Congo children accused of sorcery

KINSHASA, Congo — When Mando Mengi was 5, his mother died and his father remarried. His stepmother, a tall, mercurial woman with two children of her own, saw Mando as a burden and gave him endless chores while the other kids did nothing.

One day, Mando refused to sweep the dirt floor of their home. His stepmother found a sinister explanation for his stubbornness: He was practicing witchcraft.

She began to withhold food and sometimes beat him, saying it would purge the evil spirits. Finally, she gave his father an ultimatum: “You’ve brought a sorcerer into this house,” Mando recalled her saying. “Either he leaves or I do.”

Mando didn’t wait for him to decide. He ran away, joining tens of thousands of children who live on the streets of this broken-down African capital — most of them, aid agencies say, rejected by families who accuse them of witchcraft.

In Congo, where belief in the power of spirits and black magic goes back centuries, boys and girls as young as 5 are bearing the brunt of witchcraft allegations that once were reserved for rural women and widows. Aid workers blame the social toll of decades of economic depression, disease and conflict, which have torn apart countless families and made daily life desperate for most of the country’s 60 million people.

With 4 million Congolese thought to have perished mostly from illnesses and hunger since a civil war began in 1998, and with eight in 10 surviving on less than a dollar per day, children are sometimes seen as encumbrances, just more mouths to feed.

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Pastors offer exorcisms

Jean-Marie Kalonji, a pastor who runs the Fountain of Adoration of God Evangelical Center and advertises his deliverance services on Christian radio, claims to be Kinshasa’s expert on the subject. On a recent afternoon, a dozen people waited in the dirt courtyard of his one-room church for consultations.

“Witchcraft is a bigger problem in Congo than AIDS,” said Kalonji, a young, professorial man with eyeglasses perched on the end of his nose. He displayed a 2-inch binder crammed with loose-leaf sheets, each of them a witchcraft case, he said.

Kalonji, who claims to have performed hundreds of exorcisms, renounces the “false methods” of other pastors, which he said don’t work. He listed some of these methods in a slim paperback volume he authored three years ago titled “African Sorcery: Strategies of Deliverance,” which he sells for about $7.

Among them are burning the sorcerer, extracting flesh from his mouth, beating him with an iron rod, trampling him, making him drink a bottle of palm oil daily for a week and forcing him to stare at the sun.

Kalonji was cagey about his own technique, which he said involved a lot of prayer but no physical abuse. As for payment, he said, “If a grateful parent offers me money, I don’t refuse.”