Mean streets hold little magic for young African ‘witches’

Mean streets hold little magic for young African ‘witches’ – International Herald Tribune: “In parts of Angola, Congo and the Congo Republic, a surprising number of children are identified as witches and beaten, abused or abandoned. Child advocates estimate that thousands of children living in the streets of Kinshasa, Congo’s rubble-strewn capital, have been accused of witchcraft and cast out by their families – often a rationale for not having to feed or care for them. The authorities in one northern Angolan town identified 432 street children who had been abandoned or abused as suspected witches. A report last year by the government’s National Institute for the Child and the United Nations Children’s Fund described the number of children deemed to be witches as ‘massive.”