This just breaks your heart...
African Crucible: Cast as Witches, Then Cast Out
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.
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.” Terrified, Domingos told them what they wanted to hear, but his relatives
were not appeased. Ferraz Bulio, the neighborhood’s traditional leader, said
seven or eight captors were dragging Domingos down a dirt path to the river,
apparently to drown him, when he intervened.
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