The Congo is a supposed to be one of the most beautiful and the richest countries in the world.

It languished under the Belgian occupiers and a brutal, C.I.A. backed dictator.

Today systems for the health care, education, criminal justice and social support are either non-existent or about to collapse. The international community has largely ignored the country’s demise.

Children living and working on the streets, outside of the care and protection of their parents, are a relatively new phenomenon in the DRC, as in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

Police no longer systematically arrested children for vagrancy, and government institutions to care for them fell into disrepair and disuse.

Around the same time, a declining Congolese economy coupled with a rise in unemployment

made schooling unaffordable to many poor Congolese parents.

An estimated 30,000 children live on the streets in Kinshasa, and tens of thousands more in other urban areas.

The large number of street children and adults in cities throughout the country comprise a growing urban subclass, with their own adult leaders who tightly control large and sometimes competing groups of street people, and their own language, with terms and vocabulary used uniquely among them.

Since at least the mid-1990s, street children in the DRC have been known as “shegue”, a term that was popularized by Congolese musician Papa Wemba in his song, “Kokokorobo”, and has largely replaced previous names used to refer to street children.

“Shegue” was described as an abbreviation of the name Che Guevara, in reference to the independent spirit and toughness of street youth.

Other names for street children are “mayibob” or “tsheill”, often used in reference to girls who alsp engage in prostitution.

Some street men and women, having grown up on the streets, are having children of their own, raising a second, and in Kinshasa sometimes a third, generation of children who know nothing of life but the streets.

In a report the UN Children’s Fund noted that more children under the age of five die in DRC each year than in China, which has 23 times the population.

Leaders of political parties have enlisted street children to create public disorder in mass demonstrations. In many cases, the security forces have responded to these protests with excessive use of force, leading to the death and injury of dozens of children.

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