Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (30 page)

K1MPESE: On July 13, i96o, around 1800 hours, a dozen sol diers and about a hundred civilians arrived at the home of Mr.
****.
With his wife and three children under 16 years of age, he was taken by car in the direction, of Leopoldville. His wife was separated from him, and in the car which was carrying her and her youngest chil dren, she was raped three times by native soldiers. They struck the 9-year-old child and undressed the 2-year-old baby "to make sure it was a boy."

K1MPESE: Mrs. **** was raped during the night of July 13-14, i96o, at the same time as Mrs. B***. She was raped a second time, together with five other women. The following day while being taken to Thysvill, the line of women were raped a third time, some in the presence of their children.

K1MPESE: Mrs. X* ** was raped io times during the night of July 13-14, in the presence of her children and her husband, who had been bound and beaten with a club.

K1MPESE: Mrs. A*** was raped four times during the night of July 13-14, in the presence of her 3-year-old child.

CAMP HARDY (Thysville ) : Mrs. **** with her husband and two children lef t Malanga Station at July 11, 1960. In the vicinity of Block 110 they were stopped by ABAKo civilians,* searched, impris oned and beaten all night. They were all sent on to Thysville where they arrived on the 12th towards midnight. Mrs. **** was alone in a cell with her children under 7 years of age when a party of about io soldiers arrived. One held her arms, one her legs, a third placed his hand on her mouth to stifle her cries, and a fourth pulled her hair and struck her in the face. She was raped about a dozen times in the presence of her children who were huddled in a corner, one hold ing the other. These attacks lasted from 0200 to 0430 hours. The family was saved by a white doctor.

CAMP HARDY (Thysville ) : On July
11,
1960, Mrs. A*** with a small child was at the house of Mrs. B***. Her husband had been imprisoned by native soldiers, who invaded the house and there found also Mrs. C***, seven months' pregnant, and Mrs. D***

*
Loyal to Kasavubu.

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with a small child. Mrs. A*** was taken home. The soldiers fought over her and Mrs. A*** was finally handed over to two soldiers be longing to the transport company at Camp Hardy, both of whom raped her. She was then taken to the house of Mrs. D*** where she found Mrs. E***, Mrs. F*** and Mrs. G*** who told her that they too had been raped.

CAMP HARDY: (Thysville ) , July
11,
196o: While Mrs. **** was in bed with
2
of her children, a soldier tried 4 times to rape her even though she.was still torn from the birth of her baby and the sutures were still
in
place.

LuLUABOURG, July 9, 196o: Two families . . . were molested and beaten. Mrs. Z* ** was raped at gunpoint in her home by
2
policemen. Both families were then taken to the military camp. . . . The
2
mothers were stripped of their clothing, molested and beaten. They were then locked into the prison. In the presence of her chil dren, a soldier lif ted Mrs. Z***'s skirts and pretended to insert a hand grenade in her vagina.

LuLUABOURG: Mrs. Y* ** was taken out of her house and raped in the road before the eyes of her 3 children and her husband, who had previously been beaten. Other women, including an old lady, were stripped of their clothing, molested and publicly humiliated.

BoENDE: On the evening of July 11 Mrs. **** and her family lef t Djolu. Stopped on the road by native soldiers, they were taken to Djolu prison and the women were separated from the men . . . . Mrs. **** was standing up with her two months' old baby in her arms. In this posture, Mrs. **** was held firmly by some natives while other natives raped her and yet another trained a gun on her. During the night Mrs. **** was raped about twenty times. Knock ing her down, the natives threw themselves on her, tearing her clothes and pulling her body hair. The women with her were also raped in the presence of their children . . .

BoENDE, July 12, 196o: The nuns were put into a punishment cell with two women and a baby, according to a statement made by two of the nuns. The native soldiers attacked the first nun, and, after a painful struggle, managed to rape her. Then they attacked another and with the help of yet another soldier, tried to rape the Sister. Two of the soldiers stamped on her. The nun fainted, and one of the other sisters asserted that the victim had just expired. The soldiers were frightened and ran away; other soldiers reproached them for having killed her when it was not permitted to do so. The nun remained unconscious for a long time. At 0530 hours the party of white prisoners, both men and women, were taken to another prison. They were all naked, including the religious, and their hands

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were tied behind their backs. They were incarcerated in a cell block where some twenty women and children were already imprisoned. The soldiers wanted to know why the nuns were not affiliated to Lumumba's political party, and whether they had sexual relations with priests; each was promised a soldier for the night. Subsequently the captives were taken to Mompono by truck accompanied
by
in sults of the native population.

In July,
1960,
the American Universities Field Staff sent an energetic observer named Edwin S. Munger to Leopoldville ( now Kinshasa, Zaire) to write a report on the Congo situation. Munger's newsletter for the month of September is an attempt to verify the rape accounts. Interestingly, he spoke to no raped women, but restricted his investigation to interviews with govern ment officials, doctors and missionaries. Written in the typical, somewhat breathless fashion of an Institute Fellow who has just landed at the airport, Munger's reportage contained some remark able insights.

Relying on the Belgian white paper as his starting point, Munger spoke first to an ambassador from Ghana. "Did you see anyone raped yourself?" the ambassador asked him. Nodding at Munger's negative reply, the ambassador said chummily,
"It
is typical of a wartime situation. During the last war American troops used to take Ghanaian girls down to the beach all the time and we never made any objections." A member of the Force Publique confided over a cup of coffee, "The Belgian women have hurt their vaginas to make accusations against the Congolese." A black American minister told him quietly,
"It
is hard on the children and women but the Belgians deserve it. That's hard for a minister to say, isn't it?"

Munger did better when he spoke to some French and Belgian doctors. One told him, "I saw very much the same thing in the last war when soldiers lost their discipline in Europe. My own gyne cological examinations were limited to 13 women here. . . . Be lieve me they were raped." A husband and wife medical team at the Leopoldville airport emergency center had processed scores of rape victims. The wife, Dr. Deniese Malderez, spoke freely: "I do not know how many rapes there were. We announced we had penicillin available as protection against venereal disease. Over 3
50

r
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women were injected at this station. Approximately
50
women said

they feared conception and asked for hormonal treatment. This we did not give because they were flying direct to Brussels. I believe many who were raped did not come to our station. As I went through the waiting hall downstairs to treat bruised women, several told me they had been raped but would not come for an injection. I couldn't go around calling, 'Those who have been raped report here.'
In
our ward I heard again and again the women whispering to each other, 'How many times for you?' Two girls of eight and eleven were brought to me. Their father said they were in the last car from Thysville and had been cut off. He said many Congolese had raped his daughters for
24
hours. One girl sat here for ten hours without saying a word. One girl had her legs drawn up and could not move them. . . . Over
150
women from Thysville asked for injections. I do not believe they were hysterical and asked for treatment
if
they were not raped. Many were ashamed to admit it. I went to four nuns who had been beaten and admitted they had been raped but would not come for treatment. The priests were shocked. You know Belgium is a Catholic country and abortior!
is

illegal, but several priests said curettage must be performed . . ." Munger also spoke with a Belgian evacuee, an old-time colo nialist who had owned a coffee plantation. "Why, I've known these people like the back of my hand," the old-timer told him. "I've been working with them and sleeping with their women for 35

years and I never expected to see this."

It was not just Belgian women who were raped by Congolese soldiers and civilians, but Portuguese, Greeks and Americans-no foreign national was exempt. And the Congolese during those brief, unhappy days in July,
1960,
were doing no more, in violent, compacted fashion, than the colonialists had been doing to black women for a century, and that they themselves had been doing throughout history to the women of their own race.

Philippa Schuyler, daughter of George Schuyler, conservative black editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, found herself in Leopold ville that July. She had gone there to give a piano recital and stayed on to do some reporting for the
National Review,
and then to write a book. As a black conservative and a feminist, Philippa Schuyler hewed to an original course. She was one of the few reporters in the Congo to make the connection between the European women and

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the native women, and was able to later write with equal indigna tion, "Thousands of black women have been raped in intertribal fighting."

Schuyler also managed to interview some Belgian victims. One woman who had been attacked by three soldiers showed the pianist her body bruises and torn underwear, thickly smeared with dried, clotted blood. The woman gave her this personal account: "I
was a
social worker, there to teach the Congolese women sewing, cook ing, social adjustment, and so on. I lived alone, and it was easy for the soldiers to break in. I tried to hide in the wardrobe, but they pulled me out, spitting on me, and beat me all over. I grabbed a sewing basket and hit one soldier on the head with it, but he wrenched it out of my grasp. I jabbed him with a pair of scissors but it didn't do any good. My legs were bleeding. I fell on the floor and they kicked me. I tried to get up but the floor was slippery with blood, and I fell in it. I crawled away and tried to run into the WC and bolt the door, but I wasn't fast enough, and they came in after me. . . . The women were helpless. . . . [They] stayed in their houses. Where else? They thought they would be safer there. These houses were a little distant from each other and there were no phones, so one woman could not warn another . . ."

The authenticity of Philippa Schuyler's interview with her social worker and the calm account offered to Edwin Munger by Dr. Deniese Malderez cannot be questioned, but Munger and Schuyler were hardly writing for major outlets. Rape in the Congo during the turbulent days of
1960
was never treated by the estab lishment press as anything more than peripheral exotica to the "big story" of colonialism and civil war. "One woman could not warn another," Schuyler reported. Who but a woman would find this perception relevant?

"It
would be interesting to know whether the correspondents of those papers which made no mention of [rape] knew of these allegations," wrote an editorialist for the British New Statesman that July. "And if so, whether they did not regard them as suffi ciently substantiated to include in their cables. Or did they just miss the story?"

Munger tried to find. out. He tracked down a battle-hardened reporter with a reputation as "one of the ablest and most experi enced men covering the African continent," and put the question to him, recording his answer without comment: "He . . . be—

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lieved other stories more important for his paper and did not, in his view, waste time investigating charges of rape."

There are several aspects of the Congo story to give one pause. The attitude of tough male reporters that an investigation of mass rape was a waste of time on an unimportant side issue was the same attitude that twelve years later retarded exposure of the mass rapes of Bangladesh, or the systematic rapes of Vietnam. The temporizing by government officials and Congo sympathizers that rape was a typical, and therefore
acceptable,
by-product of colonial uprising, or any clash between men, was part of the standard "war is hell" stance affected by diplomats, generals, soldiers and battle loving correspondents in every war. At the same time, the docu mentation of rape by the aggrieved side, in this case the Belgians, was collected to prove a propaganda point: that the departing colonialists were injured innocents of a beloved country "not yet ready" for independence. And finally, the very nature of the rapes themselves: they were acts of undifferentiated hostility of men toward women, perpetrated on nonbelligerents in the course of a celebration, in this case a celebration of independence-part of the general hoopla of flexing muscle, taking over, and tying on a manly drunk-with the raped women cast as symbol of the hated op pressor, a ready, easy target without the means of self-defense. Rape in the Congo was shrouded in the cloak of vengeance and made plausible by an historic view of woman as the property of man, but we should not forget that beyond the shiny patina of ideological excuse, it was also rape amid the levity and frivolity of men having a good time.

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Two Studies in American History