This news report, which is about Indonesian villagers using superstition to make sense of a recent cluster of deaths caused by the bird flu, will not surprise those who have lived in a developing or underdeveloped country. Magic is often the final way to explain, to cope with a reality that has nothing to present but one hundred percent poverty. Mike Davis’s latest book, Planet of Slums (the Das Capital of the 21st century), dedicates a whole chapter to the direct connection that exists between poverty and superstition in the Third World, “The Little Witches of Kinshasa.”
Davis writes:

“The Mabutu dictatorship, which for 32 years systematically plundered the Congo, was the Frankenstein monster created and sustained by Washington, the IMF, and the World Bank… The World Bank—nudged when needed by the State Department—encouraged Mobutu to use the collateral of his nation’s mineral industries to borrow vast sums from foreign banks, knowing full well that most of the loans were going straight to private Swiss bank accounts. Then the IMF, starting with the first SAP [the neoliberal Structural Adjustment Program] in 1977, stepped in to make sure that ordinary Congolese paid off the debt with interest…”

Both SAP and Mabotu ruined the national economy of resource-rich Congo, and with no government or international support in sight, more and more people turned to magic for answers and hope.

“…[L]iteral perverse belief in Harry Potter has gripped Kinshasa [the capital of Congo]. leading to the mass-hysterical denunciation of thousands of child ‘witches’ and their expulsion to the streets, even their murder. The children, some barely more than infants, have been accused of every misdeed and are even believed, in the Nidjili slum at least, to fly about at night in swarms on broomsticks. Aid workers emphasize the novelty of the phenomenon. ‘Before 1990, there was hardly any talk of child witches in Kinshasa. The children who are now being accused of witchcraft…became an unproductive burden to parents who are no longer able to feed them. The children said to be ‘witches’ are most often from vert poor families.”