Gender, Violence and Politics in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Jane Freedman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317129844
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been called the 'worst place in the world' for women, with reports of widespread and horrific incidents of rape and sexual violence and almost complete impunity for the perpetrators of such violence. However, despite the high profile media reporting on sexual violence in the DRC, and the widely publicized responses of the international community, there is still very little real analysis of the real situation of women in the country. This book provides such detailed analysis of gender relations in the DRC, and goes beyond the usual explanations of sexual violence as a product of conflict, to examine the complex and socially constructed gender norms and roles which underlie incidences of violence. The book benefits from a comprehensive account of men's and women's roles in conflict, violence, peace building and reconstruction, and evaluates the impacts of national and international political responses. In doing so, this book provides valuable new evidence and analysis of the complex and multilayered conflicts in the DRC.

Chapter 1
Gender Relations in Pre- and Post-Colonial Congo

It would be difficult to try to understand or analyse gender relations and the experiences of men and women in the contemporary Democratic Republic of Congo without first examining some of the historical background and the evolution of these relations over time. As pointed out in the introduction to this book, DRC had a very violent and difficult colonial history, and it is clear that colonial rule had an important impact on the shaping of relations between Congolese men and women. Previous to colonisation, there are legends of women rulers and queens in the territory of Congo and among its kingdoms, but few histories have been written which allow us to judge whether the power that these women held was merely symbolic or whether, as some claim, there were truly matriarchal systems of rule in pre-colonial Congo, where women held real power. During my research and interviews, the legends of Congolese queens were evoked by respondents to demonstrate that the DRC is not a country of gender inequality and women’s oppression, but one where women have traditionally held positions of power, and even dominance over men. The use of these type of legends or myths seems to be a way for Congolese men and women to counter some of the dominant discourses about the DRC being the ‘worst place in the world for women’, and the use of them points to an important point about the way in which outsiders should not so easily dismiss the DRC’s history and traditions as ‘patriarchal’, nor too easily condemn the current conditions of women in the country without making an effort to understand the history and culture which provide the contemporary context. On the other hand, sometimes it seems that these myths of Congolese queens and women rulers are evoked perhaps too frequently and with too little justification, to try and counter any suggestion that there is a lack of women’s rights in the country today, without any real historical data to support the legends or any real analysis of how the power of these queens has really been transmitted to contemporary Congolese women. Unfortunately, a lack of thorough historical research and data makes it very difficult to pronounce on the real truth behind these legends, but their existence remains a good reminder of the fact that Congolese women have never been merely oppressed victims either in reality or in the national imagination.

Women in Pre-Colonial Congo

A difficulty presents itself in this or any other attempt to describe women’s situation in pre-colonial Congo, because of the paucity of research and publication on African women’s history. As Margaret Jean Hay points out in her review of historical perspectives on African women, much of the literature on African women’s history is both ‘fugitive and fragmented’ (1988: 432). Hay also voices a concern that much of the academic literature on African women’s history relies largely on mission and archival sources, rarely including oral testimonies, and thus silencing the voice of ‘the major protagonists themselves’ (1988: 436). Although progress has been made in charting the history of ‘exceptional’ women, and also to some extent the various classes of urban women in pre-colonial and colonial Africa, there are still far fewer histories which focus on the experience of rural or marginalised women. The reasons for this include a lack of written documentary resources on the situation of rural women, and thus a reliance on oral testimonies. But historians are increasingly turning to new methodologies to try and ensure that the voices of African women and their experiences are heard, and that women’s role in African history is made visible.

In the case of the DRC, there are relatively few historical resources which give us an insight into women’s experiences and relations between men and women in pre-colonial times, however, there is some research which highlights the role of elite women, and other research which points to women’s role in agricultural activity. As was stated in the introduction, the fact that the DRC as a state is a fairly recent creation, as it was formerly made up of various kingdoms, some of which also included neighbouring countries such as Angola and the Republic of Congo, adds to the complication of these histories. Some of the histories of women in the pre-colonial period are thus more general histories of large areas of Africa, which lack specificity regarding the situation of women in what is known as the DRC today. More is known about women’s experiences and situations under colonialism, but again, the voices of African women themselves are often absent from these histories which rely more on accounts of missionaries and those in the colonial administration and thus describe colonial attitudes towards gender relations and women’s position. Recently, feminist historians in the DRC have been attempting to piece together more of this history, but the relatively young and under established domains of women’s history and gender history in the country, mean that this research is still generally in its very early stages.¹ However, despite this relative scarcity of information, it is important to relate what is known to put modern gender relations in the DRC into their historical context, which is what we will attempt to do in the rest of this chapter.

In general histories of Africa prior to colonisation, it has been noted that women were generally responsible for subsistence agriculture to produce food whilst men hunted and were charged with rearing cattle and other domestic animals (Vyas-Doorgaspersad and Lukamba, 2011). Women were usually under the care and control of their fathers until they married and this control was transferred to their husbands and the members of their husband’s family after their marriage (Walker, 1990). Women in pre-colonial Africa could thus be described as ‘precious objects of exchange and control’ (Guy, 1990: 34). Clans or family groups constituted the basis of pre-colonial Congolese societies, and these were generally under the control of a man. There were both patrilineal and matrilineal societies that existed, where the children would be allied either to the clan of their father or to their mother. Although in matrilineal societies women had a certain degree of power in that it was they who transmitted membership of the clan to their children, these were not matriarchal societies where women had control of decision making (although this existence of matrilineal families may be at the origin of some of the myths and legends of matriarchal societies run by powerful women). This power of decision making in this matrilineal system would reside with a woman’s maternal uncle or brother. Women had a value which resided principally in their ability to have children, and in the dowry price that could be obtained through their marriage. Usually it was the men of the clan who negotiated this marriage and women, even if they were occasionally consulted, stayed in the background (Malu Mswamba, 2006).

However, not all women were without power, and there are examples of pre-colonial societies where women did have relative degrees of power. For example, John Thornton’s study of elite women in the Kingdom of Kongo, sheds light on the ways in which these women might be able to translate ideological and symbolic power into real power through their activities (Thornton, 2006). The Kingdom of the Kongo was a massive and highly centralised state which at the start of the sixteenth century controlled a vast area including territories in what are now Angola, The Republic of Congo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Kingdom of Kongo probably governed a population exceeding 400,000 people (Thornton, 2006). Within this Kingdom, elite women managed to exercise power firstly by working through their husbands and sons or other male relatives. One of the first battles in which these women’s power was in evidence, was that to prevent the influence of Christianity, which they believed would lead to the end of polygamy and so remove the position and privileges of some of the king’s wives. They eventually lost this battle, but as Thornton argues:

Although they may have lost out in the battle to prevent Christianity from depriving some of them of privilege and access, women were also fairly quick to take to Christianity and to patronise it. In doing so they also revealed that they were not without material resources as well and that they might use them to influence events, at least in the religious arena. (2006: 441)

During the eighteenth century these women gradually increased their power at an elite level and came to exercise authority in their own right, not just through influence over their husbands.

The status of women in pre-colonial Congo, was varied and dependent on the social and political organisation of their community, but it has been argued that there were a number of fundamental similarities amongst different communities and groups (Rusan Wilson, 1982). One of these was the predominance of women in agriculture, and indeed, Ester Boserup used the example of pre-colonial Congo to describe female farming systems as an economic mode of production in Africa (Boserup, 1970). A division of labour existed in the Congo Region, in which women did most of the agricultural work associated with food production. Whilst men cleared land for cultivation, women were responsible for sowing and planting, looking after the plants, and harvesting (Malu Muswamba, 2006). This key position in farming gave women rights and status: They had rights to cultivate land and to dispose of the produce as they wished, and in certain cases to inherit land and to pass on their land to their children. The fact that women controlled food production meant that they could dispose of any surplus they might generate, and they thus had a source of revenue and were an economic asset to their community, as well as being relatively economically independent (Rusan Wilson, 1982). Trade, like agriculture, was also a largely female occupation in pre-colonial Congo (although trade was not very well developed, due to poor transport and communications and the disruption caused by the extension of the slave trade, and war between different groups). Women were also able to engage in handicrafts such as pottery, weaving and dyeing of materials (Malu Muswamba, 2006). There were, however, some restrictions on what women were allowed to do in certain communities. For example, amongst the Bashi of the Eastern Congo, women were forbidden from owning cattle or from farming cattle. Malu Muswamba explains that this was because women were not allowed to carry arms to protect cattle against theft, and also because they were thought to be impure at certain times of their lives (such as during menstruation) and therefore could not come into contact with the cattle (Malu Muswamba, 2006: 25). Despite these particular restrictions in certain communities, however, women in pre-colonial Congo could thus be argued to have a certain degree of economic independence and autonomy, and an ability to engage in various types of economic activity and to manage their own finances to a certain degree. This situation was transformed under colonialism which transformed economic and social structures in order to fulfil its aim of providing profit first for King Leopold, and then for the Belgian State and for private shareholders, and which imposed its own norms on the prescribed roles and status of men and women.

Colonial Structures and Gender Relations

As has been argued in the introduction to this book, the Belgian colonial regime in the Congo was brutal and exploitative and allowed little room for the development of the country or of its population. The colonial authorities also had an impact on gender relations in the country. As Amina Mama has argued about colonialism in Africa, ‘colonialism also humiliated women, not only as colonial subjects but also in gender-specific ways’ (1995: 54). This is not to argue that pre-colonial societies did not impose different roles on women and men, or that there was gender equality in these societies, but it is clear that the colonial regime both imposed another layer of differentiation on gender roles, and also contributed to transforming existing gender relations within the country. As Yates argues:

Whatever the local traditions, Belgian colonialism introduced the Western-type school and the modern economic sector and gave pre-eminence to conservative Western concepts about gender roles – even in agriculture where Congolese women had clearly defined managerial responsibilities. European educators sponsored a deliberate pattern of sex-differentiated roles whose norms were embodied in the life of schools. As would be expected, strongly emphasized patriarchal traditions led to stereotyped linkages between sex differences in access to education, on the one hand, and employment in the modern sector, on the other. Finally, as would also be expected, sex differentiation during the colonial period has implications for the contemporary life of Zairian (Congolese) women. (1982: 128)

In the Congo, these gender specificities were evident in the ways in which women were forced to work for the colonial authorities, and in ways in which their personal, domestic and sexual lives were controlled. Whilst both men and women were used as forced labour, there was a gendered divide in the tasks attribute to each. The Belgian authorities also restricted women’s movement in specific ways, and advocated for a specific model of family relations, based on the European nuclear family ‘in which pious Christian women fulfilled the roles of wife and mother’ (Bouwer, 2010: 16). This narrow definition of the family and of kinship had little relation with the previous Congolese practices of kinship, or with the networks of extended families and kinship that tended to exist in the pre-colonial era. However, in urban areas, these new models of the nuclear, ‘Christian’ family, became the dominant ideals for family life.

Colonial education was organised along gendered lines, with girls’ education aimed at forming them for their future roles as wives and mothers (Bouwer, 2010; Welepele, 2012). Nearly all education for Congolese children was provided by Catholic missionaries, whose aim was to shape the moral character of these girls and teach them the European (and Christian) model of the nuclear family. As one leading missionary explained: ‘When the young Congolese boy and girl are civilized and Christian, we will unite them into a Christian family from which will come the Christian people’ (Cambier, 1890, cited in Yates, 1982: 129). The missionaries thus taught girls to be good ‘Christian wives’, able to care for their family, and subservient to their husbands. At independence, nearly all of the 1.6 million Congolese children who were in school were attending a Christian school, either Catholic (77 per cent of children) or Protestant (19 per cent of children) (Yates, 1982). The missionaries also taught girls skills such as child-rearing and housekeeping (Bouwer, 2010). European ideals on the ‘civilisation’ of indigenous populations led to the institution of laws to regulate domestic and private life. Colonial education insisted on the practical aspects of education, on instilling ‘moral qualities, the aptitude for work and the habit of continuous labour’ into the indigenous populations (Kita, 1982). For girls, official instructions ordered that a form of education should be developed which ‘trained good wives and mothers, and which did not neglect practical skills such as agriculture, cookery, washing, ironing and sewing’ (Kita, 1982: 103). As Mianda (2002) argues, Congolese women did not generally contest colonial education because in many ways it reproduced pre-existing sexual divisions of labour (whereby the women were primarily responsible for domestic affairs), and women and men both aspired to the ‘civilised’ status held up to them as a model by the colonial authorities.

A lack of educational opportunities for girls and women under the Belgian colonial rule, meant that at the time of Congolese independence in 1960 there were no female university students, and moreover, there were no women among the 800 graduates from academic secondary school (Yates, 1982). In the last year before independence (1959–1960), only a fifth of all school pupils were girls, and in secondary schools, girls made up less than four per cent of the pupils (Yates, 1982). These limited educational opportunities and attainments also had a clear impact on Congolese women’s ability to engage in the labour force in anything other than traditional roles. The sex-differentiated education system and the limited access to education for girls meant that many occupations, such as administrative posts, were closed to women. Whilst educational and employment opportunities for boys and men were also clearly limited during the colonial period, by virtue of the colonial authorities views on the role of black Africans in colonial society, the even limited opportunities open to Congolese men, were not similarly available to Congolese women.

The Belgian authorities also instituted a gendered division of labour. Both men and women were expected to work, in a system of forced labour, but women were often kept away from the more heavy labour in industrial production. This was both for practical reasons (women were considered less productive because of their lack of strength and skills, and because of their other tasks in the household), and for financial reasons (the Belgians had organised a system of paying family allowances to men who worked for them but did not want this to cost them too much and so refused to pay them to women workers, who were assumed to survive on the payments made to their husbands) (Welepele Elatre, 2012). The work that men were forced to undertake, often as slave labourers, involved heavy tasks such as collecting rubber from trees, constructing railway lines or mining. The Belgian authorities considered that these tasks were too hard for women, and that men were simply more efficient and productive in these areas. However, women had to provide food for their husbands and relatives who were working, and also for the Belgian troops who oversaw the workers. At times women were also taken hostage to ensure that the male members of their families would produce enough rubber (Bouwer, 2010). Heavy taxes imposed by the Belgian authorities on the Congolese population often forced men to move away from their families to work in plantations and mines and thus families were separated and wives and husbands often did not see each other for months or years at a time. Later, as the Belgian authorities realised that men who migrated alone to work were more likely to become less productive and to die, they began to encourage them to bring their wives and families with them to industrial and urban areas. They even went so far as to try and arrange and facilitate marriages for those workers who were single, by bringing single women for them to marry. The women living in industrial compounds and camps were expected to grow food to feed their husbands, and to be homemakers, to ensure the health and the productivity of their husbands in the mines and industrial compounds. The authorities and mine owners reinforced men’s control over women through their system of remuneration and discipline. Any family allowances that were paid out were paid to men as heads of household, giving men control over the family’s resources. And men were also held responsible for the behaviour of all of their family, so that if a man’s wife was perceived to have committed an infraction to the rules, it was him that would be punished because he had been incapable of controlling his wife.

The educational divisions, and division of labour imposed by the Belgian colonial regime in the Congo, also had the effect of limiting women’s access to resources, particularly in agriculture, where they had traditionally had independent rights to cultivate land and to consume or trade their produce as they wished. They could also inherit land and pass on ownership rights to their children (Rusan Wilson, 1982). The colonial regime re-organised this distribution of agricultural labour and rights, particularly following the introduction of cotton as a commercial crop in the early twentieth Century. The economic re-organisation of agriculture was accompanied by an ideological assault on women’s status in farming. Matrilineal systems of descent and female farming were considered to make men lazy, and Belgian administrators argued that men needed to be ‘educated’ to work, often through forced labour (Rusan-Wilson, 1982). In 1933 cotton cultivation was made mandatory, under the control of a Belgian state monopoly. Adult men in suitable rural areas were forced to cultivate cotton and to sell it to the authorities for a regulated price. This obligatory cash crop cultivation was imposed only on men, and it was men who were paid for their crops and who had to pay taxes to the authorities as heads of households. The refusal of the colonial agents to talk to or deal with women, meant that they were completely excluded from any of these agricultural and financial transactions, and so their status in agriculture was undermined. And as Bouwer demonstrates: ‘When men started controlling the money, women’s rights and access to land and their management responsibilities were eroded … Expanding cash-crop production meant that men’s supervisory rights over land were increasingly transformed into ownership rights’ (2010: 43). Women also lost the right to inherit land and to pass it on to their own children, and with the introduction of written law, women’s dependence was codified, with stipulations that they needed their husband’s authorisation to work or to sign any legal documents. These legal provisions have carried over into modern Congolese law, and remain a block on women’s independence (Malu Muswamba, 2006). Moreover, as has been argued above, the colonial education insisted on only domestic skills for women, so their training in agricultural skills was limited to the production of subsistence crops to feed their families, whilst boys were trained in the production of cash crops and were introduced to new agricultural skills and techniques. All of this combined to produce a loss of status for women, reflected in perceptions of women’s roles in society both by Belgian administrators and by Congolese men and women themselves. As Rusan Wilson argues: ‘The increasing deterioration of women’s economic independence, the rural isolation, and the absence of a meaningful education for women caused a loss of stat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Gender Relations in Pre- and Post-Colonial Congo
• 2 Gender and Armed Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo
• 3 Sexual and Gender-Based Violence: Merely a Product of War in the Democratic Republic of Congo?
• 4 Gender and Peacebuilding
• 5 Women’s Political Participation and Representation: Or Why are Women Still Excluded From Politics in the Democratic Republic of Congo?
• 6 International Responses: Are They Effective?
• Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index