[LINK] "Child witches" in Africa

pompe recently linked to a recent article in The Observer that described how many new Christian churches in Africa, by mixing pre-conversion beliefs with Christian-inspired beliefs about demons and the supernatural, have managed to come up with ideologies which justify the abandonment, torture, and outright murder of thousands of children. As pompe pointed out, that kind of mixture is toxic.

Almost everyone goes to church here. Driving through the town of Esit Eket, the rust-streaked signs, tarpaulins hung between trees and posters on boulders, advertise a church for every third or fourth house along the road. Such names as New Testament Assembly, Church of God Mission, Mount Zion Gospel, Glory of God, Brotherhood of the Cross, Redeemed, Apostalistic. Behind the smartly painted doors pastors make a living by 'deliverances' - exorcisms - for people beset by witchcraft, something seen to cause anything from divorce, disease, accidents or job losses. With so many churches it's a competitive market, but by local standards a lucrative one.

But an exploitative situation has now grown into something much more sinister as preachers are turning their attentions to children - naming them as witches. In a maddened state of terror, parents and whole villages turn on the child. They are burnt, poisoned, slashed, chained to trees, buried alive or simply beaten and chased off into the bush.

Some parents scrape together sums needed to pay for a deliverance - sometimes as much as three or four months' salary for the average working man - although the pastor will explain that the witch might return and a second deliverance will be needed. Even if the parent wants to keep the child, their neighbours may attack it in the street.

This is not just a few cases. This is becoming commonplace. In Esit Eket, up a nameless, puddled-and-potholed path is a concrete shack stuffed to its fetid rafters with roughly made bunk beds. Here, three to a bed like battery chickens, sleep victims of the besuited Christian pastors and their hours-long, late-night services. Ostracised and abandoned, these are the children a whole community believes fervently are witches.

[. . .]

Mary Sudnad, 10, grimaces as her hair is pulled into corn rows by Agnes, 11, but the scalp just above her forehead is bald and blistered. Mary tells her story fast, in staccato, staring fixedly at the ground.

'My youngest brother died. The pastor told my mother it was because I was a witch. Three men came to my house. I didn't know these men. My mother left the house. Left these men. They beat me.' She pushes her fists under her chin to show how her father lay, stretched out on his stomach on the floor of their hut, watching. After the beating there was a trip to the church for 'a deliverance'.

A day later there was a walk in the bush with her mother. They picked poisonous 'asiri' berries that were made into a draught and forced down Mary's throat. If that didn't kill her, her mother warned her, then it would be a barbed-wire hanging. Finally her mother threw boiling water and caustic soda over her head and body, and her father dumped his screaming daughter in a field. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she stayed near the house for a long time before finally slinking off into the bush.Mary was seven. She says she still doesn't feel safe. She says: 'My mother doesn't love me.' And, finally, a tear streaks down her beautiful face.

The story of torture, murder, and abandonment that the article told reminded me about a very similar 2006 article from the Observer about very similar events in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As Congolese society has disintegrated, undermined by the country's rulers and ravaged by Aids and poverty, the family has collapsed. Children have been the main victims, often accused of witchcraft when families suffer misfortunes.

'Thirty years ago this did not exist,' says Remy Mafu, the director of the Rejeer project for street children. 'Now it's a huge problem and difficult to know how to deal with it.'

He estimates there are between 25,000 and 50,000 children on the streets of Kinshasa, a city of seven million. Many - if not most - have been accused of witchcraft and rejected by their families. The roots lie in a distorted development of African culture. Witchcraft does not mean in Africa what it means in Europe. Traditionally in Congo, every community had mediums who communicated with spirits in the other world. These were usually older people, revered and respected. The spirits they communed with or were possessed by were usually neither good nor bad, simply powerful.

'In African culture, when something goes wrong, we ask the spirits to find the human cause,' Mafu explains. 'These days children are accused. They can be persuaded to accept it's their fault. They tell themselves "it is me, I am evil".'

Then there are the new fundamentalist Christian sects, of which there are thousands in Kinshasa. They make money out of identifying 'witches' and increasingly parents bring troublesome children to the pastors. 'It's a business,' says Mafu. 'For a fee of $5 or $10 they investigate the children and confirm they are possessed. For a further fee they take the child and exorcise them, often keeping them without food for days, beating and torturing them to chase out the devil.'

[BRIEF NOTE] The Sorbs

Television New Zealand recently carried a story about the Sorbs, a West Slavic people related to the Czechs and Poles who reside in the region of Lusatia, which straddles the borders of the eastern German states of Brandenburg and Saxony. The Sorbs are like the Ruthenians or Rusyns in being a small Slavic nation that never quite managed to break through into nationhood but the Sorbs, unlike the Ruthenians, lack any one sizable territroy where they predominate. Sorbs form a minority throughout Lusatia, with a population distribution akin to that of a diaspora, the closest thing to a Sorb homeland being certain rural villages where Sorb traditions are strongest. Many of these villages are now face physical destruction.

Germany's Sorbs, one of Europe's oldest and smallest minorities, are mounting a last-ditch campaign to preserve a rural way of life that survived Nazi persecution and decades of communist rule.

Energy group Vattenfall Europe wants to uproot thousands of people from their homes to expand its open cast brown coal mines in Lusatia, the watery flatlands in the south eastern corner of Germany which are home to the 60,000-strong Slav community.

"We are fighting against Vattenfall and local politicians - this is about the environment and about keeping our way of life," said Rene Schuster, a Sorb environmental campaigner.

Sorbs have lived in Germany for more than 1,000 years and their language has similarities to Czech and Polish.

Lusatian street signs are in two languages and local radio airs a few hours of Sorb programmes each week.

Sorbs marry in black, play bagpipes and stage a pig-slaughtering festival in January.

They are famous for their intricately painted Easter eggs and colourful processions.

Open cast mining has forced 30,000 people and 136 Lusatian villages to move since 1924 and much of the upheaval happened during and shortly after East German Communist rule.

Vattenfall has recently submitted plans to extend its open cast mining in five areas which would mean moving another 3,000 to 4,000 people.

The community blames the brown coal industry, one of the most highly polluting forms of power generation, for the decline of the Sorb, or Wendish, culture.

"We get more consultation and better compensation now but that does not help preserve Sorb traditions," said Schuster, pointing to a water pump in the former village of Lakoma where his house used to stand.

If history in Lusatia had gone differently--if they had remainder under the Bohemian Crown from the mid-17th century on, say--there might well be a coherent Sorb homeland. It hasn't, of course, and it's difficult to avoid pessimism. Outnumbered at least ten-to-one in their traditional districts in Brandenburg and in Saxony, lacking even a compact majority-Sorb enclave, with universal fluency in German, no foreign sponsorship like that enjoyed by the Danish minority of Schleswig-Holstein, and no taboos regarding intermarriage with Germans and no demographic advantage over Germans, it's difficult to imagine that an actively lived Sorb identity will outlast the 21st century. Vattenfall's planned coal mining project certainly will be culturally destructive, and the idea of burning coal as fuel does strike me as a s[pectacularly bad decision, but even if Vattenfall has its way the effect will be only that of a coup de grace.

[BRIEF NOTE] Foreign languages in the Czech Republic

In the Czech Business Weekly, Bryn Bailer wrote that "Reports that German is kaput are exaggerated"

Reports earlier this autumn hinted that the German language was headed the way of the dinosaur and the vinyl record. "In a couple of years we won’t even need entrance examinations, and we will count ourselves lucky that anyone wants to take German," Jaroslav Kovar, head of the German language and literature department at Masaryk University in Brno, South Moravia, recently told daily Lidove noviny. "If this trend continues, the German departments may disappear completely from the country‘s universities."

But even though academics currently bemoan the drop in the number of students studying German, increasingly in favor of French, Italian and Spanish, local companies--even Germany-based ones--do not seem particularly concerned.

"If you look at the decline, five years ago there were 700,000 pupils [at primary, secondary and university levels] who were learning German in the Czech Republic," said Matthias Makowski, deputy director of the Prague branch of the Goethe Institut, which promotes German language and culture. "It is 500,000 now."

Part of the decline has to do with the Czech Republic’s declining birthrate, which translates to fewer pupils. Last year, the European Union released statistics indicating that Czech women have about 1.2 children each--far below the rate of the 2.1 children considered to be adequate to maintain the population.

The lack of German language skills hardly seems to be an issue for companies contacted by CBW. Two of them--Munich, Germany-based electrical engineering and electronic products manufacturer Siemens and Stuttgart, Germany-based auto component maker Robert Bosch--said that if an employee was transferred into a position that required German language skills, the company would pay for individual or group lessons.

"It is not even checked [at the recruitment level] whether they speak German or not," said Kveta Kubotová, public relations manager for business software company SAP ČR, which has offices in Prague and Brno, South Moravia, and employs nearly 200 Czechs. SAP ČR’s parent company is based in Mannheim, Germany.

"We don’t have an official position with regard to the need for German," Kubotová said. "It is seen as a ‘nice to have,’ but not required. Therefore, there is no special reward for German speaking employees."

In Bosch’s Prague office, the only hard-and-fast foreign language requirement is English, according to Pavel Roman, a corporate communications officer for the firm.

The German language is fairly widely spoken, Wikipedia's Eurostat-derived article claiming that 28% of the population of the Czech Republic has some fluency in German as a second language (admittedly, versus 24% claiming fluency in English). Even so, the fact that German is so relatively unimportant is rather odd, considering how Bohemia and Moravia were constituent units of first the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation then of the German-using Hapsburg empire until 1918. Within the Czech Republic, the expulsions of the Sudeten Germans in 1945-1946 and the severing of close relations with West Germany helped marginalize German. Similar processes occurred elsewhere in central Europe, complicated in countries like Poland where remnant German-identifying populations, less thoroughly purged than in Czechoslovakia, left slowly over the course of the Cold War for West Germany.

The net result of these forced migrations and interrupted cultural networks is that although German has more speakers inside the European Union than French, more people speak French as a second language than as a native language. (English, of course, has more speakers than either language.) Perhaps cultural diplomacy and economic development might promote the status of the German language throughout Europe, including the Czech Republic; perhaps not.