A story from Spero News about children of certain tribes and regions in Angola being accused of witchcraft by their parents and bearing the consequences:

Jonas is a survivor of a disturbing trend that has emerged in Angola

in recent years: Children being accused of witchcraft, resulting in their abuse, abandonment, and, in some cases, death. It appears more frequently among the Bakongo people, concentrated in the Uige, Zaireand Cabinda provinces in northern Angola.

Isolated instances of children accused of sorcery have been recorded in the past. But now there is a "significant and growing phenomenon of abused and abandoned children" being singled out, according to a recent study by the National Children’s Institute (INAC), the government’s child protection department, and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

The problem first came to the attention of rights groups in 2000, when Save the Children, a nongovernmental organisation, recorded an unusually high number of children living on the streets of M’banza Congo, a city in Zaire. The concern was the children had been kicked out of their homes following allegations of witchcraft.

"It was frightening – the number of children in this situation, more than 400 just in M’banza Congo," recalled Suzana Filomena of Save the Children—Norway (SCF).

Filomena visited nine of 12 "treatment centres" in the city run by pastors of Pentecostal churches, healers, and followers of Kimbanguism, an African church with Congolese roots.

She found the children there being subjected to various purification procedures. The least harmful involved prayers and the sprinkling of holy water; the worst involved applying stinging perfume and chilli powder to the eyes, palm oil in the ears, the cutting of skin, burning with candles, herbal suppositories, laxatives, two-week-long fasts, forced labour on the pastor’s farm, and seclusion which could last up to six months, according to the SCF and UNICEF.

The pastors and healers had an interest in identifying and curing child "sorcerers", perpetuating the belief as they filled their pockets with the cash and other offerings that the families paid to exorcise their children, said the study.

Why do I blog this? Because I’m interested in Christianity in the Global South, as they say, and particularly in the growth of Pentecostalism, which has always seemed to me to be such a potentially sketchy trend. It’s huge, it’s phenomenal…but is it particularly prone to being transformed into something only nominally Christian, if that?