On September 21, 2001, the torso of an African boy was discovered floating in the Thames near Tower Bridge. The child was maybe five or six years old, and his limbs and head had been cut off. Eleven years later, his murderers have still not been brought to justice. Indeed, the case of “Adam” — the police’s initial, generic name for the unidentified victim — is the only unsolved child murder in the capital.
At the time of the discovery, Richard Hoskins was lecturing in African religions at Bath Spa University. As the case of “Adam” appeared to involve a religious aspect, he was asked by murder-squad detectives whether he could help with the investigation. The Boy in the River is Hoskins’s account of his involvement with not only the “Adam” case, but a decade of abuse and murder cases involving African children in Britain.
The police initially thought Adam had been killed in a perverse interpretation of the South African muti tradition, whereby animal parts are used as “cures” for ailments. But Hoskins had another theory. He believed the precise cutting of the body was inconsistent with muti, which has scant regard for the appearance of the corpse. The torso had also been found with a pair of orange shorts, which seemed to indicate another ritual element.
Hoskins was able to deduce from the age and style of Adam’s circumcision that he was unlikely to be from southern Africa. It was much more probable that he came from West Africa — and, more particularly, from the Yoruban group in Nigeria. In the Yoruban pantheistic tradition, there are hundreds of earthbound gods, called orishas. “All orishas require sacrifice,” explains Hoskins. “Not necessarily human sacrifice — but there was no doubt that the practice persisted in some deviant offshoots of Yoruban religion.”
Hoskins’s conclusions shocked the police. If he was to be believed, a child had been sacrificed in the heart of London. The subsequent forensic tests appeared to fortify Hoskins’s theory. By examining Adam’s bones for levels of strontium, the scientists were able to pinpoint Adam’s provenance to the Yoruba plateau in Nigeria. A chance discovery of a Nigerian asylum seeker named Joyce Osagiede provided further clues. Osagiede claimed her husband had been involved with human sacrifice as part of the distinctly weird Yoruban cult of the Maharaj Ji, whose favourite colour was orange-red.
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Hoskins’s work on the Adam case has yielded some fruit — certain members of a human-trafficking gang believed to be connected to the killing have been jailed or deported — but it has not led to a murder charge. Because of the lack of a conclusion, Hoskins devotes several chapters to his work on other high-profile cases: for instance, the victims of a relatively new evil, perpetrated by some revivalist churches in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), in which children said to be possessed by kindoki — witchcraft — are deemed in need of exorcism. The kindoki problem is growing in Britain. Most recently, Hoskins gave evidence at the trial of Magalie Bamu and Eric Bikubi for the murder of Kristy Bamu, Magalie’s younger brother. Bamu and Bikubi, who were both originally from the DRC, had accused Kristy of bringing kindoki into their home. They beat him savagely for five days, and eventually drowned him in the bath.
Intermingled with details of these sinister cases are vignettes from Hoskins’s own life. His connection to the unsettling world of traditional African religions is, we discover, intense and personal. In 1986, he had begun a new life with his wife at a Baptist mission in Bolobo, in rural Zaïre. There, while working at a vaccination clinic, he fathered twins, one of whom died at birth. The surviving twin, Abigail, grew up healthy. But one day, a local man approached Hoskins with dire warnings that his daughter was being called by her twin to the “shadowlands”. This man implored Hoskins to see an nganga (traditional doctor) and “spill some blood”. Offended, Hoskins refused. A few weeks later, Abigail died from a fever. Frustratingly, Hoskins never makes clear the extent to which he believes in the African spirit world.
The Boy in the River is not a traditional true-crime romp. Indeed, it treads an uneasy path between its novelistic style and nonfiction subject. But the facts of the narrative hold the attention. In the 21st century, in the heart of Britain’s capital, a little boy was sacrificed and dumped in the river.
Pan £7.99/ebook £7.99 pp334, ST Bookshop price £7.59