Sensibiliser en douceur: les shegués dans les iconotextes congolais pour la jeunesse. Le cas de Prince de la rue et Elikya, le petit orphelin

This paper identifies the narrative strategies used in the picturebook Prince de la rue (Mwankumi, 2010) and the comic book Elikya, le petit orphelin, vol. 1 (Bomboko and Kojélé, 2019) to raise awareness among their (very) young readership about the plight of shegués—street children in Congo –in a gentle way. The article highlights three types of strategies: those that show suffering but blur it (“blurring strategies”), those that divert readers' attention from suffering while still showing it (“diversion strategies”), and those that distance suffering. Finally, the article links the differences in the implementation of these strategies to the context in which the two books were published, one having been published in Paris and the other in Kinshasa