They are condemned as witches and warlocks, the demon seed of sorcery. Denounced, shunned and ejected from their homes. Yet they’re children as young as 4 and 5, tossed onto the scrapheap of street life to fend for themselves, chased by predators and running away from police.
Platini — named grandiosely for a former soccer star – is 14 and for the past three months has been sleeping in the doorway of a bakery in Makala, one of the capital’s poorest communes, where he can smell the aroma of fresh-baked bread and beg for morsels.
“My mother died when I was little and they said I killed her, that I ate her from the inside,’’ the youth explains in his native Lingali tongue through an interpreter. This accusation – feeding off the internal organs of a relative who’s died from an undiagnosed illness – is a common motif in the mystic anthropology of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the growing phenomenon of “child witches’’ driven from their homes.
Platini’s father remarried. His new wife wanted nothing to do with the boy and resurrected rumours of the child’s possession by evil spirits. She beat him remorselessly — 16 surgical staples required at one point, for a broken joint and an attack with the jagged edge of a smashed bottle.
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