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DR Congo's unhappy child 'witches'
Friday, 17 January, 2003, 07:11 GMT
By Mark Dummett
BBC, Kinshasa
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/2660757.stm
At a church in Kinshasa the children sat glassy eyed and nervous as they waited to be exorcised by the priest.
One by one they stood up and explained how they became witches, were kicked out of their homes and ended up at the church.
" Parents who don't work or who lose their jobs... are looking for a scapegoat "
Ange Bay Bay
Lawyer
Nzuzi, an eight-year-old with a sad face, said she was tricked by some class mates.
"They gave me some bread at school. It was poisoned and they came to get it back later."
Nzuzi said that when her family slept, she would sneak out to join her friends to fly in the night sky.
When they found out, she joined the growing ranks of children abandoned by their parents in Kinshasa, and accused of witchcraft.
The children rights organisation, Save the Children, estimates that there are more than 20,000 of them.
'New problem'
Although the belief in sorcery is traditional in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as elsewhere in Africa, many people are concerned that children never used to be blamed in such huge numbers.
"It is a new problem, because when we grew up we never saw this problem of children accused of sorcery. It is only since life became bad," said Ange Bay Bay, a children's rights lawyer.
When something goes wrong in a family the children are often blamed, she said.
So a child can be accused of sorcery when death, an illness or sudden unemployment strikes the home.
As Kinshasa's economy and infrastructure collapsed in the last decade, as a result of government corruption and war, so the number of children accused of witchcraft exploded.
"Parents who don't work or who lose their jobs because of the economic situation are looking for a scapegoat," Mrs Bay Bay said.
Nabor, for example, who now lives in a home supported by Ange Bay Bay, was blamed, along with his brothers, for the death of his father.
"My dad was ill, he had tuberculosis. And when he died, we were chased away from the house because we were accused of having eaten him," he said.
Song for change
Many of the children suffer appalling treatment from their families and in the churches where they are forced to undergo sometimes painful exorcisms, Mrs Bay Bay explained.
"There are children who are ironed with a clothes iron, there are others who are not given food for a whole week - there are these unbelievable things going on," she said.
A group of former street kids turned musicians are now trying to do something about the situation.
Their band, called La Chytoura, backed by a Unites States NGO Centre Lokole, has released a song and a video to change people's attitudes.
It tells the story of one young boy who is blamed by his parents for his father's unemployment.
When he accidentally kicks over a cooking pot, he is accused of sorcery and thrown onto the streets.
The song, of course, has a happy ending, and the band members hope its story line and catchy rhythm will have an impact on Kinshasa's music-loving and TV-watching public.
"We want to educate the whole world that what is going on in our country is not good," singer Romain Mazamba said.
=============================
Child witches in the Congo
Jeremy Vine reports for the BBC's Newsnight programme from Kinshasa, DR Congo
Tuesday, October 12, 1999 Published at 16:21 GMT 17:21 UK
There is something wrong with the maize grinder in the Mahonda household.
Pandi, a father of two with a preoccupied air, drags the rusted motor out of his home to work on it for the umpteenth time this week.
Still tutting after five minutes, having got precisely nowhere with his screwdrivers and hammers, he shrugs and gives up. "This grinder will simply not work," he says. Kinshasa is not the kind of place where helpful ironmongers stay open late to fix rusted motors. It is a lost cause - bad news for Pandi and his partner, Kalumbu.
Their continuing problems with the grinder are also potentially devastating news for their two sons. Ikomba, eight, and Luwuabisa, 10, have already been identified as the cause of the problems this poor village household is experiencing.
'My children are witches'
Their mother sums up what has gone wrong. "First the icebox in the kitchen broke, then I was ill. I just kept being sick. No doctor could tell me what the matter was. Then the grinder broke down, and I had an accident in the car. Also, money went missing from the home. That was when I realised."
Realised - realised what, precisely? "Realised that Ikomba and Luwuabisa are witches." It is no more precise than that. Kalumbu completes the sentence with the two boys sitting either side of her, obviously not aware of just how much trouble they may be in.
This story is being repeated again and again in Congo at the moment. The country has been badly scarred by war - first by the rebel uprising which ousted the corrupt and tyrannical President Mobutu in 1997, then by a second rebel move which is now threatening his successor, President Laurent Kabila.
He was Congo's best hope for democracy, but has not yet held an election and is suspected of pocketing state money. To call the economy a basketcase does not do even half its problems justice.
People are superstitious here. They want explanations when things go wrong.
Because of the increasing hardship many children end up living with members of their extended family, and a phenomenon which experts say is unique to Congo is developing. Children are being accused of sorcery and chucked onto the streets. The unlucky ones are murdered by their own family members before they escape.
Which is why Ikomba and Luwuabisa are in such danger.
Accused of witchcraft
For now, their parents are not completely certain of their diagnosis. So they take them to a sect to see what the real truth is - which is where the story starts to get really frightening.
The sect - run by a free-thinking Congolese Bible teacher called Prophet Onokoko - has 230 children on its books. All are accused of witchcraft. Many have been thrown out of their family homes. All will have to undergo some kind of ritual exorcism to expunge the evil spirits.
In a small room, members of the sect crowd round the two terrified Mahonda boys, praying. Eyes closed, with an air of deep concentration, Prophet Onokoko joins in with chosen words.
"Oui!" someone shouts suddenly - confirmation, it is said, that the boys are witches (or as they call them here, 'enfants dits sorciers'). The Prophet's eyes open and light up. He shakes Ikomba and Luwuabisa by the hand. "Yes, yes," he grins. "It is confirmed."
The procedure is simple, Prophet Onokoko explains. The boys will be made to vomit up the devil. He produces other "devils" that have been sicked up by young children: a whole prawn, a shell in the shape of a horn, and even - kept in a blue bucket which he lifts with a flourish - two barbel fish.
"These came out of the mouths of children who had spirits," he tells us. "We had a girl here who vomited a large prawn. When it came out, she was at peace."
Angella's story
Then we meet the girl, Angella, who is busy hanging washing on a line. She says her name, and that she is 10. Then she tells how she was treated when her parents decided their bad luck was being caused by her sorcery.
"They wanted to kill me. They wanted to throw me into a big river. They put me in a sack, ready to do it. When I escaped, they gave me shocks with an eletrical power flex."
More than 14,000 children in Kinshasa are said to have been thrown out of their homes accused of witchcraft. It's tempting to think that if Prophet Onokoko manages to remove the stigma from some of them so they can return to their families, his sect is worth its weight in gold.
Child abuse
Not so, say Save The Children. Their representative here, Mahimbo Mdoe, has researched the world of enfants dit sorciers and is extremely worried by the work of the exorcism sects, and not least Prophet Onokoko's: "As far as we're concerned what's going in that organisation is purely and simply child abuse," he says. "Children are made to vormit up things that have been inserted into them unnaturally."
Two eyewitnesses have told us of objects like bars of soap being inserted into the anuses of children. It all shows just how vulnerable children in Kinshasa are, if they get thrown out their families accused of being child witches.
The Prophet denied all of this, but he was happy enough showing his Polaroid photos of items he claimed to have forced children to vomit up - and one photograph in particular was distressing to see. A boy with a massively bloated stomach grinned at the camera. But a part of the picture, just over his right leg, had not come out. There was a white flash over his shin.
"The white is there because the spirit of the demon was inside his leg," said the Prophet. "He had to be given several exorcisms. Now, he is fine." Quite what "several exorcisms" would do to a boy who could not have been more than twelve is anyone's guess, but the charity thought they knew - his insides were so badly disrupted, they believed, that he died. The 'demon' in his leg was nothing more than a fault when the photo was developed.
We stood looking at that picture for a while, wondering when the suffering of Congo's children would ever end.
=============================
Congo witch-hunt's child victims
BBC Online
Wednesday, 22 December, 1999, 15:48 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/africa/575178.stm
Congolese children are being accused of witchcraft and made scapegoats for the country's many ills. Jeremy Vine reports from Kinshasa on the gruesome business of exorcism.
There is something wrong with the maize grinder in the Mahonda household. Pandi, a father of two, drags the rusted motor out of his home to work on it for the umpteenth time this week.
After five minutes, having got nowhere with his screwdrivers and hammers, he shrugs and gives up.
"This grinder will simply not work," he says - bad news for Pandi and his partner, Kalumbu. Kinshasa is not the kind of place where helpful ironmongers stay open late to fix rusted motors.
But the continuing problems with the grinder are also potentially devastating news for their two sons. Ikomba, 8, and Luwuabisa, 10, have already been identified as the cause of the problems this poor village household is experiencing.
Their mother sums up what has gone wrong.
"First the icebox in the kitchen broke, then I was ill. I just kept being sick. No doctor could tell me what the matter was.
"Then the grinder broke down, and I had an accident in the car. Also, money went missing from the home. That was when I realised."
Realised - realised what, precisely?
"Realised that Ikomba and Luwuabisa are witches."
It is no more precise than that. Kalumbu completes the sentence with the two boys sitting either side of her, not aware of how much trouble they may be in.
Bad times
This story is being repeated again and again in the Democratic Republic of Congo at the moment. The country has been badly scarred by war - first by the rebel uprising which ousted the corrupt and tyrannical President Mobutu in 1997, then by a second rebel move which is now threatening his successor, President Laurent Kabila.
He was Congo's best hope for democracy, but has not yet held an election and is suspected of pocketing state money. To call the economy a basket case does not do even half its problems justice.
People are superstitious here. They want explanations when things go wrong.
Because of the increasing hardship many children end up living with members of their extended family, and a phenomenon which experts say is unique to Congo is developing. Children are being accused of sorcery and chucked onto the streets.
The unlucky ones are murdered by their own family members before they escape. Which is why Ikomba and Luwuabisa are in such danger. For now, their parents are not completely certain of their diagnosis.
'Exorcism'
So they take them to a sect to find the real truth. It is there that the story starts to get really frightening.
The sect - run by a free-thinking Congolese Bible teacher called Prophet Onokoko - has 230 children on its books. All are accused of witchcraft.
Many have been thrown out of their family homes. All will have to undergo some kind of ritual exorcism to expunge the evil spirits.
In a small room, members of the sect crowd round the two terrified Mahonda boys, praying. Eyes closed, with an air of deep concentration, Prophet Onokoko joins in with chosen words.
"Oui!" someone shouts suddenly - confirmation, it is said, that the boys are witches (or as they call them here, enfants dits sorciers).
The Prophet's eyes open and light up. He shakes Ikomba and Luwuabisa by the hand. "Yes, yes," he grins. "It is confirmed."
'Vomit up the devil'
The procedure is simple, Prophet Onokoko explains. The boys will be made to vomit up the devil. He produces other "devils" that have been sicked up by young children: a whole prawn, a shell in the shape of a horn, and even - kept in a blue bucket which he lifts with a flourish - two barbel fish.
"These came out of the mouths of children who had spirits," he tells us. "We had a girl here who vomited a large prawn. When it came out, she was at peace."
The we meet the girl, Angella, who is busy hanging washing on a line. She says she is 10 years old. Then she tells how she was treated when her parents decided their bad luck was being caused by her sorcery.
"They wanted to kill me. They wanted to throw me into a big river. They put me in a sack, ready to do it. When I escaped, they gave me shocks with an eletrical power flex."
More than 14,000 children in Kinshasa are said to have been thrown out of their homes accused of witchcraft. It is tempting to think that if Prophet Onokoko manages to remove the stigma from some of them so they can return to their families, his sect is worth its weight in gold.
Abuse
Not so, says Save The Children. The organisation's representative here, Mahimbo Mdoe, has researched the world of enfants dit sorciers and is extremely worried by the work of the exorcism sects, and not least Prophet Onokoko's.
"As far as we're concerned, what's going in that organisation is purely and simply child abuse," he says.
"Children are made to vormit up things that have been inserted into them unnaturally.
"Two eyewitnesses have told us of objects like bars of soap being inserted into the anuses of children. It all shows just how vulnerable children in Kinshasa are, if they get thrown out their families accused of being child witches."
Bloated stomach
The Prophet denied all of this, but he was happy enough showing his Polaroid photos of items he claimed to have forced children to vomit up - and one photograph in particular was distressing to see.
A boy with a massively bloated stomach grinned at the camera. But a part of the picture, just over his right leg, had not come out. There was a white flash over his shin.
"The white is there because the spirit of the demon was inside his leg," said the Prophet.
"He had to be given several exorcisms. Now, he is fine."
Quite what "several exorcisms" would do to a boy who could not have been more than 12 is anyone's guess, but the charity thought they knew - his insides were so badly disrupted, they believed, that he died.
The "demon" in his leg was nothing more than a fault when the photo was developed.
We stood looking at that picture for a while, wondering when the suffering of Congo's children would ever end.
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