Shegue


Today systems for the health care, education, criminal justice and social support are either non-existent or about to collapse.

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

...For the vast majority, however, day-to-day life exists on the margins, without access to credit, without banks, without insurance, beyond any government regulation or benefit, beyond any physical structure.

...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.... In the last fifteen years, numerous interrelated and complex socio-economic factors have led to the explosion in the number of children on the streets in DRC including, but not limited, to: the civil war, resulting in countless children orphaned or abandoned, huge numbers of people displaced, a sharp deterioration in essential state services, and a related increase in poverty and unemployment.

In the former olympic swimming pool the young Shege make their life repairing old flip flap.

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 to researchers as an abbreviation of the name Che Guevara, in reference to the independent spirit and toughness of street youth.

...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.

...There are many places in Kinshasa where street children are violently dealt with, and violence is usually their mode of communication.

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