Rachel Mwanza

Rachel Mwanza
Mwanza at a TEDx presentation in Paris, October 2014
Born	1997 Kasai Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo
Nationality	Congolese
Occupation	Actress
Years active	2013-present

Rachel Mwanza is an actress from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, best known for her performance as Komona in the 2012 film War Witch (Rebelle). Prior to being cast in the film, she was homeless and living on the streets of Kinshasa.

Mwanza was born in 1997 in Mbuji-Mayi, the third of six siblings, and spent her early childhood in Kasai Province. Her father dispatched her mother and siblings to Kinshasa when she was eight years old, promising to rejoin them later. There, the children no longer attended school, and her mother held her responsible for the family's misfortune after a false prophet stated Mwanza was a witch. He charged her mother for attempted exorcisms to rid Mwanza of witchcraft, but eventually she was thrown out on the street.

Mwanza spent several years living as a street child in Kinshasa before being cast in the Canadian film War Witch (Rebelle). She also appeared in the 2013 film Kinshasa Kids written and directed by Marc-Henri Wajnberg.

She later moved to Montreal, where she attended the high school École Lucien-Pagé and lived with the family of Anne-Marie Gélinas, the associate film producer for War Witch.

She was cast in the film after director Kim Nguyen and producers Pierre Even and Marie-Claude Poulin saw her in a documentary film on the street kids of Kinshasa. Due to her lack of education, she did not know how to read or write when she was first cast in the film; the filmmakers have since made arrangements to pay for her education and housing until she turns 18. In February 2013, she was granted a visa to allow her to attend the Academy Awards, as it was the Canadian entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The visit combined attendance at the awards along with promotion work for Rebelle while she was in the United States.