in Uganda. The players then challenged MTN in court, through Proline, and have now won a significant damages award. But the judgment exposed some serious flaws in the way that Fufa has approached the question of using the image rights of its senior players, and the court commented that this is a ‘case study’ for why Fufa needs to sort out its contractual arrangements with senior players.

Executive interference in Ugandan court decisions continues – this time by the justice minister

21 March 2024
Carmel Rickard

Uganda’s minister of justice, Norbert Mao, has taken a leaf straight from the book of the country’s president, Yoweri Museveni. This week, the minister wrote to the principal judge of the Ugandan high court, asking that the judge directly intervene in a matter that has been brought to his attention by an MP on behalf of a constituent. Mao asked for the ‘immediate administrative intervention’ in the matter by the principal judge. Earlier this year, Museveni wrote a similar letter to the chief justice of Uganda, also requesting intervention in a matter, and the CJ later indicated that this was not the first time it had happened.

Is rape by family members treated too lightly by the law?

19 March 2024
Carmel Rickard

The high court has sent the case of a Malawian teenager, charged with raping his 89-year-old grandmother, back to the magistrate’s court for a possible re-trial because the court had wrongly prosecuted a case of rape instead of incest. If convicted in a re-trial, however, Malawi’s incest law could see the accused sentenced to a mere five years. Malawi’s penal code provides for a significant difference between the sentence to be imposed when a man rapes a close family member, and in a case where the two are not related. When they are unrelated, the code provides that a rape offender ‘shall be liable to be punished with death or with imprisonment for life’ (However, Malawi has had what amounts to a moratorium on carrying out the death penalty since 1992.) By contrast, ‘incest by males’, is categorised in the code as a ‘felony’, and anyone convicted ‘shall be liable for imprisonment for five years’. There is an exception: if it is proved ‘that the female person is under the age of 16, the offender shall be liable to imprisonment for life’.

Prominent SA advocates lose battle over conviction in Namibian courts for working without a permit, misleading immigration officials

6 March 2024
Carmel Rickard

Two prominent South African advocates have just lost their last hope of squashing their convictions in the Namibian courts. Johannesburg advocates, Mike Hellens SC and Dawie Joubert SC, had been found guilty on two counts, first, working as legal practitioners without an employment permit, and second, giving false or misleading information to immigration officers when they entered the country in 2019. Though they had gone to Namibia to appear in court in a bail application, they told the immigration officials they were there for a ‘visit’ and for a ‘meeting’. Both appealed against their conviction but they had also asked for a judicial review of the decision. In the high court they lost their appeal but won on the review. The outcome in both matters were taken to the apex supreme court for a final word. In December 2023, they lost their appeal at the supreme court. What would that same court say when the state appealed against the review finding? The supreme court has now given its answer: it found the review, that had favoured Hellens and Joubert, was wrongly decided, and set it aside, awarding costs against the two advocates in both the high court and the supreme court.