The sorcerers’ children battling Congo’s demons
‘Baby police’ as young as five used by militias as civil war fighters with promise of magic to protect them
The potion was powerful stuff: the grown-up rebels who had given it to the boys, smearing it on their beanpole bodies every day for a week, had promised it would make them invincible.
Still, the first time he went into battle Jean-Paul wanted to be sure. With the reasoning of a 12-year-old boy, he worried that his clothes could somehow diminish the magic. So he fought the enemy naked.
It seemed to do the trick. Over the next two years, he would emerge mostly unscathed, physically at least, from repeated engagements with the Congolese army, stripping each time.
“I knew that as long as I remained naked, I could be sure that the charms worked,” he said.
His friend Phillipe, a year older and wiser, had even less reason to doubt the sorcery. Unlike Jean-Paul, who went into battle with a hunting rifle, he had been given far more powerful weapons: three eggs and a calabash gourd. “When I threw the eggs, they turned into bombs and the enemy was killed by the fire,” he said. “I killed many people that way.”
For more than two decades, the myriad local wars that have scarred the Democratic Republic of Congo have featured child warriors manipulated into fighting by adult commanders steeped in magical beliefs.
Phillipe, who volunteered at the encouragement of his father, and Jean-Paul, press-ganged by his village chief, fought in the latest, triggered when the country’s Kasai region rebelled in 2016 against the government of Joseph Kabila, then Congo’s president.
Mr Kabila’s enforced departure in January has raised hopes of ending a war that has killed thousands, forced more than a million people to flee and seen children as young as five fighting and dying on the battlefield.
Not only has a man widely hated in Kasai been removed, but his successor, Félix Tshisekedi, has his roots in the region. Yet, for all the new president’s
local popularity, a lull in the fighting in recent months could prove temporary amid suspicions that Mr Kabila is still Congo’s real power.
The restoration of peace in Kasai depends on whether the new president has the means and desire to address the grievances of a region marginalised by successive governments in Kinshasa, the capital.
Kasai, historically dominated by the Luba ethnic group and its affiliates, should have been rich. In the Sixties it produced more than half the world’s diamonds. Instead, its mineral wealth was repeatedly plundered by politicians who allowed the region to become one of the country’s poorest.
Despite decades of degradation, Kasai was remarkably stable until 2016, when Mr Kabila’s government moved to exert greater control of the region by removing the right of its people to appoint their own chiefs.
It sparked a vicious civil war as a Luba sub-clan took up arms after the Kabila regime prevented an independent-minded local leader assuming the Kamuina Nsapu chiefdom and then killed him.
Jean-Paul and Phillipe were caught up in the rage that swept the region, taking the responsibility of righting the wrongs done to their community onto their young shoulders.
“I saw my friends join and fight the army,” Jean-Paul said. “We wanted to liberate the country.” They were far from alone. Thousands of children were deployed on the battlefield, serving under commanders who wasted no time in wielding sorcery to their advantage. Girls as young as seven, dressed in matching red frocks, were positioned on the front line.
Swishing their magic dresses to scoop up the army’s bullets, they protected not only the boys standing behind them with their hunting rifles and eggs, but also the men, usually armed with proper weapons, who brought up the rear.
Unsurprisingly, the child soldiers – known as the “baby police” – were killed in their thousands. Jean-Paul was told that the children who died met their fate because they had not followed the rules that made the magic work: perhaps they had eaten meat, or had sex, or worn underwear while fighting.
For rebel commanders in Congo, child fighters have always proved useful. Not only do they act as human shields, they can have a surprising effect on enemy morale.
Even the army’s elite republican guard seemed to fear the magic. Sometimes they did mow down the girls in their red dresses and the boys. But often they turned and fled.
Going from village to village, the Kamuina Nsapu militia was permitted by chiefs to set up baptism sites where children could be indoctrinated.
At these, children were given bitter potions made from tree bark powder, usually mixed with human blood and ground-up bones. The remainder, made into a paste, was brushed onto their bodies. Sometimes, as in JeanPaul’s case, they swallowed three live red ants before marching round a fire chanting incantations.
Other rebel groups, inspired by the Kamuina Nsapu’s resistance and with grievances of their own, sprang up. The government responded by creating militias from non-Luba ethnic groups that could use their own magic to take on the rebels.
Atrocities mounted. Suspected sympathisers were executed, villages destroyed and schools and clinics burnt down. Reports of cannibalism abounded. More than half of the fatalities suffered by the Kamuina Nsapu, 3,000 alone in the rebellion’s first nine months, were children, according to figures collected by Congo’s Catholic Church. But even the children could be brutal. Phillipe said he and other “baby police” sometimes executed prisoners on their commanders’ orders.
The fighting unleashed a humanitarian disaster in Kasai. Some 1.4million people fled and today 3.8million people still need humanitarian assistance.
In a region where most eke out a living on pocket farms, many were unable to plant crops, leaving them close to starvation. Nearly half of children under five are now malnourished, according to Unicef.
The crisis has only worsened in recent months after neighbouring Angola expelled 750,000 people who had crossed the border from Kasai looking for a better life.
Much now depends on what actions Mr Tshisekedi takes. Yet many are suspicious about the nature of his election victory, believing it was engineered after he struck a secret deal allowing Mr Kabila, whose party still dominates parliament, the ultimate say in governing the country.
Although some rebel militias stopped fighting, most refused to disarm because government militias did not.
The only hope of peace rests on whether the new government makes a concerted effort to regenerate the region. Rebuilding transport infrastructure would be start.
But the government also needs to deliver services such as health and education. “Even before the crisis, the region did not have a lot of well-built schools,” said Christine Kabore, Unicef ’s field office chief in Kananga, the capital of Kasai-Central province. “Unicef has for many years helped the government to build them, but we cannot replace the government.”
Phillipe and Jean-Paul, whose names have been changed to protect their identities, have escaped the militias for the moment but their futures are far from certain.
Phillipe slipped away from the Kamuina Nsapu in the fog of one chaotic battle. Jean-Paul lingered but says he started to worry about the number of children being killed. He and the other boys in his platoon concluded that their commander was not following the rules of the order, inviting divine disfavour on them all. One night they fled.
Readjusting to normal life has not been easy. Phillipe has twice moved in with family members in different villages, but both times he had to run away after being identified as an ex-fighter, the type of person many villagers did not want in their midst.
Jean-Paul returned to his father’s house. But when he got to the village he found it deserted after an army raid.
On the floor of his home, he found his father lying on the floor, badly beaten by the soldiers. For a week he nursed the man who had encouraged him to go to war, but his injuries were too great and he died in his son’s arms.
Both boys are now in a children’s refuge in Kananga run by a missionary order from Belgium. Here, life is more tolerable; there are games and lessons and, above all, safety. Yet adjusting to real life is hard and outside the refuge, Kasai continues to simmer.
‘When I threw the eggs, they turned into bombs and the enemy was killed by the fire. I killed many people that way’