Legions of Street Kids Legacy of Congolese Tragedy

They’re called shegues, or street kids, apparently after the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara. And for the tens of thousands of Congolese children forced onto the streets by civil war and economic hardship, the name is appropriate.



With the government and judiciary uninterested in their plight, the children need to be exceptionally tough and resourceful to survive.



Nine year-old Patient sleeps rough in the Katangan capital Lubumbashi. He says he was forced out when his father remarried following the death of his mother.



“[Our stepmother] started mistreating us, me and my little brother,” he said. “She deprived us of food, and we did all the domestic work. One day a pastor of the church where our stepmother prays came to pay us a visit and said that we were sorcerers.



“[He said] if she has no children with my father it is because of our presence in the house. [Our] suffering was so strong and unbearable that we fled from our house, and today I’m still living on the street.”



The numbers of street children have spiralled over the past 15 years, not only in Lubumbashi but all around the country. Like Patient, some are victims of family problems, others the collapse of Congolese society and the economy following two civil wars.



The wars – in 1996 and 1998 – forced crowds of refugees to cities like Lubumbashi. Some children came with their families, but many arrived alone after losing their parents as a result of the fighting.



In Katanga, ethnic conflicts and the worldwide recession have exacerbated the problem.



In the early Nineties, under the influence of the Union des Federalistes et des Republicains Independants party, those from neighbouring Kasai province who supported the rival Union Pour la Démocratie et le Progrès Social, were driven out. Divorce among couples of different ethnicities was common during this period, and many children found themselves abandoned to the streets as a result.



More recently, the global financial crisis has badly affected Katanga where the economy is heavily reliant on mining. Poverty and unemployment are on the rise which has a knock on effect on the province’s children.



“You find many children on the streets, because of the difficult economical and social situation of families,” Thérèse Ilunga, the president of a Katanga child protection NGO, said. “If you look at it closely, it is in poor neighbourhoods where the population lives in poverty that most of these children come from.”



Few children’s rights organisations exist in Congo, and those that do receive no funding from the government. Most, therefore, can only care for children for short periods, then leave them to the dangers of the street.



Patient spends his days scrounging for food and his nights looking for a safe place to sleep. “I have no fixed place to sleep,” he said. “[To eat] I beg people of good will for money, and if that doesn’t bring enough, I collect food waste in warehouses. In the evening, we meet with friends, and each one shows what he has collected, and we prepare something together.”



Besides begging, the street children sometimes find paid work shining shoes, washing and guarding cars, delivering packages, selling cigarettes on the streets and in bars and as money collectors on taxi-buses. Many turn to alcohol and drugs like valium and hemp which are readily available due to weak regulations controlling the sale of illicit substances. Others sniff gasoline.



Ilunga criticises parents like Patient’s who reject children for reasons of witchcraft. She says it is more about simple economics that sorcery.



“I don’t believe it,” Ilunga said. “It is merely a reason for parents to get rid of their children since they don’t have the financial means. You also have divorce cases. The stepmother doesn’t want to keep the children of the first marriage and gives witchcraft as the reason. Sometimes children decide themselves to take to the street to look for an improvement of their life.”



She is calling on Congo’s justice system to step up and prosecute those who abandon their children.



“Children have to stay in the house with their parents,” Ilunga said. “We are in a country with laws. [These people] have to be brought before justice since abandonment is a serious mistake. When you make a child, you have to take responsibility.”



Héritier Maila is an IWPR contributor in Lubumbashi.