Children accused of witchcraft in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC): Between structural and symbolic violence
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3675
L’articolo prende in esame il fenomeno dei “bambini-stregoni” a Lubumbashi (Katanga, Repubblica Democratica del Congo) quale risultato dell’intreccio di due dinamiche: l’accusa di stregoneria dei bambini in ambito domestico e l’alto numero di bambini di strada nelle città congolesi. Da una parte, le accuse di stregoneria in famiglia seguono due logiche differenti: una modalità di assoggettamento dei bambini, esercitata in particolare dai pastori delle chiese neopentecostali; e una “pragmatica dell’incertezza” attraverso la quale le famiglie congolesi affrontano le incertezze della vita come la malattia, la sofferenza, i problemi coniugali, la perdita e la morte. D’altra parte, la presenza dei bambini nelle strade di Lubumbashi suggerisce che il discorso della stregoneria è inerente ad una violenza simbolica connessa ai concetti di limite, margine e liminalità: i bambini di strada sono associati alle streghe poiché trasgrediscono le norme sociali più elementari e vivono al di là delle reti ordinarie di solidarietà (parentela, famiglia, scuola). In quest’ottica, l’articolo propone un approccio etnografico il quale prende in considerazione la complessità dei “bambini-stregoni” sottolineando l’importanza delle pratiche quotidiane e degli oggetti di uso banale nella definizione dei legami famigliari e nelle accuse di stregoneria.
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Edoardo Quaretta
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Children accused of witchcraft in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC): Between structural and symbolic violence
Text.Serial.Journal
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Edoardo Quaretta
2019/12/29
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3675
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Università della Calabria / Università di Torino, Italy
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Children accused of witchcraft in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC): Between structural and symbolic violence
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                                          2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2019: 61-82




Children accused of witchcraft in Democratic
Republic of Congo (DRC)
Between structural and symbolic violence
Edoardo QUARETTA
Università della Calabria / Università di Torino




ABSTRACT: In this paper I consider the phenomenon of the “child-witches” in
Lubumbashi (Katanga, DRC) as the result of the intertwine of two dynamics: the accusation
of children within the sphere of the family and the large number of street children in
Congolese cities. On the one hand, witchcraft accusations within the family tend to
work in two ways: as a mode of childrenʼs subjugation, exerted especially by pastors in
neopentecostal churches; and as a “pragmatic of uncertainty” that allow Congolese
families to deal with uncertainties of life, such as sickness, suffering, marital problems,
failure, and death. On the other hand, children in the streets of Lubumbashi suggest a
witchcraft discourse linked to the symbolic violence that should be read in terms of
boundaries, margins, and liminality: street children are associated with witches because
they have transgressed basic social norms and they live out of the ordinary social
networks (kinship, family, school). In this vein, I propose an ethnographic approach
which takes into account the multiform feature of the “child-witches” highlighting the
importance of the everyday practices and ordinary objects in family ties definition and
witchcraft accusations.
KEYWORDS: WITCHCRAFT, CHILDHOOD, STREET CHILDREN, VIOLENCE, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Edoardo Quaretta
Children accused of witchcraft in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC): Between structural and
symbolic violence
2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2019: 61-82.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3675
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Introduction
   In this paper, I consider the phenomenon of the “child-witches” (enfants-
sorciers) in Lubumbashi (Katanga, DRC) as a result of the intertwinement of
two socio-cultural dynamics: the structural violence of the families’ daily life
within which the accusations of children occur, and the symbolic violence
exerted upon the street children who are identified as witchlike individuals 1.
In this vein, witchcraft accusations are, on the one hand, the consequence of
an increasing structural violence characterizing the children’s living
conditions within the sphere of their family; on the other hand, the
transgression of the social norms by the sheges2 provokes in the mind of
Lubumbashi’s dwellers an identification of street children with witchcraft.
   The data presented in this document comes mostly from socio-
anthropological fieldwork carried out in Katanga between 2010 and 2017.
The most significant sources of information in the research survey were the
Salesian centres for street children, the Bakanja Ville and Bakanja Centre,
one revivalist church, and the Congolese families I visited on a regular basis.
   The child-witches issue rose up strongly first as a humanitarian and mass-
media phenomenon in the late 1990s and in the early 2000s. At the turn of
the new millennium, local and international press stressed the violence
perpetrated on children in the revivalist churches and on violent events
involving street children3. Put under the spotlight, children seemed to
become new targets of a contemporary Congolese witch craze. Along with
the media attention NGOs, and more broadly the humanitarian field, took
the issue of the children accused of witchcraft as severe human rights
violation (Aguilar Molina 2005; Human Rights Watch 2006; Cimpric 2010;
Hanson, Ruggiero 2013).
   In the academic literature, the term “child-witches” is not new. Robert
Brain (1970) first used it in a paper published in Mary Douglas’s edited
volume Witchcraft, confessions & accusations (Douglas 1970). Witchcraft
accusations against children are also the subject of Peter Geschiere’s “Child
Witches Against the Authority of their Elders: Anthropology and History in
the Analysis of Witchcraft Beliefs of the Maka (Southeastern Cameroon)”, an
article written in the 1970s, that speaks about the rise of a “new form of
1. I wish to thank Anuac’s anonymous reviewers for their inspiring comments and
constructive criticisms.
2. Local name for street children.
3. See for instance MONUC, “Attaques perpétrées sur les enfants de la rue à Mbuji-Mayi 20-
25 Septembre 2004”, Avril 2005, www.refworld.org/docid/46caab050.html, accessed on
01/12/2019.


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witchcraft”, called the mbati in the Maka language (south-east Cameroon).
In the Maka’s villages, which were studied by Geschiere, more and more
often adolescents were accused of witchcraft because they rebelled against
the authority of their elders (Geschiere 1980).
   More recently, Filip De Boeck has reconsidered children accused of
witchcraft in the Congo as a specific research topic (De Boeck 2000, 2005,
2009; De Boeck, Plissart 2013). Within the framework of this text, I would
like to briefly recall the three main ideas of De Boeck’s analysis of the child-
witch: first of all, Congolese society is experiencing a crisis of “the logic of
the gift” and of reciprocity, which has led to the juxtaposition of two terms
that in the past would not be associated with one another (i.e. childhood and
witchcraft). Secondly, revivalist churches play an important role in spreading
the discourse on witchcraft in the public and private spheres and in leveling
witchcraft accusations against children. Revivalist churches are social fields
where the link between childhood and witchcraft can more easily be made.
Thirdly, children are today more likely to be accused of witchcraft than in
the past because of the paradoxical position they occupy in the Congolese
society. At one and the same time, they represent a burden for their family,
and they represent the future of their society. Thus, children and adolescents
are at the edges of both social inclusion and social exclusion.
   Following the research path opened up by De Boeck, this paper proposes a
preliminary attempt to split the phenomenon of the child-witches into two
fundamental dynamics: the social stigmatization of the shege associated
with witchcraft, and children accused of witchcraft at home. The goal is to
disaggregate the “child-witch” representation in order to avoid casting it in
a generic “African occult” (Ranger 2007).
   To distinguish these two case studies, which seem to be a continuum of
verbal and physical violence on the ground, is analytically valuable for two
fundamental reasons. Firstly, the two figures are, evidently, linked to the
idea of the “occult” and of the “esoteric” inherent in witchcraft. Yet they do
not refer only to those ideas. Once separated, they show that accusations of
child witchcraft have less to do with an imaginary view of witchcraft and
much more to do with the social functioning, disintegration and
reformulation of family relations and solidarity. The close, causal connection
between witchcraft accusations and the crisis of the logic of the gift has been
demonstrated also by other ethnographic studies. These latter have shown
that one of the causes that provoke an accusation of witchcraft against a
child is the breakdown of family ties and, more generally, the weakening of
neighborhood solidarity in urban areas. As reported by children’s
testimonies in an article by Kahola-Tabu (2014), who interviewed street

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children in Lubumbashi, difficulties in recomposing family ties, for example
after a divorce or a second marriage, affect more often subjects in a position
of dependence, such as children. Children are therefore more easily at the
center of dynamics of scission and exclusion from the core of a recomposed
family. Secondly, to split analytically the phenomenon of the “child-
witches” allows to untangle the hank of intricate dynamics and to observe
more closely the relationships of power and abuse that underlie the
stigmatization of street children and the accusations leveled at children at
home.

Street children and witchcraft’s symbolic violence
   From the beginning of my fieldwork in Lubumbashi, witchcraft discourse
used by people when they spoke about street children suggested to me a
symbolic violence arising from an individual transgression of the social
norms. This makes me reconsider classical ideas in the structural
anthropology of margins (Douglas 2001) and liminality (Turner 1991). Street
children are in fact associated with witches, even though not openly accused,
because of their modes of living. To live in the street, or in the Salesians
shelters, put children out of the ordinary social networks such as kinship,
family, the church and the school. These latter are places where the
Christian and urban image of childhood has been (and still is nowadays)
performed and recognized. In contrast to this idea of childhood, the link
between childhood and witchcraft does not sound that absurd to
Lubumbashi’s inhabitants when applied to street children. It should be
noted that, in the case of the shege, the match between these two semantic
fields (childhood and witchcraft) does not happen necessarily in the
revivalist churches. Instead, this is rather the consequence of a widespread
witchcraft idiom that helps to link social marginality with greedy
individuals. Children living alone, out of any kinship network, sleeping on
the sidewalks and feeding themselves are then identified as witches.
   The power of the witchcraft discourse in explaining the shege’s way of life
is grasped fully if compared with the humanitarian category of “street
children”. With reference to the humanitarian field, NGOs appeared quite
late in this region. Katanga has been marked by a century of social
paternalism and political totalitarianism. International and local NGOs
involvement in Katanga has been made possible since the 1990s, and came
about as a result of the decline of the biggest public companies and
Mobutu’s dictatorship opening to a multiparty system (Poncelet et al. 2006).
Moreover, NGOs operating in the 1990s were responding to a state of


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emergency, which led them to draw uncritically from Western categories,
such as that of street children (Glauser 1990). Despite the official discourse
on the shege, which is put in the same street children category it’s put in
other countries in the world, my hypothesis is that this representation has
been appropriated and molded since its reception by Lubumbashi’s
inhabitants. As matter of fact, the term “street child” puts forward the
relation between two semantic spheres, which are “street” and “childhood”.
In many societies, the category of street children is relevant to conceptualize
the marginality of these children (Lucchini 1993, 1996). Conversely, in the
Congo, this category does not seem to suggest the same meaning. In the
Congo and Katanga, the social exclusion of children is better understood
using the image of the “invisible world” rather than the street. The liminal
position occupied by the shege has crystallized around the image of the witch
rather than the homeless, as unlikely as this is in other parts of the world.
This is not surprising since, as De Boeck reminds us, in Congolese societies
the witch is par excellence both the image of the crisis as well as the image of
anti-social individual (De Boeck 2000: 56). The symbolic violence borne by
the witchcraft idiom is expressed conceptually but also through language. In
Lubumbashi, people do not use the word “street child”, neither in French nor
in Kiswahili. The literal translation in Kiswahili would be mutoto (child) ya
barabara (street). To say mutoto ya barabara would be completely
meaningless for the Congolese. This is also reported by city dwellers when
they say “the street has never had children”. In the same vein, the
association suggested by the French enfant de la rue is unlikely to be
translated into vernacular languages. The moral incompatibility of these two
semantic spheres does not allow to speak about the shege with French words
(Rubbers 2007). Witchcraft, instead, is the idiom that allows to link
antisocial individuals with amoral worlds.
   In the case of the shege, witchcraft discourse outlines a world in-between
(the shege’s world), and we could also say an “anti-structure” (Turner 1991)
through which, by contrast, the boundaries of ordinary family and social
orders are put forward and reaffirmed. In particular, what people meant
when using an association with witchcraft in addressing street children is an
idealized image of childhood. Images of a proper childhood are displayed in
advertisements visible throughout the city, in TV series and shows, and in
the pastors’ and priests’ sermons in their churches. However, the specific
idea of the modern and urban childhood is a colonial legacy. Colonial
institutions have been for a long time great constructors of childhood and
parenting ethics. Since the 1920s, they have done so through a social policy
implemented by the colonial administration, the Catholic Church, and by


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public companies such as the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK). From
this period, “colonial trinity” (colonial administration, church and
companies) aimed to stabilize the urban population, encourage Christian
marriages and promot the nuclear family model. This was the peculiarity of
the Belgian Congo, which was even more evident in Katanga, where wage
labor became the main source of men’s legitimacy to become the head of a
family and thus exert social control upon family members. In colonial times,
as Bogumil Jewsiewicki points out, the ability to exercise a wage labor was
linked to a specific legal category, namely the “efficient adult man”. This
category did not concern only urban workers. The organization of
compulsory crops, especially cotton and coffee, extended a sort of wage
labor also in rural zones. The nuclear family model, and the ideal of
domesticity connected to it, replaced the role of kinship social structures in
the education of children, and education became a task of the parents at
home. The nuclear family, school, Catholic Church, and youth movements
(Scouts and Kiro for example) were social fields within which this transition
occurred, and where a new parental ethic and an unprecedented idea of
childhood came about.
   In Lubumbashi, the colonial legacy still informs the idea of the “modern
family”. The image of the urban and Christian family is pursued, especially
in the wealthier districts of the city centre, while in the cités (neighborhoods)
it is much more contested, even though it remains the dominant model.
Both in the inner city and in the Lubumbashi’s neighborhoods, parents and
elders founded their authority on the capacity to meet their children’s basic
needs (food, clothes, to have a home, and pay school fees). To define himself
as a “responsible” and “reliable” father or elder (ainé) means to be able to
get access to the food and goods market (“nourrir les enfants à leur faim”),
and to the health and education system (“faire grandir à l’école”). In the
context of crisis, many difficulties in meeting the children’s needs come
from the individualization of the access to these goods and services, which
are, moreover, structured according to other social factors, such as gender,
social class and generation. Children’s needs are perceived by parents both
as social obligations and moral responsibility. They constitute pillars of the
social contract between generations. They define the logic of reciprocity
between parents and children (Reynolds White et al. 2008: 7). Work (kazi),
school fees (minerval), food (mboka), and health care are today symbolic
media that define social roles as well as social categories such as the
“reliable parent” (un parent responsable), and, the other way round, the
irresponsible parent. From the standpoint of children, they are also
supposed to have rights and duties: they should respect the authority of the


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father, attend classes, succeed in school, and contribute to the domestic
budget. The ethic of childhood, to be a “reliable child”, should be respected
so as not to end up a lazy child, a shege or a vagrant (vagabond).
   It is well documented that the crisis in the 1990s has seriously strained a
parent’s ability to fulfill their children’s basic needs (Petit 2003; Nkuku &
Rémon 2006; Tréfon 2004). In Katanga, former UMHK/Gécamines agents are
the most striking example. Men who were the family breadwinner, in the
golden age of the UMHK/Gécamines, lost much of their power and control
over their children and wife when the company went bankrupt in the 1990s
(Dibwe 2001; Rubbers 2013). Accordingly, state and public businesses
failures provoked, beyond the economic impoverishment of the majority of
the households, also a crisis of social identity.
   The designation of shege to the “invisible world” (kipande kingine /
kipande kibaya, literally “the other side [of reality]” / “the evil side [of
reality]”), emphasizes the social crisis mentioned above. By the use of the
witchcraft idiom, these kids are represented as individuals belonging to a
world beyond any social structure. Living in the invisible world, in an in-
between place, refers to individuals not subjected to social normativity and
freed from any logic of reciprocity. That is the result of the freedom they got
in the street released from the social control of elders and parents. The most
striking feature attributed to the shege is their capacity to perform activities
they are not usually supposed to do, such as to feed themselves, work,
wander, smoke, or buy clothes. In doing so, they breakdown any logic of
reciprocity and refuse to adopt common social roles.
   Of course, being out from under social control and the weakening of ties
with their relatives has a price for these children that has to be paid. Street
children are sanctioned by the symbolic violence of witchcraft and by what
has been called “the curse of being nothing” (l a malédiction de n’être rien)
(Jewsiewicki 1998). That means they will become individuals at the margins
of society without any recognizable social identity. In social and cultural
terms, such a subject can hardly be recognized as a child. Very often the
shege are not even considered human beings, but rather they are associated
with animals (rats, wolves, dogs). As I said above, being at the margins of
society is better expressed by the witchcraft idiom that identifies the shege
with witches. They are said to be, to quote the most frequently cited words of
my informants, “hardly approachable”, “dangerous subjects”, “contaminated
by impure spirits” and with whom “one must avoid to share food with”.
These ideas do not belong only to ordinary Katangese. They are very often
expressed also by Salesian and Catholic social workers and seminarists
(frères) who work with street children. As I was told once by a Salesian frère:

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      All these children who spend the night outside their home are automatically
      witches. One must not really approach them. We should not eat with them
      because they have been already contaminated by impure spirits. In our society
      sleeping outside your home, in the street, means to get impure spirits and
      children who do that turn into a problem for the other citizens4.

   From a social point of view, the condition of being out of the social fields
(kinship, family, school) where social identities and mutual recognition are
performed implies entering an in-between world where social blurriness and
vagueness dominate. Children in an in-between world are thought of as a
dangerous anomaly and a viral illness spreading out all over the society. In
this sense, the symbolic violence of witchcraft exerted upon children can be
understood as the consequence of the breaking down of what Alain Marie
calls the “community debt” (dette communautaire) and the “circle of the
endless debt” (le cercle de la dette infinie) (Marie 1997). According to this
author, the status of the youngsters (cadets) is that of “debtors” who are
subjugated to their elders (ainés), who in turn ensure their growth by
providing them with food, a house, and an education. “Debtors” should
therefore develop a sense of recognition and subjugation contracted toward
theirs elders in a “endless debt”. Witchcraft discourse sanctions subjects,
like the shege, who free themselves from this “anthropo-logic of the debt”
(Marie 2002).
   From a cultural point of view, street children marginality is conceptualized
by the witchcraft idiom because it allows to think what Marc Augé calls the
“unthinkable of the social” (l’impensé du social) (Augé 1982). According to
Augé, the unthinkable of the social is pure power. Pure power is at same
time out of all social structures and lies at the constitution of social
relations. Children who came into contact with the blurred zones of the
social reality, with violence and danger, have touched a source of power
which is problematic. The inhabitants of Lubumbashi identify the shege’s
forms of power with their capacity to survive in a hostile environment
without any adult mediation. It is also identified with the freedom they got
by roaming around the city at night and from the sexuality of street children.
   The sharpest problem with the shege is the difficulty to control and
discipline the violence perpetrated by and exerted upon them. The shege are
thus perceived as “actors” and “victims” of violence (De Boeck 2009), and
also as a source of power and danger (Comaroff, Comaroff 2005). The ideas
of pollution (contagion), power and danger associated to them have provoked

4. Interview with E., social worker, Lubumbashi 20/05/2010.


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violent reactions toward the shege. In 2010, when I started my fieldwork in
Lubumbashi, the issue of security was a prior theme on the city political
agenda (Quaretta 2016). Street children were growing in number and were
perceived by the inner-city inhabitants as a serious threat to their security.
The feeling of insecurity spread throughout the city partially as a result of
harsh incidents street children were seen to be responsible for. However, the
feeling of insecurity was also partially suggested by the complete loss of
control of the local authority on this issue and by the state of degradation of
the zones where the shege were living.
   The agency deployed by the shege in order to survive in a hostile
environment, such as the streets of a large city, is often reduced by external
observers to the violent behaviors that characterize some groups of street
children (Kahola-Tabu 2014). Actually, the children’s agency is also
observable in less violent manifestations, as, for instance, when they run
away from home to break free from violence suffered within their family, or
when they lie so as not to be taken back to their family when, for example, a
street child is brought to a Pentecostal church or taken into a Salesian
educational centre. Other forms of agency are linked to the daily life of the
shege: the ability of acting the débrouille (literally “fend for yourself”), the
auto-cuisine (knowing how to prepare food for oneself), the aesthetics of the
street wardrobe and the consumption of illegal drugs.
   The reason why street children’s agency is often reduced to their violent
behaviors is probably because it is missed that, as Kahola-Tabu points out
(2014: 137), youth violence is actually a counter-violence to the forms of
exclusion and indifference of the society and the state towards street
children. Under such conditions, the relationship between exclusion and
violence has become part of the social structure in so far as it no longer
concerns an emergency situation, as it was in the 1990s during the emerging
economic crisis. The transition from a state of emergency to a state of
structural violence has produced two fundamental consequences with regard
to the phenomena of the shege. Firstly, it created a “street culture” (Biaya
2000): a youth subculture that is the extreme and violent expression of
youth social exclusion and of the generational conflict underlying Congolese
societies. Secondly, also for Lubumbashi, we may share the analysis of some
scholars (Yengo 2016) who suggest that the emergence of a social and
cultural opposition between the “street” and the “family” as being
fundamental in the context of the present-day Congo. As said, the street has
become not only a physical space where subjects rejected from family are
cast, but it has also become a place where an oppositional culture (a “street


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culture”) is shaped against that of family and kinship. This opposition has
repercussions not only on infant marginalization, but also on ordinary
delinquency and even on the level of political and armed violence5.
   To get back to the symbolic violence of the witchcraft labeling, that is
moreover problematic because street children are in the hands of
institutions such as Salesian’s shelters, NGO’s centres and by specialists
such as social workers, educators, and catholic aid workers. These actors do
not seem to have appropriate tools for considering all the social, cultural and
symbolic implications that the street children phenomenon have in
Lubumbashi. That is why the strategies implemented by these institutions
for family reintegration and social inclusion of the shege often fail. Following
Mary Douglas, the path from the social margins toward reintegration would
entail the use of ritual. With no rite of aggregation, to which a whole
community should participate and share common symbolic values, social
integration is more likely to fail. Without a new position in society, children
remain in the margins “credited with unreliability, unteachability, and all
the wrong social attitudes” (Douglas 2001:98). Douglas’ interpretation of
being in the margins is particularly cogent for the Congolese common
assumptions about street children. These latter are considered, first and
foremost, as subjects “who are unable to change”. I was very often told about
the impossibility of changing a shege’s habits and behaviors. They are
thought to be deeply corrupted with money (“they love to get money”, “Ils
aiment l’argent”), with sexual promiscuity (banakupatana), and with filth. For
Lubumbashi inhabitants it is hardly possible to bring about changes in their
way of life regardless of the methods used. A social worker told me about
this impossibility for a shege to change:
      A child who has lived for many years on the street, even if you provide him with
      a good education or whatever good for his life, he will never change. A vagrant
      is always a vagrant. Even us we are careful with them. A child without father
      and mother, without love, well, one has to beware of these children6.

   The work and strategies of the Salesian centres and NGOs programs
(social surveys, protection of the children’s rights, family reintegration,
follow-ups of children reintegrated, and food programs) may sometimes
succeed but are not effective in solving the street children issue. The main
reasons for this situation can be identified in the social and economic
conditions in which many households are still living today. Given the poor
conditions at their homes, children run away and choose to live in the street.

5. I am particularly thankful to the anonymous reviewer for this important suggestion.
6. Interview with Ph., social worker, Lubumbashi 5/05/2011.


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Nevertheless, the problem also stems partly from the way public and private
institutions approach street children. I argue that these institutions work
more like Western institutions such as the prison or the asylum. Once
individuals are formally classified as “abnormal”, their behaviors became
unacceptable. After a long period in prison or in asylum, individuals are
hardly capable to reintegrate their own society. In the same way, institutions
working with the shege participate to render the “street child” a symbol of
marginality and of the abnormality of being out of any social network. From
a cultural and local point of view this abnormality is thought and sanctioned
through the witchcraft idiom.

Children accused of witchcraft and the structural violence
   Accusations of witchcraft leveled at children at home are less a discourse
about social margins than an explanatory idiom to challenge social conflicts
and to interpret misfortune. In order to approach the accusations of
witchcraft at home, I begin this section by posing two preliminary
considerations. First of all, most of my interviews have been characterized by
stories whose focus was on the ordinary violence people experience in their
lives. By “ordinary violence” I mean at the same time the structural violence
(Farmer 2001) which is embedded in social structure a n d in people’s
everyday life (Scheper-Huges 1993) for which they encounter severe
hardships in most of Lubumbashi’s neighborhoods (cités) in meeting basic
needs (health care, water, electricity, education, public transportation, and
food). Secondly, the experience of material deprivation and uncertainty so
often expressed by my informants (and indeed visible to me) show how
social dependency, vulnerability and violence are deeply interconnected.
This means that in challenging conditions of “distress” (Naepels 2019) we
should pay attention to economic as well as to the “ecological conditions”
people live in (ivi). Indeed, living conditions shape and push people toward
specific cultural interpretations, such as a belief in witchcraft, when illness
and misfortune come about. This is fairly evident in Lubumbashi’s cités.
Witchcraft idioms and symbolism as well as the anti-witch practices partly
compensate the poor quality of biomedical care. This does not concern only
witchcraft accusations leveled at children. The “new mystical” illnesses, for
instance, are also examples in which structural violence, the lack of health
care and medical services, shape people’s responses to suffering. Nteta and
Kapopo are considered as two mystical illnesses that have been massively
spreading in the city for the past ten years. Nteta and Kapopo are biological
diseases easily identifiable by biomedical symptomatology. Nteta is diabetes
and Kapopo is dental decay. Serious injuries caused by Nteta and Kapopo

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take over when people do not have the means to be properly treated. Very
often the lack of treatment and money lead to death. These dramatic
outcomes could be avoidable with simple procedures, for instance by the
removing of the infected tooth, which costs around 40$. In these cases,
people turn to revivalist pastors and “traditional healers” (bafumu), who
treat illness as a “spiritual problem”.
   My hypothesis is that structural violence pushes people to turn their
attention exclusively toward the social etiology of the illness, disregarding
biological symptoms. The reason for this is basically to alleviate suffering
and to shape its experience. The vacuum left open by the absence of a
medical system has been occupied by “specialists/experts” in treating
sickness and misfortune, as I just said, such as pastors and bafumu.
Revivalist churches are among the most important religious actors. These
latter provide believers with economic and spiritual support. Nevertheless,
in revivalist churches the attention is more likely directed to “spirituality”
and Christian morality. In doing so pastors, and the other revivalist religious
figures, stress the social dimension of illness and propose social etiologies.
In other words, in revivalist churches the focus on illness is removed from
the body of the sufferer and cast into the spiritual field. Either an external
agent or misbehaviors are supposed to lay at the emergence of the
symptoms. It might be a witchcraft attack provoked by jealousy; it may be
the consequence of the believer’s sins or misbehaviors; it can be the result of
the believer’s misdeeds. A major consequence of this interpretation is to rule
out physical symptoms in favor of social and moral causes.
   Nteta and Kapopo are just two examples that show how everyday
structural violence profoundly shapes the cultural experience of illness and
misfortune and pushes people toward a specific cultural interpretation
(Reynolds White 1998). In most of my case studies, children accusations of
witchcraft stem from the interpretation of illness, death and misfortune. The
social dimension of this interpretation is often mobilized through the
accusation. In contrast with the common assumption that sees witchcraft
accusations as an excuse to cast the children out of the home, I propose to
see it as an interpretative idiom of what Marc Augé called “the elementary
forms of the event” (forme élémentaire de l’événement) (Augé 1984).
According to Augé, elementary forms of the event are illness, death and
misfortune. These are defined by the author as the most “social” of the
individual life events (ivi). In this vein, the accusation of witchcraft works as
a “pragmatic of uncertainty” (Reynolds Whyte 1998) that deploys a twofold
logic of interpretation: the identification (diagnosis) of the individual
symptoms and the questioning of the social order, on the one hand through

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the symptomatic idiom Congolese families deal with substances, objects,
biomedical and local medicines by which people try to treat the immediate
injuries and harms, and on the other, by the etiologic idiom always taking
into the interpretation the social environment within which the individual
diseases manifest. Because of their precarious structural position within the
family, children become the articulation point of the witchcraft etiologic
idiom.
   Practically speaking, when a witchcraft accusation breaks out at home, it
opens up a crisis, a “social drama” to say it as Victor Turner does (1967).
Social dramas call for a ritual resolution. To my view this is the most
important difference between witchcraft accusations at home and the
“witchcraft” labeling of the sheges. Witchcraft accusations at home attempt
to open a liminal space and time in order to retake control of situations,
spaces, and subjects where practical forms of control became difficult
(Douglas 2001:103). Witchcraft accusations uttered at the revivalist church
open a liminal space within which the usual activities of a family are either
suspended or set aside in favor of ritual practices. These latter are often
prescribed by a mutumishi, the Katangese-Swahili term for “God’s servant”
(“homme de Dieu”), who charges ritual practices with a strong symbolic
value. Ritual actions may consist in going to church at specific moments,
praying several times a day for hours, going through several “soul healings”
(“cure d’âme”), practicing fasting, and in abstaining from eating specific
foods.
   Theoretically, a witchcraft accusation uttered by a mitumishi looks like
the former anti-witch specialists or like the treatments of a mufumu
(traditional healer). Following Marc Augé, we can identify three equally
important dimensions of this witchcraft idiom: technical, interpretive, and
normative (Augé 1974). The technical aspect is the consulting of a
mutumishi, whether he is a pastor, a prophet, or a religious “intercessor”.
The mutumishi deploys a set of detection tools in order to provide the
believer with a “spiritual diagnosis”. This latter is produced through visions,
prophetic dreams, and prayers. The mutumishi then proposes to the believer
a healing path (“parcours de guérison”) to fight the attack of the sorcerer,
which consists in prayers, soul healings, confessions, and deliverance from
witchcraft. The normative aspect of witchcraft discourse is identifiable in the
account the mutumishi makes up during the soul healings and the
deliverance of the victim from evil spirits (bampepo). In these accounts,
whose patterns of narrative are very often similar, the “elementary event”
that affected the believer’s life is interpreted through the symbolic reversal
of the ordinary life. Through the witchcraft imagery, the mutumishi turns

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social norms upside down. In doing so, food becomes poison; kitchen tools
(like the pan to cook bukari) become the witch’s weapons to harm; children
turn into adults; children get married with their own offspring; daughters
turn into mami wata; and human beings transform into animals. Through the
reversal of social norms and roles, pastors and prophets aim to address and
reaffirm the ethic and morality of Christian life. The moral questioning of
one’s behaviors takes us to the core of the third aspect of the witchcraft
discourse, i.e. the interpretation. The mutumishi’s interpretation is a moral
discourse on illness, misfortune, and death. This explanation implies that
the trigger of the suspicion or accusation of witchcraft is frequently a
symptom affecting an individual. The pastor quickly moves these symptoms,
discrete and localized manifestations, into the spiritual field. I would be
tempted to say that “spiritual” here means not just the transcendent nature
of the relation between believers and God, but it also refers to the
immanence of the social relations. More precisely, “spiritual” refers to the
invisible part concerning the power inherent in all social relations. In this
sense, to relocate symptomatic manifestations into a “spiritual” domain also
implies a social etiology involving the moral nature of one’s behaviors and
actions. It serves to address the legitimacy of the exercise of power and
authority in social relations. Of course, pastors find this source of legitimacy
in Christian theology and in the Bible, within which the role of children and
women is subjugated to the father’s authority.
   In Lubumbashi, as I see it, most of the time witchcraft accusations arise
from very specific events (a series of deaths, illnesses, and loss). Accordingly,
to the twofold logic of interpretation I mentioned above, accusations
pointing out symptoms also underlie conflicts at home within the family and
among kinship, like that between different generations (grandparents /
grandchildren) or between stepparents and children from a previous
marriage. In these conflicts, children stand either in a weak position or at
the edge of the family inclusion and exclusion. Take, for instance, the
example of recomposed families and children whose parents are not
officially married (e.g. the man has not paid the bride’s price to his family-
in-law). In these cases no formal status is guaranteed to the children, neither
by the state nor by kinship norms. Thus, standing in a sort of social no man’s
land, children’s behaviors are more likely to be questioned as misfortune
burst out at home. There are specific sets of child behaviors which are more
easily condemned. One is to “show overbearing pride” (afficher l’orgueil),
which refers to an arrogant and disrespectful child; another behavior
severely reprimanded is “to be hypocrite”, which addresses, in the parents’


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terms, a child who is not genuine and sincere in the relationships with his
parents and relatives. Other misbehaviors are severely blamed, such as to
run away from home, to lie, to be disrespectful, and to get drunk.
   To conclude, the strength of a witchcraft accusation lies in its capacity to
explain all the aspects of what I have called, along with Marc Auge, “the
elementary forms of the event” (Augé 1984). More precisely, the power of
the accusation resides in its capacity to keep together individual symptoms
and social dimensions of the event. In this sense, witchcraft can be seen as a
“circular way of thinking” (une pensée circulaire) (ivi) combining a
symptomatic and an etiologic idiom (Reynolds Whyte 1998). I use the
concept of “circularity” of witchcraft discourse differently than Peter
Geschiere (1997). For Geschiere, the circularity of witchcraft is linked to the
ambivalence of “acceptable and unacceptable uses of occult forces”
(Geschiere 1997: 207). The nganga (traditional healer), says the author, “can
offer protection against witches only because he or she is a super-witch”
(ivi). In other words, the circularity of this discourse stands in the ambivalent
meanings (neither completely positive nor negative) carried by “occult
forces”. Moreover, the author draws from the categories of political
anthropology to state that witchcraft (djambe or evu in his Cameroonian
fieldwork) is inherently ambiguous because it serves to level inequalities as
well as to address the accumulation of power and wealth (ibidem: 69). As I
see it, the circularity of the witchcraft discourse has to be understood
differently when addressed to children. In this case, the mutumishi’s circular
explanation puts at work an interpretation that works according to a twofold
logic: a causal logic a priori that points out the symptoms of a specific
disease; and a causal logic a posteriori that gives an all-round explanation
that brings together individual symptoms and social relations (Augé 1984).
This is why a witchcraft accusation can quickly involve many family
members in a series of accusations: in pointing out an individual symptom,
pastors imply problems in relationships to people (e.g. husband/wife,
husband/brother-in-law, step-parent/child) that, in turn, needs to address
individual symptoms and so on.
   Since people rarely solve these problems, the circularity of witchcraft
accusations never ends. The circularity of the witchcraft accusation can be
broken down as an agent of misfortune that has been found, sickness healed
and a social order restored. Difficulties in getting the problems solved,
especially those related to health, turn revivalist churches’ rituals into a sort
of “perverted ritual” (Augé 1977). As I said above in this text, the witchcraft
interpretation works through the symbolic reversal of ordinary life. Through
the witchcraft imagery, the mutumishi turns the social norms upside down

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in order to reaffirm those same norms. Nevertheless, while the “social
drama” opened by the first accusation cannot be solved, the circle of
accusations may perpetuate with a long series of accusations. In the case of
children, the circularity of anti-witchcraft rituals comes to an end as the
children run away from home. In the witchcraft interpretation, pastors
understand the runaway as a self-accusation of being a witch.

Conclusion
   In this text, I have proposed to exanimate the “child-witches” in the
Congo as a multifaceted phenomenon composed of, at least, two main
figures. From the one hand, I have showed the process of social exclusion of
street children who are labelled as witches for their antisocial modes of
living and violent behaviors. A process which is exacerbated by an
institutional action, individualizing and marginalizing, that reproduces itself
mechanisms of exclusion and social labelling interpreted locally by the
idiom of witchcraft. On the other hand, children are accused at home and in
Pentecostal Churches. Here witchcraft works as an interpretation of
individual illness through a “logic of persecution” (Zémpleni 1975; Ortigues
& Ortigues 1984). Children in marginal positions within kinship networks
are more easily targeted as agents of misfortune.
   This distinction is mainly valid theoretically, but in practice
stigmatization and accusation, symbolic violence, structural violence and
violence at home are constantly interconnected. The two cases I have
presented in this text suggest two final considerations. First of all, the
symbolic violence exerted in the public space upon street children shows the
limits of a society unable to “contain its children” rather than its inability
“contain witchcraft” (Ciekawy & Geschiere 1998). In the Congo social
structures, representations and ethics relating to children seem to no longer
have the power and resources to give meaning to an overwhelming
demographic category.
   Secondly, the strategies set up for the social reintegration of children
from the margins (both in the street or in family) is problematic. On the one
hand, religious and humanitarian institutions support street children. These
institutions create, often unwillingly, institutionalized images of childhood
(such as the “street children”, the “child-soldier”, and the “child-witch”)
labeling the marginalized children even more profoundly. Moreover, shelters
and humanitarian programs do not set cultural rituals which would allow to
control and discipline the meaning of children marginality which is, as we
have seen, culturally sanctioned by the symbolic violence of witchcraft. On


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the other hand, accusations of witchcraft at home, and more broadly, the
circularity of the witchcraft discourse, generate a vicious circle, making a
chain of individual events and a social explanation that reinforces itself
through a feedback logic. Following Marc Augé, the difficulty in breaking
down the circle created by the all-around witchcraft explanation makes the
rituals preformed in revivalist churches less a ritual of inversion than a ritual
of perversion (Augé 1977). The ritual actions performed by a mitumishi
transpose illness symptoms and misfortune onto a “spiritual” level. In
proposing a spiritual and social etiology, pastors thus exacerbate social
causes, producing irreversible consequences (runaway of the accused,
worsening of the sufferer’s health conditions, and sometimes even death).
Therefore, the solution of the social drama opened by a witchcraft
accusation fails. It could succeed if a mediation would occur between the
treatment of the bewitched and the restoring of the social order, a solution
seldom achieved.




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 Edoardo QUARETTA received a PhD in Anthropology and Ethnology at the University
 of Perugia and the Free University of Brussels. He conducts fieldwork in the
 Democratic Republic of Congo since 2006 on a various range of research topics
 such as childhood, witchcraft, Pentecostal churches, international aid and
 Catholic missionaries. He is currently research fellow at the Department of
 Humanities of the University of Calabria and teaches African History and
 Development at the University of Turin. Among his latest publications: R.
 Giordano, E. Quaretta, D. Dibwe dia Mwembu (eds) Dynamiques sociales et re-
 présentations congolaises. “L'expérience fait la différence” (L'Harmattan, 2019);
 “Ethnographie et recherche visuelle. Réflexions à partir d’une expérience de
 recherche partagée sur la mobilité en Italie” (Africa e Mediterraneo, 90, 2019).
 edoardo.quaretta@hotmail.it




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Edoardo Quaretta
Children accused of witchcraft in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC): Between structural and
symbolic violence
2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2019: 61-82.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3675
