Black Axe: from a college fraternity to a crime lord cult
From the outside, several college fraternities look like terrifying, brutal cults that are willing and able to inflict horrifying violence against people. It turns out that in some countries, that’s exactly what they turn into.
Strangely enough, this is enough of a problem in Nigeria that these fraternities have been given a name, Confraternities. These have been forming since the original, the Pyrate Confraternity, came together in the University College, Ibadan. The tragic part is that many of these organisations were built on fairly solid foundations. The Pyrate Confraternity, for example, was established by a group of college kids who wanted to stand against the wealth disparity of the student population of their school.
What began as pranks, sticking it to the more affluent, “prestigious” fraternities, descended into outright violence soon afterwards. Many more fraternities learned all the right lessons from the Pyrates, but all the wrong ones too. The most infamous among them were Black Axe, a confraternity that formed in the University of Benin, and again, the intentions of the group were pure – they wanted to strike a blow against the shackles of colonialism, just as the black axe in their logo did to a set of white shackles around a black man’s hands.
This all sounds rad. Which was exactly the problem. If you only listen to the intentions and the polemics of these groups, you’d think they were the good guys. Then you consider their actions. Everything falls into a terrifying world of organised crime after that. Violence, trafficking, money laundering, murder, every abhorrent thing you can think of, Black Axe were responsible for. And a few more than you probably couldn’t even think of.
How do you change what would otherwise be a set of smart college boys into a literal mafia? You first have to become a cult.
This is exactly what Black Axe is at its core. This isn’t a group that convinces its members to do unconscionable things, it makes them utterly subservient to them. This is a group where anyone looking to join them must first be stripped naked, then forced into a freezing, muddy field while the entire rest of the group beats them half to death. Then they crawl through their tormentor’s legs in a process called “the Devil’s passage” before finishing their initiation ritual by drinking blood.
Would you believe it, other reports of Black Axe initiation rituals are even darker. Containing even more brutal violence and the ritualised sexual assault of women. Now, this would be horrible enough if this were standard gangland activity. However, Black Axe have made some powerful allies. They’ve been involved in political crime multiple times, overseeing alleged election fraud and ferrying blackmail and bribe money on behalf of other elected officials.
However, their bread and butter is online crimes. Their line of scams, which has seen them pose as banks, romantic partners, inheritance lawyers and real estate agents, has reportedly generated billions of dollars in revenue. It’s not as shocking as their violent crimes, but they leave people just as broken and helpless, with countless people being swindled out of their savings every day as a direct result of the Black Axe’s schemes.
A sign, if one was ever needed, that even the most noble of causes can be corrupted.