Some time back I wrote about a fellow Culture Kitchen blogger, Leo Igwe, whose blogging has gotten him and his family beaten up repeatedly. He is a Nigerian who stands up against both Christian and Muslim fundamentalism in Africa and stands up for reason and science. His main crusades have been fighting against child abuse in the name of religion. For his efforts he has been harassed by the police and beaten by mobs. But he keeps fighting even as the attempts to silence him have escalated.

The latest attack was a couple of weeks ago when his mother and father were beaten in their own house. His father lost an eye. I am on vacation now so not blogging so much, but I have to post the latest from Leo: despite these repeated attacks, he has vowed to keep fighting. The latest Culture Kitchen diary by Leo Igwe is reposted below with further background on Leo and his efforts.

From Culture Kitchen:

The recent attack on my family which led to my father's loss of one eye was an unfortunate development. It was yet another attempt to intimidate us and undermine our campaign for justice.

To any intelligent observer of the trends in Nigeria, this incident would not have come as a surprise. Because Nigeria has practically been taken over by thugs, hoodlums, kidnappers and bandits.

Nigeria is held hostage by forces of dark age and barbarism. Anything that appears to be civil or enlightened about Nigeria is mainly on the surface. Since independence Nigeria has been descending gradually into anomie, anarchy and criminality. Nigeria has derailed and deteriorated due to misrule, bad governance, collective irresponsibility and insensitivity, lack of vision and thoughtfulness, selfishness, greed, ignorance, hypocrisy and self deceit. Nigeria has failed to put in place institutions that treat the people in a fair, just and dignified manner. Nigeria has failed to adopt effective mechanisms to reward those who want to live honest, decent, diligent and dignified lives. Nigeria has failed to cultivate and institutionalize those values that make a nation great, relevant and prosperous.

At best, Nigeria pays lip service to these values. The government is irresponsive and irresponsible. The educational system is in shambles. The justice system is nothing to write home about. The value system has collapsed. The greatest tragedy is that most Nigerians have resigned to this ‘fate’. They think that nothing can be done to change or improve the situation; that no radical or reasonable change can be realized. Most Nigerians have given up hope- hope of realizing a decent and dignified life; hope for justice and fairness for all; hope for recognition and respect for their rights. Fear, despair, gloom, pessimism and cynicism loom throughout the country.

The public institutions are used to oppress and exploit the public. The power of the people is used to abuse, enslave and maltreat the people.  read more »

I think it is particularly important to remember this incident from 2007 given the recent comments about "Going Muslim" made by a particularly ignorant NYU professor that I discussed recently (here and here).

Back in 2007 a Muslim came to the rescue of some Jews being attacked by Christian extremists. Funny how we forget incidents like this but remember incidents that make Muslims look bad.  read more »

An amazing study just came out in the journal Nature where people studied violent conflicts statistically and found that such conflicts all follow very similar patterns. And those patterns are very similar to how financial markets (also based on human behavior) function. Here is the abstract of the article:

Many collective human activities, including violence, have been shown to exhibit universal patterns. The size distributions of casualties both in whole wars from 1816 to 1980 and terrorist attacks have separately been shown to follow approximate power-law distributions. However, the possibility of universal patterns ranging across wars in the size distribution or timing of within-conflict events has barely been explored. Here we show that the sizes and timing of violent events within different insurgent conflicts exhibit remarkable similarities. We propose a unified model of human insurgency that reproduces these commonalities, and explains conflict-specific variations quantitatively in terms of underlying rules of engagement. Our model treats each insurgent population as an ecology of dynamically evolving, self-organized groups following common decision-making processes. Our model is consistent with several recent hypotheses about modern insurgency18, 19, 20, is robust to many generalizations, and establishes a quantitative connection between human insurgency, global terrorism and ecology. Its similarity to financial market models provides a surprising link between violent and non-violent forms of human behaviour  read more »

I recently covered the attack on Leo Igwe, the Culture Kitchen blogger who was attacked by a mob of religious fanatics in Nigeria. Leo is still carrying on the fight on behalf of abused children in Nigeria, despite the attacks. He has sent me his most recent post:

The attack in Calabar and the threat of religious extremism in Nigeria

By Leo Igwe

Around 11.30 am on Wednesday July 29 2009, a mob of about 200 persons from the Liberty Gospel Church invaded the Cultural Center in Calabar Cross River State The Cultural Center was the venue of a public symposium on witchcraft and child rights organised by the Nigerian Humanist Movement and Stepping Stones Nigeria.

Most of them arrived the venue in buses wearing orange Tshirt while others donned plain clothes to hide their identity. As we were about to start, some of them stormed the conference hall stamping their feet on the ground and chanting slogans critical of the event and the organisers.  read more »

Yesterday I posted about Leo Igwe, contributor to Culture Kitchen, being attacked and beaten on July 30th because he was standing up to religious fanatics in Nigeria who were abusing children. I will reiterated and expand upon the details below. But first, I have now heard from Leo by email and he seems to be doing fine and still eager to fight the good fight. Here is his message:

Thanks for your message and concern As you may know both islamic and christian fanatics are holding Nigeria hostage You must have heard what is happening in Northern Nigeria where islamists have been battling with the police and the army for control in a region where an islamic dark age is already in place The situation makes me sad and to put it literally it makes me angry And my simple ambition is to create and to keep organizing fora where these dark age ideas and their influence can be challenged, debated, discussed and criticized.

Any help I can get to realize this objective will be greatly appreciated  read more »