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The "Witch" Children of Angola:
The War Is Over But a New Horror Is Growing
2004: Just one of many stories By Rebecca

They are the criancas feiticeiras, the "child witches," the latest victims in Angola's degrading, agonizing civil war. The war supposedly ended two years ago, after twenty-seven years of conflict, with the assassination of rebel leader Jonas Savimbi. But the war left more than just buildings and streets and cities in ruins -- it left families broken, bodies malnourished, minds damaged, spirits wounded.

Thousands of children have been accused of witchcraft by their families. Abused, tortured, they are "fortunate" if they are only driven away from home. Helena Kufumana is one such fortunate "witch," a shy thirteen year-old in a "101 Dalmatians" T-shirt that is too big for her skinny body.

She cries.

In February, Helena was accused by her own parents of making her nieces ill by casting spells. Her hand was burned on a stove, her few clothes burned, and she was choked. Finally, her own mother and sisters beat her in public, and drove her from her home.

She cries. Like many such children, Helena has found refuge in a church shelter. "They tell me that if I try to come home they will kill me. They say I'm cursed."

WHAT IS HAPPENING

How many other children like Helena are "cursed" is impossible to say. Accused by their families of imagined acts of witchcraft, they are beaten, tortured, and sometimes killed. Human-rights workers, stunned by the large scale and maliciousness of the accusations and attacks, suspect that most of the children who wander the streest of Angola are just such criancas feiticeiras. Pariahs, they survive on scraps of food and hand-outs at markets. The luckier ones are taken in by churches and human-rights groups, where they are given regular meals and clean clothing -- but remain haunted by the accusations and torture.

The attacks on the "child witches" and the abuse inflicted on them, usually by their own families, is one of the most gruesome and deranged outbreaks of domestic violence in Africa in recent years. Human-rights activists seem at a loss to fully explain it.

"This is something new to us," says Matondo Alexandre of the United Nations Children's Fund. "In African culture it is usually the older people who are accused of practicing witchcraft. Now we're even seeing cases popping up involving babies."

WHY?

Why are so many Angolans turning on their own young, and in such a vicious manner, especially now? The war is over, finally. Why the torture and beatings when the people should be rebuilding?

To begin, peace has not brought prosperity for many. Though the war is over, over half the nation's children are malnourished. Buildings remain in ruins, roads unpaved, and jobs are hard to come by. Disease is rampant. Clean water is in short supply. Marriages are broken.

Others point to the explosive growth of evangelical Christian churches, whose fire-and-brimstone, apocalyptic vision of creation meshes very nicely with the rise in accusations of witchcraft.

Still others point to the influx of ideas from the neighboring Congo, where economic turmoil and political upheavel have lead to the development of a particularly malignant belief system regarding "child sorcerers" and "child witches."

Most human-rights activists and psychologists, though, agree that the root of accusations and abuse lies in Angola'¹s own wounded heart. Twenty-seven years of horrific warfare has left the entire country in a state of severe post-traumatic stress.

"Witchcraft fears have broken out in many societies during times of distress," explains Francisco de Mata Mourisca, the Roman Catholic bishop of Uige. The Bishop¹s hilltop compound has become a refuge for the nervous, hungry and sometimes bruised children who have fled the witch hunts.

"But you have to ask yourself, why our children?" de Mata Mourisca said. "The answer in Angola is simple. Because war has brutalized our families in the same way it destroyed our homes and streets."

Consider what has happened in the Bishop¹s own city of Uige, a coffee-growing town near the Congo border: children's advocates say that a teenager accused of witchery was set ablaze by a mob that included his own family. Another child was buried alive, beneath the corpse of a man he allegedly cursed. Children as young as five have been hanged, stoned to death, raped, burned and drowned in rivers after being accused of practicing witchcraft.  

Consider Carolina Jorge, a forty-five year-old grandmother. She looks eighty-five. "Nobody can care for all these scattered children anymore. They just get spoiled by witchcraft.  She is describing her own grandchildren, Jose (10) and Carolina (7). When their parents recently died of an undiagnosed illness (probably AIDS), the children moved in with Jorge. The little children were blamed for bewitching their own parents to death. In February, local police found Jose and little Carolina bound, beaten and imprisoned in an animal pen behind Jorge¹s mud hut.

Rarely does the government take action in such flagrant cases of abuse. Jorge was the exception: she was jailed for five days. Unrepentent, Jorge explains, "Those children weren't normal. They had a suitcase that made a singing noise. And the boy messed his bed every night. He was possessed."

Her grandchildren and their suitcase now live in an orphanage in the capital of Luanda.

THOSE WHO PROFIT

Finally, there are men like Papa Matumona (51). Clad in spotless white pants and a t-shirt covered with mutiple images of Marilyn Monroe's face, Matumona is the most powerful and influential kimbandero (faith healer) in Uige. He runs an evangelical treatment center for the "child witches" out of an old pastry factory. Others say it's not a treatment center at all -- it¹s a torture chamber.

"He forces them to jump and dance for hours during the hottest part of the day" to purge them of their magical powers, says Leopoldina Neto, a UNICEF child-protection officer in Uige. "He beats them. He puts chili powder in their eyes and drips boiling palm oil in their ears."

Papa Matumona denies the accusations. "I cure with love," he affirms, clutching his Bible. The services at his Provincial Center for Traditional Psychiatry are free - though he later admits that he puts his young patients to work in his vegetable gardens to pay off their "treatment" fees. Other kimbanderos demand a goat or metal pot as payment. Only then will they identify for anxious parents which of their children is a "witch." Next to oil, this capitalization on suffering makes "witchcraft" one of the few profitable industries in postwar Angola.

United Nations workers hope to break this supply-and-demand cycle through the simplest, and most difficult, of means: education. Specifically education of parents and other adults. It will be an intense, uphill struggle. An international study of the crisis has been abandoned. The Angolan researcher who headed the project -- like so many local police -- concluded that "witchcraft" was in fact real. By extension, then, most if not all of the accusations must be true.

DEFENDING THEMSELVES

Aside from over-worked, under-staffed aids workers and some religious organizations, the only people to speak in defense of the "child witches" are the accused themselves.

"It's all lies," says Sebastiao Nzuzi (12) a bald little boy with a big smile. He was stoned in his village for being a wizard. "I don't need to be cured. I'm as normal as anybody."

The local Catholic orphanage where Sebastiao sought refuge has taught him a few things -- like how to speak up for and be proud of himself. He is among twenty "child witches" who live in a sturdy building beneath a few eucalyptus trees.

Fortunately for them, the building is sturdy. One afternoon, people from the nearby slums surrounded the orphanage and pelted it with rocks. The boys, they claimed, flew over their houses at night and tried to bewitch their children. Sebastiao and the other "child witches" hunkered inside, shaking.  

--
It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars. -- Garrison Keillor

Never again the Burnings!

Nairobi Conference Focuses on Ending Mutilation of Women
News and commentary by Khrysso Heart LeFey
PIR Contributing Editor

An international conference was slated to meet in Nairobi, Kenya in mid-September to consider social, legal, and political aspects in eradicating the practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).

FGM, also known as female circumcision, is often justified on religious grounds, and though often associated with Islam in Africa, is actually a pre-Christian social custom. Traditional religion ("Animism") is still a predominant practice throughout Africa, constituting the primary religious orientation of probably 40 to 50% of African people.

The main thrust of the three-day conference was to discuss ratification of The Maputo Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa, adopted by the 53 Heads of State of the African Union at a conference in the capital of Mozambique last year. The Protocol stipulates that FGM should be prohibited and condemned.

The Maputo Protocol requires ratification by 15 members of the African Union before it will acquire any teeth. Representatives of No Peace Without Justice, a major organizer of the conference, say that  Ratification of the Protocol by as many countries as possible would be a considerable step forward not only for the fight against FGM, but also for women's rights and gender issues in general."

African Traditional Religions (ATRs), like Neo-Pagan paths, generally honor the Divine Feminine. Though scholars agree that it appears to have originated as a pre-Christian practice, FGM rarely occurs among contemporary practitioners of ATRs; rather, it functions as a powerful tool for patriarchal control, mostly but not exclusively among Muslims. Some Muslim scholars insist that Muhammad condoned, though did not insist on, the practice, if not too much cutting was done.

It is important to reiterate that FGM is not a religious practice but a social one--it is not an imperative in Islam the way male genital mutilation is in Judaism. Rather, it is thought that cutting away the most sensitive parts of girls' genitalia, thus robbing them of most of their ability ever to enjoy sex, will help to enforce their fidelity to their husbands. In cultures where FGM is practiced, chastity is still a selling point where women are still treated as property, and adultery by women is a capital offense.

Modern technology has led to FGM's sometimes being performed as a surgical procedure, though in cultures in which women are considered dispensable, sanitation and anesthesia have traditionally tended to be low priorities. Death and infertility are not uncommon results of the procedure even in the 21st century.

FGM is becoming a better-recognized human-rights issue on the world scene, though it began to be addressed as a political issue sometime during the 1950s--still quite late in the timeline for a practice that is centuries, and probably millennia, old.

It occasionally makes its way into industrialized nations from cultures where it is tolerated, said conference organizers, who promoted attendance by political leaders:  Representatives of the international community will be involved to highlight the international dimension of the problem, given... the tendency to perpetuate the practice by some immigrant communities. For example, the conference was to be opened by the President of the Republic of Kenya.

Overall, the conference hoped to involve victims, former circumcisers (both lay and professional), doctors, teachers, judges, both provincial and national government representatives, parliamentarians and representatives of civil society, NGOs, cultural and religious community leaders, and the media from across Kenya.

Conference organizers and sponsors were many and diverse. They included the Kenyan Government, No Peace Without Justice, the Association of Media Women in Kenya, the Italian Association for Women in Development, the European Commission, The Canadian International Development Agency, UNICEF, the Italian Cooperation, the Norwegian Government, UNIFEM, the Swedish Government, the Sigrid Rausing Trust, and GTZ (a German development organization).