Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

196 PLANET OF SLUMS
gift exchanges and reciprocity relations that order Zairean society:
unable to afford bride price or become breadwinners, young men, for
example, abandon pregnant women and fathers go A WOL.76 Simultaneously,
the AIDS holocaust leaves behind vast numbers of orphans
and HIV-positive children. There are huge pressures on poor urban
families - shorn of their rural kinship support networks, or conversely,
overburdened by the demands of lineage solidarity - to jettison their
most dependent members. As a researcher for Save the Children grimly
notes: "The capacities of Congolese families and communities to
assure basic care and protection for their children seem to be breaking
down."77
This crisis of the family, moreover, has coincided with both the
Pentecostal boom and a renascent fear of sorcery. Many Kinois,
according to Devisch, interpret their fate within the larger urban catastrophe
as "a type of curse or ensorce!!ement."7S As a result, literal,
perverse belief in Harry Potter has gripped Kinshasa, leading to the
mass-hysterical denunciation of thousands of child "witches" and their
expulsion to the streets, even their murder. The children, some barely
more than infants, have been accused of every misdeed and are even
believed, in the Ndjili slum at least, to fly about at night in swarms on
broomsticks. Aid workers emphasize the novelty of the phenomenon:
"Before 1990, there was hardly any talk of child witches in Kinshasa.
The children who are now being accused of witchcraft are in the same
situation: they become an unproductive burden for parents who are no
longer able to feed them. The children said to be 'witches' are most
often from very poor families"79
The charismatic churches have been deeply complicit in promoting
and legitimizing fears about bewitched children: indeed, the
Pentecostals portray their faith as God's armor against witchcraft.
Hysteria amongst both adults and children (who have developed
intense phobias about cats, lizards, and the long dark nights of power
blackouts) has been exacerbated by the widespread circulation of lurid
76 Review of lecture by Filip De Boeck, "Children, the Occult and the Street in
Kinshasa," NClJJS from Africa (February 2003).
77 Mahimbo Mdoe quoted in Astill, "Congo Casts Out its 'Child Witches'."
78 Devisch, "Frenzy, Violence, and Ethical Renewal in Kinshasa," p. 608.
79 "DRC: Torture and Death of an Eight-Year-Old Child," October 2003.
A SURPLUS HUMANITY?
Christian videos showing the confessions of "witch children" and subsequent
exorcisms, sometimes involving starvation and scalding
water. so US AID researchers directly blame the industry of "self-made
preachers" who "set up their pulpits and mete out predictions for those
seeking an easy fix for their grief and misfortune."
\'>C'hen prophecies fail, the preachers might easily blame continued misery
on spurious causes, such as witchcraft, often turning on children as the
source because they are easy to blame and least able to defend them­
selves. A family seeking the advice of their preacher might, for example,
be told that their handicapped child is causing their continued misery,
citing the child ' s disability as a clear indication that he or she is a witch. S!
De Boeck, on the other hand, claims that the sects are sustaining an
informal moral order amidst general collapse, and that "the church
leaders do not themselves produce these accusations, but merely
confirm and thereby legitimize them." The pastors organize public confessions
and exorcisms (cure d'dmes): "The child is placed in the middle
of a circle of praying, often entranced women who regularly lapse into
glossolalia, a sign of the Holy Spirit." But families often refuse to take
children back once they have been accused, and they are then forced
into the street. "I am Vany and I am three years old," one child told De
Boeck. "I was ilL My legs started to swell. And then they started saying
that I was a witch. It was true. The preacher confirmed it."82
Witch children, like possessed maidens in seventeenth-century
Salem, seem to hallucinate the accusations against them, accepting their
role as sacrificial receptacles for family immiseration and urban anomie.
One boy told photographer Vincen Beeckman:
I've eaten 800 men. I make them have accidents, in planes or cars. I even
went to Belgium thanks to a mermaid who took me all the way to the
80 See "Christian Fundamentalist Groups Spreading over Africa," German
campaign of Friends of People Close to Nature, 17 June 2004 (v;ww.fpcn-globaLorg).
81 Cripe et aI., "Abandonment and Separation of Children in the Democratic
Republic of Congo," p. 16.
82 See extracts from Filip De Boeck, "Geographies of Exclusion: Churches and
Child-Witches in Kinshasa," BEople 6 (March-August 2003).
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