Je ne savez pas

Anyone who’s someone in Kinshasa was running around last night in preparation for the new UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon’s visit. It’s the Sec Gen’s first official international trip as world leader. Ban will make an address this afternoon in Kinshasa -on what, I couldn’t begin to tell you- before heading to Kisangani in the east tomorrow.

A good portion of the rest of Kinshasa, expat and Congolese, spent the Friday evening at the premier of Les Enfants Bouc Emmissaire (The Scapegoat Children), a short film on Kinshasa’s street kids produced by ORPER (Oeuvre de Reclassement et de Protection des Enfants de la Rue or Work for the Rehabilitation and Protection of Street Children).

Street kids in Kinshasa have a terrible reputation as vagabonds, thieves and trouble-makers. As in many African cities, there are hoards of these kids in bedraggled clothes, sniffing glue and begging for a few cents and throwing stones when they don’t get what they’re looking for. The shegues, as they are known in Kinshasa have been involved in instigating many of the riots that took place during the elections period, rumouredly at the behest of political leaders who know it only takes a few francs to convince a street kid to do your dirty work for you. They are avoided by everyone. An annoyance at best, a sign of our total failure as a race at worst.

We shut our car windows, maybe passing a few francs through a closing window slit, lock our doors and look the other way.

No one knows quite how many street kids there are in Kin (although speculations are in the mid tens of thousands) or exactly how they’ve found themselves on the street. Many children have been thrown out of their homes after being accused of sorcery, which is a tale heard many times over and recounted again in the film. One girl in the film is accused of sorcery when her grandmother dies and the family church threatens to burn her à la Salem. She runs away and ends up unsurprisingly on the street, where many chidren are raped, exploited and beaten by gangs of older children.

The up side is that she and many other children have been rescued rescued by ORPER and now find themselves in children’s homes where they have a chance to return to their childhood and find a path to a better future. Some of these children sit watching the film with us, dressed in their choral uniforms, whose performance opened the evening. These children’s eyes no longer have the reddened glaze that drugged-up, hungry ten year olds bare like teeth in the street.

In the parking lot as we are leaving, three kids come to the car window begging. We back out without looking as I think of the last line in the film:

Now you can’t say I didn’t know.