Angola: What Do Scrap Truck Parts Have to Do with Treating the Mentally-Ill? Read On...

There are many different kinds of casualties in a war – and not all of them physically maimed. There are those who suffer mentally -- from the cruelty, horror, anguish and misery they experienced. After more than two decades of civil war, Angola was no exception when it came to counting the toll of its violence in terms of the mentally disturbed. In my June 1997 trip, I recounted how some of them were being dealt with.

It is Sunday morning. On the outskirts of Luanda, down a deeply rutted, garbage-strewn road, a church service is under way inside a sun-baked, mud-brick building.

Some of the parishioners can be seen through holes in the wall -- swaying and clapping to the music. What can't been seen from outside is that some of them are in chains.

Welcome to Papa Kitoko's center for traditional medicine, said to be Luanda's biggest treatment facility for the mentally ill.

Forty-year-old Papa Kitoko not only runs it, administering his special mixtures of herbs and roots to patients, he also tends to their spiritual needs as the leader of his own religious cult.

Clad in an emerald green tracksuit, a broken stethoscope around his neck, he greets visitors while relaxing in his dingy office with a cigarette after leading the church service.

“We collect all mental patients from the city of Luanda and we treat them and try to integrate them back into normal society.”

In the 21 years of the center's existence, Papa Kitoko says more than 43-thousand people have been treated. He says he finances the non-profit operation with donations from private sources and from Angola's hard-pressed government, which appears all too happy to have given him responsibility for this particular social problem.

Angolan authorities have donated a battered ambulance and a piece of land in the countryside for a kind of halfway house where crops are raised.

A former soldier himself, Papa says Angola's years of warfare have increased the number of mental patients in society.

“One of the major factors was the war. There are also many drug addicts and also social pressures such as the lack of employment and the present social conditions will create certain stress and pressures which we deal with.”

Although some of those receiving treatment at the center are women, many of the current patients are former soldiers -- picked up off the streets because they were said to be violent, or hurting themselves, or behaving strangely, or living in their own filth.

Now they live in Papa's compound -- some chained to bedframes, others to scrap auto parts like truck transmissions or wheel hubs, which they pull behind them as they wander about.

Papa says he is forced to restrain some of the patients because they are a danger to themselves and others. But others are free to come and go, receiving treatment on an outpatient basis.

It is not a pretty sight. Parts of the compound are unroofed, exposed to the blistering sun. Most of the beds lack mattresses. Human waste lies exposed in the outdoor latrine.

Perhaps most disturbing is the chained man leaning against a wall who claims in a soft voice that he was snatched off the streets and deprived of his liberty against his will.