It is easy to forget that life continues in the shadow of war. Small stalls selling vegetables and fruits lined the dusty roads of Bukavu’s town center, as people crisscrossed in traffic heading to work or school or market or a friend’s house. We passed a bakery called Peace and a mobile phone shop marketing itself with a painted portrait of a BlackBerry-wielding Barack Obama. Our hotel was a quick trip from the border, and I settled in to my room for the night. The next morning we climbed into a Land Cruiser for the journey from town to Panzi Hospital. Once off the main road, the car started to lurch, as the stone-filled road challenged the heavy vehicle to a duel. I gripped the seat in front as we made our way down the hill in plumes of red dust until we reached the gates of the old mission hospital.
In comparison to the road outside, Panzi Hospital’s grounds were immaculately swept. Low concrete buildings with wards formed the core of the medical complex, with shrubs dotting the edges of buildings. We were greeted and led to a grassy courtyard that formed the site for morning prayers. I was asked to address the staff, which I did in a mix of French and faltering Kiswahili, as our delegation was greeted in song, prayer, and words of gratitude. By midmorning we were on a tour of the compound. The line for the antenatal unit was long but orderly, as nurses in neat uniforms attended to pregnant mothers coming in for their monthly checks. We were shown the blood bank, the general wards, the HIV clinic. Though calm, the murmurs of war were not too far beneath the surface. We entered one of the waiting rooms to find a number of women sitting on the floor with their babies on their laps. The smell was strong, and the medic that was guiding us whispered quietly, “It is the fistula—these women have survived rapes, and they are leaking urine.” Walking through the lab, I spotted a sign pinned to a shelf that stated matter-of-factly, “Travaillons comme si nous n’allons pas mourir demain”: Let’s work as if we are not going to die tomorrow.
This mantra, it seems, has guided the work of Dr. Denis Mukwege, medical director of Panzi Hospital, who resuscitated the old hospital in the midst of conflict and built it into a center of medical innovation in gynecological surgery and holistic, justice-fueled response to violence against women. His work would win him a Nobel Peace Prize. A baobab tree of a man, Mukwege filled the doorframe of his office as he walked out to greet us. His white medical coat and rubber clogs signaled his profession, just as the overcurved bend in his shoulders signaled his calling as mender of women’s pain.
That evening we were invited to his house for dinner, and we sat around his family table as he and his wife offered nourishment with the generosity of old friends. Dr. Mukwege and I ended up talking into the evening. I shared that my grandfather came from the mountains on the Congo-Uganda border, summoning in me a sense of historical responsibility to this region. He shared his life story and what had compelled him to do this work, choosing to return to Congo rather than remain in the West and a relatively easy life of private medical practice. His vision had clearly inspired a dedicated staff base, faced as they were with ongoing challenges to their own physical security and mental health. I saw, in the outreach projects Panzi had established to support its women patients, that this willful commitment to thrive in defiance of human cruelty was shared. Women patients who had been handed the repercussions of armed grievances that were not theirs—lost families, fractured physical bodies, disrupted livelihoods—working together in a resilient solidarity to make their worlds anew. In the simplest of words, what I saw of Panzi’s work was remarkable. As our car left Bukavu, I was overcome with a sense of triumph.
On the flight back to London, I struck up a conversation with the White woman sitting next to me. She was middle-aged and from her accent clearly from a British upper-class background, by education at least if not by family position. She explained that she was working as a peace-building consultant in Congo but had recently started a business venture there. She asked what I was doing in Bukavu, and I described the visit to Panzi Hospital. “Mukwege,” she said. “Well, his hospital is not as great as everyone says it is.” She proceeded with a decidedly salty analysis of not just Panzi Hospital but also what she felt was the fault of the Congolese people for bringing war and its horrors upon themselves. I sensed almost a jealousy in her posture, as she launched critique after critique against the people of the country that was the source of her apparently buoyant livelihood.
I looked dead into her eyes and said, “Well, I think that you and I have completely different understandings of history.” I proceeded with a quick-fire analysis of the history of Congo from its status as the personal property of King Leopold of Belgium, the hope that Patrice Lumumba provided for political autonomy, and his slaughter at the hands of Western-backed assassins. That the Congo’s mineral wealth had always been extracted to fuel Northern militarism—even the uranium for the first atomic bombs dropped by the USA in Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from the soil of Congo. Her arrogance did not falter, and she muttered back, “That is old news,” and turned away, ending our conversation.
Anger can be clarifying. As the fire of fury rose in me, I realized how deeply African possibility is held hostage by so-called experts like this woman, who did not return the welcome offered by African communities by holding their future anywhere in her heart. To her the devastation of life in eastern Congo was a career opportunity, a business opportunity, a means to an end. Raw material for personal progression. I am not sure why I had expected her to be moved by my attempts at rescripting her narrative. There was no real or imagined bloodline connecting her to the arteries of Bukavu’s people. The truths of this land were, well, erasable. Her finger was casually positioned on Delete.
In October of that year gunmen entered Dr. Mukwege’s home, pointed weapons at his two daughters, and waited for him. As his car pulled in, they managed to get as close as a gun to his head before his watchman, Joseph Bizimana, intervened, sacrificing his own life instead. The news spread fast. Mukwege’s own staff, friends, and patients arrived first to stand guard. A group of women from Panzi’s outreach projects even journeyed on foot from their homes on the outskirts of Bukavu, kitenge-clad sentinels coming to protect the beloved doctor. Mukwege was a risk. In recent speeches he had been writing the political economy of the conflict swirling around him back in to public record. Western mining companies, national political elites, the economy booming around eastern Congo’s precariousness, all forces that depended on an ever-dwindling memory of their presence to flourish.
Back in London, I chose the few solidarity tools at my disposal—an email to Dr. Mukwege, text messages to colleagues to see how to stoke a political response, and my voice. A colleague and I cowrote an article for openDemocracy in which we retraced the political underpinnings of the need for solidarity with Mukwege. To write against the emptying, the elision.
If activism is the affirmation of life, then perhaps it really is a battle against the backstory being erased from the world. Situated in history as woman, as feminist, as African, as Black, I see the path toward persistent presence is lit incandescent. To survive is to name troublesome truths. Loudly, at precarious moments.
In the midst of threat.
Chapter 14
The Lord’s House, a Queen’s Soul