Ota Benga Alliance For Peace, Healing and Dignity

This is the first of a series of newsletters sent to friends and supporters of the Ota Benga Alliance. We hope they will be of interest to web site visitors.

February 5, 2008

Dear Friends,

As 2008 unfolds, I have promised to stop procrastinating and communicate more frequently through regular newsletters. In this first one, we are pleased to announce the (nearly) new website of Ota Benga Alliance: http://www.otabenga.org/, where you’ll find articles from and about the DRCongo, and other issues related to peace, healing, and dignity.

In 2007, we continued to support the Center for Human Dignity, our sister organization in Kinshasa which struggles valiantly in extraordinarily difficult times to build community structures (Mbongi) bringing people together in ways that help and heal. More on this later. On the website you can read some of the bulletins they have put out, as well as commentary from the director, Ernest Wamba dia Wamba.

The bottom line has not changed: namely, how to bring people inside and outside of the DRCongo to change their attitudes toward the situations lived daily by millions of people in the Congo and too many other places in the world.

For the average Congolese, 2007 was a horrendous year once again. Elections took place, a new government was installed—yet, for most of the 60 million people, daily life has remained the same or gotten worse, especially for the most vulnerable ones, like women and children. They, more than any other group, deserve our attention, and we will focus on them in subsequent newsletters.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, it is hard to remember a year when one didn’t hear of women being raped, some in conflict situations, some not. But in 2007, especially in the eastern part of the country, around the city of Bukavu, the rape of women went beyond anything heard before. Some have called it feminicide…and no amount of shared information, even of the most shocking kind, even when the stories are personalized, seems to budge anyone from their apathy—or is it paralysis, cynicism, despair?

Reading what happened to the women who are hospitalized in a special ward of a hospital in Panzi, about 10 km south of Bukavu, the capital city of South Kivu Province, leaves one aghast. How could someone inflict such destruction on a human being, leaving her with no control over the functioning of the most intimate, sensitive, fragile parts of her body? One of the persons who inflicted such unbearable trauma stated he wanted to do something which would put him (and his victims) beyond the pale of recovery or healing, pariahs in their own society. The victims of rape lose everything within the community: respect and dignity. What’s worse, in a world that thinks rape is not such a big deal, they have no one to turn to…unless a campaign is mounted to declare rape a crime against humanity.

Short of this, the battle against this mindset leading to the desacralization of life is likely to remain at the level of blahblahblah. For healing to be taken seriously, not just by a few, but by all living beings, it will help the Congolese to know one of the routes by which the sacredness of life was destroyed—going all the way back to when the richest resource of the Congo was siphoned off, long before the system which emerged from that turned its savagery toward things like coltan, diamonds, and gold. Healing is not just for the Congolese people, it is also for those who have most benefited from the dominant narrative/history, a history they would prefer to forget. Healing requires knowing everything about how the wound was inflicted, so that healing can take place without reproducing any part, however small, of the mindset which led to the wound.

A passage from Henri Christophe’s personal secretary, who lived more than half his life as a slave, describes the crimes perpetrated against the slaves of Saint-Domingue by their French masters:

"Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in
sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in
mortars? Have they not forced them to eat shit? And, having flayed
them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by
worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be
devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not thrown them into boiling
cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside
barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into
the abyss? Have they not consigned these miserable blacks to man-eating dogs until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and poniard?"

--Robert Heinl, Written in Blood: The History of the Haitian People (University Press of America: Lantham, Md., 1996)

These are the wounds from which we all must heal, perpetrators as well as victims.

Peace and solidarity,

Jacques Depelchin
Executive Director