Twins a mixed blessing for some West African parents

OUAGADOUGOU – In her dreams, Eveline Zagre believes her 2 sets of twins stock premonitions and marque demands of her -- bargain a chicken, beg for money.

“Their spirits volition participate your dreams and fto you cognize what they privation and past you person to get it for them,” she said.

Despite the load of pursuing their imagination directives, Zagre considers herself doubly blessed. The 30-year-old parent of 5 is raising 3-year-old duplicate girls and 13-year-old duplicate boys successful Burkina Faso – 1 of the West African countries wherever twins are revered for having peculiar powers, similar healing the sick, warding disconnected danger, bringing fiscal prosperity and predicting the future.

The majority-Muslim country, with its beardown taste clasp of the supernatural, regards twins arsenic the children of spirits, and the mothers of twins arsenic specially picked to carnivore them. This profoundly rooted cognition stems from the days radical could not scientifically explicate however twins were conceived. In different parts of West Africa, twins are seen arsenic a curse.

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“People were acrophobic of twins due to the fact that they couldn’t explicate ... wherefore these children were calved 2 alternatively of one,” said Honorine Sawadogo, a sociologist astatine the government-run National Center for Scientific and Technological Research successful Burkina Faso.

Parents of twins would crook to witch doctors who came up with rules they believed they indispensable travel successful bid to support their children and themselves safe, said Sawadogo, who did her doctoral probe connected the mothers of twins. These beliefs and practices persist contiguous contempt the established technological mentation for however twins travel into the world.

Zagre and her husband, Ousmane Nikiema, visited a witch doc aft giving commencement to some sets of twins. For their boys, the parents were fixed nary directives. But a witch doc told them their girls, Victorine and Victoria Nikiema, needed to beg for wealth connected the broadside of the roadworthy oregon hazard being killed by a household member’s spirit.

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"If (the witch doctor) sees a tone successful the compound, you’ll person to instrumentality the children to beg successful bid to forestall the curse," said Nikiema, who lives with his household successful Burkina Faso's superior city, Ouagadougou. “(The spirit) mightiness not termination them, but he’ll bash thing to them. He tin marque them insane oregon thing similar, oregon helium tin paralyze them.”

Throughout Ouagadougou, mothers and their identically dressed twins tin beryllium seen sitting connected mats alongside roads and begging. They are driven by imagination requests and witch doc instructions, mothers told The Associated Press.

As they beg, visitors connection gifts, similar chickens, chromatic barroom and seashells, successful speech for blessings.

“I bless radical erstwhile they travel and springiness america things, I accidental whitethorn God heal you if idiosyncratic comes and is sick,” said Marcelline Tapsoba, the parent of 2-year-old twins.

As they sat connected the crushed successful their accustomed spot successful the city's outskirts, Tapsoba and her children were surrounded by different mothers and their twins who besides were begging and offering blessings.

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Tapsoba said those who person her blessings often instrumentality weeks aboriginal to convey her for their newfound romanticist oregon fiscal success.

Similar scenes play retired successful Ghana. “If you springiness commencement to the twins successful Ghana, you person to travel the twins’ rules,” said Kasim Amadu, a businessman. It is thought that wronged and unhappy twins tin pb to idiosyncratic harm for the parents and others, helium said.

Most cultures successful West Africa cherish twins, and soothsayers judge they tin heighten their connection with the tone satellite done them, said Philip Peek, a prof emeritus astatine Drew University successful New Jersey whose probe includes folklore and African religion.

Peek, who is the exertion of the book, “Twins successful African and Diaspora Cultures: Double Trouble, Twice Blessed,” said determination is simply a longstanding planetary content that twins person a heightened quality to pass due to the fact that of the enslaved they signifier successful the womb, which allows them to link to higher powers.

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“They pass intuitively and the quality is surely recognized successful secular terms, not conscionable spiritual,” Peek said.

Not each West African assemblage embraces them.

Twins are considered evil successful immoderate neighborhoods surrounding Nigeria’s superior of Abuja, said Stevens Olusola Ajayi, a Christian missionary who has rescued 19 sets of twins retired of fearfulness they would beryllium killed. Ajayi, who has been doing this enactment since 1996, brings the children to unrecorded with his household and community. This twelvemonth helium returned six children to their parents; it is the archetypal clip helium has been capable to put specified household reunions.

Even successful countries wherever they are viewed favorably, twins tin beryllium astatine hazard of being exploited for fiscal gain. Some mothers get children from neighbors and walk them disconnected arsenic twins to marque much wealth from begging, said Sawadogo, the sociologist.

It is not casual being the genitor of twins. In Ouagadougou, Fati Yougma, 27, said her duplicate girls bushed her successful her dreams if she doesn’t obey their demands.

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Despite that, Yougma is honored to beryllium their mother.

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AP writer Chinedu Asadu successful Lagos, Nigeria, contributed to this report.

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Associated Press religion sum receives enactment from the Lilly Endowment done The Conversation U.S. The AP is solely liable for this content.

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