Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.When Josephine Iyamu was arrested in 2017 at Heathrow airport after stepping off a flight from Lagos in Nigeria, she was carrying eight mobile phones and 20 SIM cards. While searching through her luggage, police also found a pouch containing small bones and clumps of human hair. “We described it at the time as a mobile juju ritual kit, so that was a bit of an eye-opener,” recalls Paul, one of the arresting officers.A year later, Iyamu, a British-Nigerian nurse from London, was jailed for 18 years for trafficking five Nigerian women to Germany where they were forced to become sex workers. Iyamu had struck fear into the women by performing a ritual which involved stripping them naked, cutting them with razor blades, forcing them to eat raw chicken hearts and invoking the spirit of an ancient deity fabled for putting curses on individuals and their families.The new podcast, Cursed, tracks the police investigation which involved German, Nigerian and British authorities working together to expose Iyamu, the first person to be convicted under Britain’s Modern Slavery Act. The series is hosted by Femi Oke, a British-Nigerian presenter and journalist, and is the work of Raw, the production company behind last year’s exceptional The Second Victim, about a Black woman adopted into a white family and her efforts to find her biological parents. Cursed is similarly characterised by smart, sensitive and detailed storytelling. The series spans 10 episodes and it’s a reflection of the superior writing and reporting that none of them feel like filler. It helps that Oke and her team have secured remarkable access to police evidence, including wiretap recordings and interrogations, which are woven into the narrative alongside the testimony of investigators and witnesses. Oke also digs deep into Nigerian culture and belief systems as she explains how Iyamu, known to the women and her associates as “Madam Sandra”, exerted control over her victims. Motivated by a desire to make enough money to support their families back home, each of the women submitted to the “juju” ritual, after which they were transported to Europe, making the perilous journey across the Mediterranean by dinghy, and then harassed daily by Iyamu to pay back their travel costs, which she claimed ran into tens of thousands. Central to Cursed is the figure of Iyamu herself who, prior to her arrest, lived a scarcely believable double life. In London, she resided in a modest flat on a Bermondsey estate with her husband and son, while in Benin City in Nigeria she owned a gated mansion with her own staff and private security. There she dabbled in local politics and presented herself as a pillar of the community. To hear this woman, a nurse who had caused untold suffering and pain, blankly intoning “no comment” to British police as they read out the charges against her is to be chilled to the bone. audible.co.uk
