Six years after one of the worst single incidents of mass rape ever recorded in the 21st century, no perpetrator of the Walikale mass rapes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has ever been brought to trial in either a domestic or international forum. The attacks were condemned at the time by the United Nations Security Council, which urged swift prosecution. The hundreds of victims have never received any acknowledgment or reparation from the Congolese state.
When the Democratic Republic of Congo was dubbed the “rape capital of the world” in 2010 by Margot Wallström, the former UN special representative on sexual violence in conflict, understandably the government of DRC was not happy. Besides that, putting one country above all others when it comes to violence against women is a debatable move: So many places have horrifying records of rape and impunity for such cases. But Wallström had good reason for aiming her words at what is unambiguously a truly terrible place for women.
There’s a darkish room, maybe 12 feet by 13 feet, tucked into the back area of the ground floor of a school called Lycée Wima. Seated along walls of peeling paint are more than a dozen women sewing patterned bags, shoes, dresses, and dolls on elegant Singer sewing machines from the time between the last world wars. The work is exacting.
Colonel Magistrate Freddy Mukendi is an imposing man who speaks from behind darkly shaded eyeglasses. He takes up the full space of a lounge chair, giving off a breezy, if formal, comfort in his own skin. Considering his high-level position in the DRC, this may not be entirely unexpected.
Maseru, Lesotho—“That’s how African men are,” the woman said. She and two others laughed aloud at the infidelity of their husbands. Their laughter resonated in the hotel lobby, attracting disapproving stares from the men in business suits who occupied most of the other coffee tables.
In January 2008, during the violence following Kenya’s disputed elections, someone banged on my door. The man was a friend of my neighbor and, since my neighbor wasn’t home, I thought I might be able to help. But when I opened the door, he forced his way into my house and raped me.
In 2011, a Thomson Reuters poll found that Somalia was ranked among the top five most dangerous countries to be a woman. Fewer than three years later, Human Rights Watch concluded that two decades of civil conflict in the country had created a large population of civilians vulnerable to sexualized violence, in a report titled “Here, Rape is Normal.”
Twenty-five years of breathing in dust has led Mireille Mbale to drink milk when she can afford it; it is what she believes will guard her against lung disease. She makes less than $5 a day. Years of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo’s brash sun have dried her exposed skin.
Bimbatta Niamey, a poised and soft-spoken woman from West Africa’s Burkina Faso, was suddenly stripped of all her stability and left to rebuild her life alone in December 2012, when her husband died of liver complications. The family of her husband, who was a chauffeur, immediately withdrew her entire savings while she cared for him.
The war in Congo is like a snake. Sometimes it slithers by and you see it and feel terror; other times, it hides in the trees, waiting. Everywhere I traveled in the country with the Nobel Women’s Initiative in February, I felt that ever-present fear—and exhaustion from so many years of being either attacked or on the lookout.
There were so very many stories. Stories of women physically torn apart, leaving stains of urine on chairs from fistula they suffered from violent rape. Stories about sexual enslavement that left teenage girls hysterically crying and unable to finish speaking. Stories of erasure—of women who had been left by their husbands and shunned by their own children because men had raped them.
I’ve been reading King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild, which tells the utterly brutal colonial history of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Early on in the book, the author laments the lack of African voices on record that tell the history of the country. Instead it is a history told by the conquerors, as all history generally is. There is no shortage of evidence, however, that the Europeans who colonized the area inflicted terrors on black men and women that are stomach-sickening.
Sometimes I read something that makes the movement of the world, the very air in the room, freeze to a stop. That’s what happened recently when I read a letter written by an activist in the Democratic Republic of Congo named Neema Namadamu. I read it once, then I read it again. Instead of describing why it had such a profound effect on me, I’m pasting it in full below.
In August 2010, reports began trickling out of Democratic Republic of Congo about another tragic episode of mass sexualized violence perpetrated by rebel troops over four days in the eastern town of Luvungi. But in a recent issue of Foreign Policy, a debate sprang up about the way outsiders have portrayed the attack. The controversy highlights the need for a more candid discussion about Congo.