A child was tortured by adults who feared she was a witch with powers to change from human to animal form, before she was stuffed in a laundry bag and threatened with being drowned, a jury in London heard on Monday.
The child, an orphan known only as B, was eight when the alleged abuse started. Her ordeal began in a property on a north-east London housing estate after another child told his mother she was a witch.
Over several months child B was cut with a knife on her chest, beaten, kicked, starved, whipped with a belt and had chili peppers rubbed in her eyes, it was claimed.
Three women and a man deny child cruelty charges, and two of the woman are also accused of planning to murder B.
A 39-year-old woman, who cannot be named because it could lead to child B being identified, denies conspiracy to murder.
The woman had claimed to be B's mother, but DNA tests showed that was not possible though she may be her aunt, the Old Bailey jury heard.
Sita Kisanga, 35, of Hackney, east London, denies conspiracy to murder and child cruelty charges. Her brother, Sebastian Pinto, 33, and his girlfriend Kiwonde Kiese, 21, both of Stoke Newington, London, deny aiding and abetting child cruelty between August 2002 and November 2003.
The 39-year-old woman and child B arrived in the UK in 2002 as refugees from Angola. The jury heard child B's father died in the civil war and her biological mother is also believed to be dead.
An accusation of witchcraft by Kisanga's eight-year-old son began child B's ordeal. Patricia May, prosecuting, told the jury that child B would have died if the ill-treatment had continued: "This ill-treatment started when Miss Kisanga's son one day accused the girl of witchcraft, of either trying to hurt him or his mother or other people to the extent of going out at night, using witchcraft to harm other people. There is no doubt a feeling among you that in Britain in 2005, such a notion would be incredible and no adult would believe it."
May said it was unclear whether the adults genuinely believed the child was possessed or used it as an excuse. A police raid on Kisanga's home recovered passages in notebooks about sin, the devil and witchcraft. One diary contained a reference to child B being a witch.
May told the jury they would hear evidence from Dr. Richard Hoskins, an expert in African studies, that spiritual possession was a "common feature" of traditional African religions.
Hoskins would further testify that ridding someone of spiritual possession was a matter for religious leaders.
Even if a child was possessed, nothing in African religions justified physical harm, May said: "These defendants, whatever their beliefs, knew full well that the treatment of B was absolutely beyond anything accepted by their community and what happened amounted to no more or less than abuse."
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