Casting Out the Demons: Exorcism in Sub Saharan Africa By Alan Bederka
Nwanaokwo Edet was nine years old when his father, convinced his son was practicing witchcraft, poured acid down his throat. The boy struggled the acid spilled, burning away his face and eyes. As the boy laid struggling on bloodstained sheets, he was barely able to mutter out the name of the church that had denounced him: Mount Zion Lighthouse. A month later Nwanaokwo succumbed to his injuries and died.
Regrettably, the 2005 death of Nwanaokwo Edet of Nigeria was not an isolated incident, but was indicative of a prevalent, and often ignored obsession with witchcraft within Christian communities in SubSaharan Africa.
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According to a 2010 Gallup survey, on average 55 percent of SubSaharan Africans believe in witchcraft. In some nations, belief in witchcraft is even more prevalent; for example, 76 percent of the residents of Kinshasa, Congo claim to personally believe in it.
Until the 1990s, witchcraft accusations were most commonly made against elders, particularly elderly women. Since the mid1990s however, “the number of witchcraft accusations against children [has been] rising in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Angola,
and Nigeria, particularly in large towns.” In more recent cases, the majority of the accused are the children of pious families. Once accused of sorcery, these children are often brutally tortured by religious leaders, clerics, and even members of their own family in an attempt to exorcise demonic spirits. Many Christian children who are accused of sorcery will choose to live on the streets rather than face the horrors of an exorcism ritual.
In 2010, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimated that as many as “20,000 children accused of witchcraft were living on the streets of DRC's capital Kinshasa.”
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Despite the horrors that await them if they choose to flee to the streets, children accused of witchcraft who stay at home will likely "face abuse by their parents, relatives or pastors who attempt exorcism [using] tactics such as the withholding of food or water, beatings, and burnings.”
There have also been cases in which children have been "taken to the forest and slaughtered, bathed in acid, burned alive, poisoned to death with a local poison berry, buried alive, drowned or imprisoned and tortured in churches.” In other cases, families leave their children out on the streets after they have been accused of witchcraft.
Many children who are accused of witchcraft are children "with disabilities or illnesses, [who are] the rebellious or badly behaved." Even behaviors as simple as a child eating but not growing or bedwetting is
associated with witchcraft in Kinshasa. Any misfortune to befall a family can be blamed on the child performing witchcraft "such as accidents, divorce and infertility...In this way, the misfortunes in life can be explained and, in extension, the social order maintained.”
At the center of the witchcraft accusation epidemic are the religious leaders who willingly perform exorcisms on the accused. The exorcism ceremonies have become a particularly lucrative business for religious leaders willing to perform them. There have been reports of individual clerics making up to $50 per child in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the average salary is around $100 per year. In addition, churches have been accused of holding
children captive and torturing them in an attempt to get a confession out of them for practicing witchcraft.
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It is possible that Pope Francis’s endorsement of the IAE may legitimize abusive exorcists in the eyes of SubSaharan Catholics and may even encourage families to perform exorcisms of their own, as in the case of Sinethemba Dlamini.
Sinethemba Dlamini was 15 years old when her family performed an exorcism on her, where she was brutally tortured by five of her relatives. Believing that she had a demon in her body, her relatives viciously beat her with a broom. When she tried to escape, her family caught her, beat her again with brooms, and pulled her intestines out through her vagina. A source states that her attackers then waited with her, praying, and expecting her to wake up, free of possession. Sinethemba Dlamini was found dead by police sometime later with her intestines lying beside her.
Whether examining the case of Sinethemba Dlamini, Nwanaokwo Edet, or any of the countless other children affected by witchcraft accusations, the one seemingly unavoidable question is “Why?” Why would a parent, a relative, a guardian, a priest, or anyone at all, allow for this sort of brutality to be enacted against a child?
The answer lies somewhere at the intersection of poverty, conflict, and ignorance. In many cases, the families of the accused children are living in poverty. To them, accusing a child of witchcraft conveniently provides the family with one less mouth to feed. While this sort of behavior may seem unconscionable to some, it is important to remember that much of SubSaharan Africa lives in extreme poverty and in environments where food is incredibly scarce. This sort of poverty breeds desperation, leading families to commit atrocities most never imagine they could.
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According to UNICEF, being an orphan or being brought up by relatives is a risk factor for witchcraft accusations. Another factor which can increase the likelihood of witchcraft accusations is the introduction of a stepparent, because in many cases, witchcraft accusations serve as a quick and easy way for a stepparent to remove an unwanted child from the home.
The myriad of social, economic, and religious factors that lead to witchcraft accusations against children create a complex predicament which can not be solved with any single solution.
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It is also worth noting that many of the nations in which child witchcraft accusations are prevalent also struggle with low rates of literacy and weak education systems. In the Democratic Republic of Congo for instance, only 2/3 of the population over the age of 15 is literate.
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As noted before, one of the reasons that families are willing to accuse their children of witchcraft is to relieve themselves of the economic burden of having another mouth to feed.