Posted by Kristen
NY Times Article: UIGE, Angola — Domingos Pedro was only 12 years old when his father died. The passing was sudden; the cause was a mystery to doctors. But not to Domingos’s relatives.
Domingos Pedro, 15, left, at home in northern Angola with his brother. After he was accused by relatives of being a witch, he was beaten and terrorized. Even his mother is suspicious of him.
They gathered that afternoon in Domingos’s mud-clay house, he said, seized him and bound his legs with rope. They tossed the rope over the house’s rafters and hoisted him up until he was suspended headfirst over the hard dirt floor. Then they told him they would cut the rope if he did not confess to murdering his father.
“They were yelling, ‘Witch! Witch!’” Domingos recalled, tears rolling down his face. “There were so many people all shouting at me at the same time.”
Anastaia said,
December 11, 2007 at 8:12 pm
I read this when it came out in the NYT and it broke my heart. Can you imagine a parent being so desperate to feed him/herself that they would cast their own child (or niece/nephew) out to the streets by accusing them of witchcraft?