Witch child (Congo)

As witches children are in the Democratic Republic of Congo , Nigeria , Togo , Tanzania called and other African countries children who have magical powers are attributed with whom they allegedly damaging spells are to exercise. Children stigmatized in this way are often abandoned, persecuted and murdered by their mothers. A Congolese woman had an average of 7.27 children in 1994. The fertility rate had dropped to 5.93 children per woman by 2013.

"Witch Children" in the Congo

The background to this quite new phenomenon is the country's economic crisis. The capital Kinshasa has around ten million inhabitants, but only 5% of the workforce is employed in the formal sector. A first structural adjustment program called for by the IMF in 1977 led to the layoff of over 80% of state employees and to a widespread collapse of the education and health system, local public transport and other public services such as garbage disposal. A second structural adjustment program from 1987 envisaged the total market opening of the country and led to the collapse of the manufacturing industry in Kinshasa, which meant a sudden loss of more than 100,000 jobs. But agriculture in all of Zaire could no longer compete with the cheap imports. Hyperinflation occurred .

Impoverished farmers moved to Kinshasa in the following years without being able to find work there. The civil war that flared up from 1996 led to numerous other internally displaced persons moving to the city.

Witch children and the collapse of Congolese society

The catastrophic economic situation led to the disintegration of families in the Congo. The previously widespread customs of mutual invitations, dinners and neighborhood help are practically no longer there. More and more men also left their families because they could no longer feed them. There were hardly any weddings because the men could not pay the bride price and saw no future prospects for themselves. After all, the mother-child connections have been falling apart since 2000: many children were accused of witchcraft and chased away. This often happened when their mothers could no longer feed them. Although the "witch children" are sometimes ascribed positive qualities, the dominant idea is that they are bad luck charms and that they use their power to harm other people through magic . They are often considered to be the incarnation of evil .

The strongly in Kinshasa popular evangelical - fundamentalist sects support this belief in witches and subdue alleged witch children sometimes painful procedures in order of their supposed obsession to free ( exorcism ). In Kinshasa alone, thirty to forty thousand children are said to be “witches”. Humanitarian organizations strive to educate and help affected children.

While the belief in witchcraft is widespread in Africa, the specific form of child witch practically did not exist before 1990. Therefore, they cannot be traced back to traditional beliefs . Rather, it occurred as a result of the economic collapse in Kinshasa. "The capacities of the Congolese families and communities to ensure basic services and the protection of their children are apparently exhausted" (Mashimbo Mdoe from the organization Save the Children). Other child rights-oriented organizations also deal with the persecution and problematic handling of so-called “witch children”, carry out awareness-raising campaigns and provide medical and psychosocial care for mutilated children (e.g. Kinderrechte Afrika eV ).

Individual evidence

↑ Source: Theglobaleconomy.com: Democratic Republic of the Congo: Fertility rate [1] (based on statistics published by the World Bank)
↑ cf. Mike Davis: Planet of the Slums, p. 199 ff.

Web links

literature

Mike Davis: Planet of the Slums. Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-935936-56-9 .

[1] Source: Theglobaleconomy.com: Democratic Republic of the Congo: Fertility rate [1] (based on statistics published by the World Bank)

[2] . Mike Davis: Planet of the Slums, p. 199 ff.