KINSHASA, Congo — Inside a small concrete church, lit by a few tungsten bulbs hanging from exposed wires, hundreds of people stood packed together in stifling heat, repeating the words their pastor bellowed into a microphone.
“On va tuer les demons” — “We will kill the demons.”
It was after midnight in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but the service was just getting under way. The pastor, Pierre Pinda Buana, wore a simple, blue button-down shirt. Its acrylic shimmered as he moved around the center of the room — smooth, practiced, confident. For almost an hour, Pinda led his congregation through songs and chants, the fervor in the church mounting. Then he preached about the main event they had all come to witness: exorcism.
Charles, a Congolese friend of mine, who asked that I not use his real name, translated Pinda’s words from Lingala, a local language, to French. But the cries, clapping, and ululations of the crowd often drowned out his voice.
Pinda began describing a demon that was living in the body of a woman who stood before him, almost entirely blocked from my sight by the crowd: “It’s attacking the heart. It’s attacking the stomach. It strikes faster than an arrow.” He called out to the demon, asking why it wanted to kill the woman.
Electrical contacts crackled — I glimpsed a church assistant crouched over a fuse box in the rear doorway — and the bulb dangling above Pinda went dark. Light fell inward from the corners of the room, yellow and angular. Suddenly, the woman collapsed onto the ground and began shouting. The crowd pressed in around her as she writhed and arched her back.
“Elle dit” — Charles told me — “she is saying the spirit wanted to kill her in her sleep because she had a good future. The spirit wanted to destroy the hope in her.”
Pinda spoke in a commanding voice, and the woman replied, every word staccato, like a glottal stop. The demon was speaking through the woman, Charles said, and resisting the exorcism. Pinda repeated “deliverance” again and again, his voice echoing in the church’s speakers. The center bulb flared back on as he pointed down at the woman and cried out for the demon to leave. The people in the crowd pressed in even more tightly, lifting their arms. Each time the demon told Pinda it would not go, the pastor raised his voice and the crowd clamored, calling out to Jesus.
Suddenly, the people fell silent. The woman had closed her eyes. Those nearest to her hunched down, touching her as they prayed. In the background, a keyboardist in the church’s band played a few soothing chords on a synthesizer.
The exorcism was surreal to an outsider standing in the clutch of believers — a startling glimpse into what, for most people in the room, was a typical church service. Yet the most striking thing about the scene was that, despite the alleged cries of a demon, the professed presence of evil, the crowd never appeared scared of the exorcism — only impassioned.
They were wary, however, of a cluster of children huddled in one corner of the room. Occasionally, a congregant would look over at these children in the shadows, most of them asleep. No one but Pinda’s assistants went near them.
Charles, a university-educated, deeply religious man in his 30s whom I had met while working on a book project and who had agreed to serve as my guide to Kinshasa’s churches, had hesitated to come that night because he knew the children would be there. They would be central to the service’s finale, he explained: Pinda would exorcise them of malevolent spirits that are particularly dangerous when they possess the young.
Before the service, as the congregation waited on the dirt road outside the church, Charles had appeared nervous, arms crossed and shoulders drawn in. At one point, a church assistant walked outside and pushed his foot into a rut between the road and a sewer’s concrete edge, prodding at what looked like a pile of rags. A child sat up; he had been sleeping next to the gutter and was covered in dirt. People in the crowd pulled back or stared, their eyes wide. The assistant nudged the boy, at most 5 or 6 years old, toward the church. He walked like any half-asleep child, slouched and staggering. He lost a disintegrating shoe and stopped to kick at it repeatedly until his foot went in. People parted to let him pass.
Charles backed away and took my arm. Leaning close, he whispered, “C’est un enfant sorcier” — “It’s a child sorcerer.”
This mother and her children were accused of sorcery and thrown out of their home because they were said to be causing the family’s financial problems.
Over the past two years, during several visits to Kinshasa, I heard terrifying rumors — of children who strangle parents in their sleep or eat the hearts of their siblings. Of swarms of children flying through the skies at night, stealing money or deliberately causing illnesses like HIV and polio.
These children, people said, are sorcerers. They are possessed by dark powers that cause them to commit nefarious, even murderous deeds. To prevent child sorcerers from mischief or worse, people told me, their families should reject them and society should shun them. Or they should be taken to church — 80 percent of Congolese are Christian — where a pastor can perform exorcisms in the name of God. Congo’s wildly popular églises de réveil (“revival churches”) — an umbrella term for sects rooted in a mix of Pentecostal, charismatic, and prophetic beliefs, as well as local superstitions about dark magic — are more than willing to oblige.
Indeed, the hysteria over child sorcery has spurred a frightening witch hunt, with devastating results. According to UNICEF in 2013, Congolese children accused of sorcery “number in the thousands.” People experiencing hardship (a sudden illness, the loss of a job, the death of a relative) often search for a child to blame and find one in their own families. Some of these children are killed, but far more are abandoned, left to join Kinshasa’s tens of thousands of street children. Or they are dragged to churches, where they may well find further misery. According to Human Rights Watch, alleged child sorcerers taken to churches may be denied food and water, whipped until they confess, or sexually abused. “More than 2,000 churches practice deliverance in Kinshasa alone,” the organization has reported. Similarly, in a 2013 report about Congo, the U.S. State Department described “exorcisms of children accused of witchcraft involving isolation, beating and whipping, starvation, and forced ingestion of purgatives.”
This is not an isolated phenomenon. Although the situation is difficult to quantify precisely, UNICEF has found that accusations of witchcraft against children are on the rise across sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the problem is so pervasive in Congo — in Kinshasa and elsewhere — that the country passed a law in 2009 banning allegations against children. To date, it appears to have had little effect.