3/31/2004 06:25:00 AM
Children in Angola tortured as witches
via cooper
...According to rights advocates in town, children as young as 5 have been hanged, stoned to death, raped, burned and drowned in rivers after being accused of sorcery. The common themes in all their stories--besides heartbreak--are parental bonds that have snapped under the strain of rebel assaults, government counterattacks, mindless violence, disease, mass starvation, scattered families, abandoned marriages and the press-ganging of children into various armed factions.
...two siblings moved in with their grandmother recently after their parents died of undetermined illnesses--possibly AIDS. As usual, the children were blamed for bewitching their own father and mother. Last month police found the whimpering brother and sister trussed up, beaten and imprisoned in an animal pen behind Jorge's bleak mud hut.
In a rare government reaction to such abuse, the woman was thrown in jail for five days.
"Those children weren't normal," Jorge said, unrepentant. "They had a suitcase that made a singing noise. And the boy messed his bed every night. He was possessed."
The traumatized boy, girl and their offending suitcase were shipped to an orphanage in the distant capital of Luanda.
The final ingredients in Angola's sad and baffling epidemic of child persecution are the men who profit from it, men like Papa Matumona.
Sporting immaculate white pants and a colorful shirt stenciled repeatedly with the face of Marilyn Monroe, the most powerful kimbandero, or faith healer, in Uige runs an evangelical treatment center for child witches. Others call it a torture chamber.
"He forces them to jump and dance for hours during the hottest part of the day" in order to cleanse them of magical powers, said Leopoldina Neto, a UNICEF child-protection officer in town. "He beats them. He puts chili powder in their eyes and drips boiling palm oil in their ears."
Matumona, 51, denied this.
`I cure with love'
"I cure with love," he said, clutching a Bible at his Provincial Center for Traditional Psychiatry [My God, what a telling name], located in a war-ruined former pastry factory.
Matumona said his services were free but later admitted that he put his stream of young patients to work in his vegetable gardens to pay off their treatment fees--a commercialization of suffering that makes witchcraft one of the few profitable ventures in postwar Angola aside from oil.
Other kimbanderos demand a goat or an aluminum pot from parents in order to identify which son or daughter is a witch. Thus the supply-demand circle is completed.
UN aid workers are hoping to break this cycle of exploitation by launching parent education campaigns. It will be an uphill battle.
An internationally funded study of the problem has been shelved. Its chief Angolan researcher, like most of the local police responsible for protecting children's rights, actually concluded that sorcery was real.
The only voices raised in defense of child witches, then, are often their own.
"It's all lies," said Sebastiao Nzuzi, 12, a smiling, bald little boy who had been stoned in his village for being a wizard. "I don't need to be cured. I'm as normal as anybody."
Sebastiao had soaked up some self-esteem lessons at the local Catholic orphanage. Twenty child witches were staying there in a clean, sturdy little house under some eucalyptus trees.
It was good that the house was sturdy. Because the next afternoon people from the surrounding slums gathered to stone the building. The boys, they shouted, were flying over their shacks at night, trying to bewitch their children. Sebastiao, like the other accursed, huddled inside.