War or Hunger?
Children's Witchcraft on the Angola/DRC border

By: Madalina Florescu

There cannot be any discussion of conflict in Africa without a reference to chronic hunger as embodied living memory of violence. Throughout the 1990`s children have become the icon of vulnerability to military power, both as perpetrators and victims. During this same period, financial wealth has become increasingly electronic and everyday life has become increasingly “spiritual”. Bodily processes have become less and less “natural”, and social relations less and less a site of the circulation of food.
A geographical focus on the distribution of witchcraft reveals an overlap with the manioc belt. Between 1850 and 1920 in Angola famine caused more internal displacement than the slave trade. Then, in the 1940`s Portugal launched the programme of white settlement that further restricted the access to land for thousands of African farmers. By contrast to urban towns that had been in the sphere of influence of the Catholic Church, the rural areas had been the zone of influence of Protestant missionaries, whom the Portuguese government did not tolerate. When the war begun on the frontier with Congo in the 1960`s, the rural interior and the urbanized coast had been for a century under the jurisdiction of different authorities in competition with one another. Using ethnographic data gathered in 2007 among former diamond traders and Congolese immigrants to Luanda, I will present and discuss how chronic hunger is talked about as “abnormal mortality” in the language of witchcraft from the perspective of children themselves, the Catholic Church, Protestant missionaries, and Angolan State.