DRC: Children's lives torn by accusations of witchcraft

Cedric Rodrick was 8 years old when the village turned against him. After his father was killed in an accident, an uncle denounced him and his brother as “witches”. A bogus preacher, offering to exorcise the evil spirits, concurred. A five-year nightmare had begun.

“The villagers chased us away, they beat us with sticks and threw stones at us. They kept shouting ‘witch, witch’ at us and said they had to beat the evil spirits out of us,” he told The Times. “I knew I was not a witch. They only did that because they did not want to look after us.”

Cedric and his brother tracked down a sister of his mother, who had died many years previously, in a neighbouring village. She turned out to be worse and handed them over to the pastor for exorcism.

“The pastor said we were responsible for my father’s death and we had to be cleansed. He made us sleep outside and refused us food for days at a time. Then, he and my aunt would hit us. They said they had to make the evil spirits run away, but they hurt. In the end I ran away. I will never go back,” he recounted.

Eventually Cedric escaped. He lost his brother somewhere along the way but teamed up with others. They formed Dickensian gangs and roamed the teeming street markets of Kinshasa during the day looking for scraps of food. At night they slept in dingy, stinking alleys, oozing untreated waste.

Unicef estimates that there are 25,000 abandoned children in Kinshasa alone and more than 40,000 across the country. More than 70 per cent have been accused of witchcraft. In places such as Mbuji-Mayi, the main diamond centre, they are used as diggers in informal mines and then killed in fights over demands for payment.

Cedric, now 14, lives in a refuge for such children. On the surface he appears like any other teenager, but his face darkens and his voice turns to a whisper when he recalls the days when he lived rough.

“I found him in the market, eating rubbish,” said BayBay Ange, the judge who set up the centre in July 2000 and now offers a home for some 25 children, ranging in age from 6 to 14. “I brought him here.”

As she talked about the centre — a tin-roofed house of small rooms crammed with bunk beds — a six-year-old boy limped across the room. “He was a burden to his mother, who moves around selling goods. He held her up and she needed an excuse to get rid of him, so she said he was possessed, which is why he limps. I found him only a few weeks ago — the other children tell me about ‘newcomers’,” Mrs Ange said.

The Democratic Republic of Congo has witnessed a huge resurgence in accusations of witchcraft and sorcery since the civil war in the mid-1990s destroyed what had been left after years of dictatorship and corruption. The kleptocratic dictator Mobutu Sese Seko and his cronies, aided by avaricious foreigners, stole the country’s enormous mineral wealth and ran down all government institutions. Rural communities, though excruciatingly poor, survived using centuries-old traditional methods, including an extended family network.

But these were destroyed by conflict: whole communities were displaced. Mass rapes, massacres and child soldiers became the order of the day.

Pastor Michel Kabi, who runs an organisation set up to counter the witchcraft phenomenon, says that the civil war, in which more than three million were killed — making it the world’s most deadly conflict since the Second World War — destroyed the social fabric of society. “People are looking for an excuse not to meet traditional obligations. They are too poor and desperate themselves and are frightened of having to look after children too. Accusing the children of sorcery is an easy way out,” he said.

Sorcery, closely linked to voodoo, has always existed in Congo, though over the past decade it has become much more popular, an easy vehicle on which to blame misfortunes.

In the past old people were often labelled “witches”, usually because their children had died and they had become a burden on the village. A headman would often prepare a potion or order the accused to wear some fetish and the matter would end there. In urban areas, where prostitution is rife and the family network has broken down, children have become the new scapegoats.

In the past five years, the hunt for witches across Congo has become feverish, at times looking increasingly like an African version of the 1692 Salem witch-hunt in Massachusetts.

Human rights activists say that the children can be starved for up to two weeks before “exorcism” ceremonies, in which they are repeatedly hit and abused. Often such treatment results in self-induced trances, or vomiting, which onlookers believe provide evidence of inner demons escaping. In the worst cases, they say that children’s stomachs are slit with razor blades to allow the evil a way out.

Last year the country passed a constitutional clause forbidding such accusations against children, but the Government is powerless to enforce it. The issue has been fuelled by the revivalist churches that have mushroomed across the country and in overseas Congolese communities, where people feel lost and isolated.

There are now thousands of these “churches”, with unqualified pastors offering deliverance and other panaceas to a life of crushing poverty. The preachers charge a price for cleansing the children of evil sprits that they say are the cause of the parents’ poverty. Illiterate parents are easy targets.

A recent Save the Children Fund report, entitiled The Invention of Child Witches in Democratic Republic of Congo, said that revivalist churches deliberately fuelled violence and hatred towards children as a way of making money.

“Most of the churches operate on a profit-making basis and nearly all of those practising exorcism will put on a real performance for the purposes of financial gain,” the report stated. “These churches demonstrate the corruption of state officials, who draw clear profit from them in the form of illegal payments. On the other hand, the churches also operate as reference points for families who have neither access to, nor confidence in, basic or social services.”

In Mrs Ange’s shelter another boy, Giles Nzambe, 7, was chased from his village three years ago after his parents died of an unknown illness. His relatives told other villagers that he turned into a monster at night. He was forced to sleep outside. During the day he survived by eating wild-growing mangoes and avocados.

“They threw sticks at him and he drifted off to the city,” Mama Ange said. “I found him foraging among the rubbish for food. We traced his village and took him home. When we arrived, the villagers saw him and ran away shouting, ‘The witch has returned’. They would not listen to reason. We had no choice but to bring him back here, but he is still totally traumatised by his experience. It is terrible what happens to these children.”

Mrs Ange said that the Government lacked the will to deal with such a crisis. She said that bogus preachers or churches even paid bribes to obtain government licences. “This is what happens when a country is rotten from top to bottom.”

Street Urchins

• Until the 1970s there were few street children in Congo, police could arrest them for vagrancy and move them to institutions or take them back home
• Economic decline and civil war led to an explosion of street children: numbers have doubled in ten years
• They have now formed gangs, with adult leaders and their own dialects
• Political parties enlist these gangs to create public disorder in mass demonstrations
• Traditionally, extended families are obliged to care for orphaned children — one of the few excuses for refusing assistance is if the child is accused of sorcery