Women?s bodies are a site of struggle

The seeds of women’s histories carry far into who we are and who comes after us: through silence; through the unsayable; and through generations visited by violence and abuse over and over again.

 

In some quarters, African-Americans are looking at whether slavery might have inflicted similar psychological wreckage on the descendants of slaves (beyond the obvious, known damage and trauma of racism). There’s talk of Korean women raped by Japanese soldiers not telling their families about it, until now, generations later, when their granddaughters start developing psychological and eating disorders as a result of the legacy of trauma that runs in the family. And yet, in Africa, where in recent years, women’s bodies have become the terrain of terror and war, what will the legacy be that we pass on in our emotional DNA?

 

Africa gave women in war a gift when it secured the first conviction for rape as a crime against humanity and a war crime, at the United Nations Tribunal for Rwanda. Rape as a war crime is now accepted in efforts to stem impunity – from international war crimes prosecutions for the former Yugoslavia to the International Criminal Court.

 

But prosecutions happen after the fact. Take even a furtive glance at recent and current conflicts in Africa and it becomes all too clear that rape and violence against women is the driving force (and not a by-product) of our continent’s conflicts – as much as guns and bombs and frontlines are.

 

The liberation struggles of yesteryear are over. But in intra-country conflicts, rebel groups have taken the gendered dimension of conflict to catastrophic proportions. If you look beyond the ideology (where ideology and broad political grievances are the reasons for the wars), it seems that in recent African conflicts, women’s bodies are the terrain on which wars are being fought.

 

In the 1994 Rwandan genocide, death squads targeted Tutsi women for rape. Sexual violence has been a staple feature of the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In northern Uganda, the modus operandi of the Lord’s Resistance Army is to abduct children into its ranks, using the girls as cleaners who then graduate into becoming sex slaves. The Ugandan army has a history of sexual abuse against the local female population, as part of the broader spread of human rights violations that they’ve been accused of. In Sierra Leone and Liberia, rape was a staple human rights violation – along with mutilations and hacking off of limbs.

 

Rape is an effective weapon of war – wiping out the fabric of a woman, her family and community. Despite this, the aftermath of large sexual violence campaigns is still not seen as something which needs large-scale international intervention and survivors are not specifically targeted for specialised help and care in a concerted way. At the Rwanda genocide trials in Arusha, perpetrators are on anti-AIDS drugs while standing trial, while back home, scores of women who were raped during the genocide are left largely unaided after becoming infected because of the rapes.

Yet the story of women’s lives in Africa’s wars is more complex than simply having violence visited upon them. Women are sometimes also perpetrators of violence in war. This is not to imply that there is at all a balance in the ratio of women being victims and women being perpetrators – and female violence hardly stands to compare with the ideological and scale of global male violence against women.

 

In Sierra Leone and Liberia young girls took part in rebel mutilations; and the exploits of female rebel commanders are legendary in these countries. (Although there is nothing written about the lives of women in rebel ranks and whether they too were subjected to rape as indoctrination.) In Congo-Kinshasa, it’s not unheard of for local women – themselves victims of multiple and continual rape by hostile groups – sending young militiamen into the communities who’ve raped them, to revisit the horror on their enemies.

 

Peacekeepers have also been accused of sexually exploiting the war-wrecked female populations they are sent to protect. The allegations against peacekeepers and aid workers sexually abusing women to give them access to food, first surfaced in Sierra Leone where there were also allegations of the abuse of minors. South African and Moroccan peacekeepers (as well as other nationalities) have been implicated in the abuse of women and girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

 

I argue that this does not paint a complete picture of the failure of the “help” of the international community. If you’ve worked for any time in any of the countries recovering from brutal civil wars, you notice something else too: the amount of white men working for donor organisations who regularly turn up in public places with what look to be minor girls on their arms (sometimes making a great display of having a woman on each arm).

 

It combines the worst of Africa’s recent history: racial swaggering from the west seeing Africa as a sexual playground; economic inequality; and a level of impunity and shamelessness towards the local population that speaks volume of the locals’ powerlessness. Yet again Africa is the recipient of behaviour that would be unconscionable in the home country.

 

Black women have inherited a metaphorical and political legacy from slavery onwards in which our bodies are constantly the terrain for violation. This theatre of abuse and our “valueless-ness” is now manifested in Africa’s wars. Yet, as war-wrecked and war-weary populations just want peace, peace is currently bringing large-scale impunity for warlords and perpetrators of sexual violence against women. With political settlements often meaning that belligerents become part of governments, we often have scenarios where perpetrators are overseeing legislation on how to punish their own war crimes.

 

There is yet to be a concerted unequivocal international outcry – including from African governments – that says that rape during war should always be prosecuted. In the clamour for a war-weary peace, it seems, justice for the group that represents the majority population on this continent is still a far cry away.