An Acoustic Register, Tenacious Images, and Congolese Scenes of Rape and Repetition

Abstract

This article argues for the importance of rewriting the conventional atrocity narrative about violence in King Leopold's Congo Free State in relation to the present, the ongoing war‐related humanitarianism and sexual violence in the DRC. The central idea is to push beyond the shock and tenacity of the visual, the ubiquitous mutilation photographs that tend to blot out all else; and instead seek weaker, more fragile acoustic traces in a diverse archive with Congolese words and sounds. This sensory, nonspectral mode of parsing the archive tells us something new about the immediacy of violence, its duration in memory, and the bodily and reproductive effects of sexually torturing women. The sound of twisted laughter convulsed around forms of sexual violence that were constitutive of reproductive ruination during the rubber regime in Leopold's Congo. The work of strategically tethering the past to the present should not be about forging historicist links across time but about locating repetitions and difference, including differences among humanitarian modes and strategies in the early 20th and the early 21st centuries.

One hundred years of suffering? “Humanitarian crisis photography” and self-representation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

“…Despite the rose-coloured light in which Leopold II cast his Congo endeavours in Europe, the early years of the twentieth century began to show a distinctly contradictory means of colonisation. With investigations from Europe underway, including Roger Casement's Report to the British Consulate (1904) and Morel's publications in the West African Mail (1903), a document and photographic trail emerged, detailing the abuses of the Congolese people through forced portage and labour, unjust imprisonment, flogging, 4 bodily mutilation, torture, rape, murder and the severing of individual's hands (Hochschild 1998;Hunt 2008;Twomey 2012). Cumulatively, the abuses committed by King Leopold II's leaders, rubber sentries 5 and the Force Publique army led to the deaths of an estimated, nearly 10 million individuals and the depopulation of entire regions within the Congo (Hochschild 1998;Hunt 2008).…”

Cuando los cuerpos hablan. La corporalidad en las narraciones sobre la violencia sexual en las guerras de la República Democrática del Congo

“…Incluso en los campos de refugiados, las mujeres siguen sufriendo ataques y violencia sexual (MSF, 2014). Este tipo de abusos ha producido a las mujeres un aumento de la mortalidad, la infección por el VIH y otras Infecciones de Transmisión Sexual (ITS) y las lesiones genitales, como la tristemente conocida «fístula traumática» (Hunt 2008).…”

“…Con la «brutalidad racional» me refiero al discurso repetido hasta la náusea por todos los actores que ha convertido a la idea de «la violación como arma de guerra» y el «cuerpo de las mujeres como campo de batalla» en lugares comunes como RDCongo que se han desemantizado y se han convertido en eslóganes repetidos que requieren del sufrimiento burocratizado de los cuerpos para conmover al público. Los crímenes sexuales han ido pasando de ser violencias invisibles -como explica Hunt (2008) al referirse a los crímenes de la era de Leopoldo II-a crímenes hipervisibilzados. De esta manera, los crímenes sexuales, un día silenciados y obviados en el marco del conflicto congoleño, antes explicado mediante la narrativa del conflicto étnico y sus conexiones con el Genocidio de Ruanda, se han convertido paulatinamente en el «rasgo característico y central del discurso sobre el Congo» (Auteserre 2012: 8).…”

Sexual Violence in the Congo Free State: Archival Traces and Present Reconfigurations

“…7 On whether missionaries/humanitarians considered rape "unfit for repetition", see Grant, 2015. On whether mutilated limbs are more sayable and photographable as a visual ruin, see Hunt, 2008. Historian Vangroenweghe (1986), for example, mentions that when Boali testified in front of the Commission of Inquiry and described how she had refused the passions of a sentry, great unease could be felt among the commissioners. It is likely that Boali exposed something that was well known at the time-the rape of native women by colonial agents or the claim that agents and sentries lay on native women-but that this claim unsettled Victorian social mores (see Grant, 2015).…”

“…It is thus easy to read Congo's history as a seamless continuity of rape, brutality and toxic violence. This article is not about reproducing a standard Congo atrocity narrative (see also Hunt, 2008). Nor does it provide a classical Leopold II-as-villain account, which is common among conventional state-centred top-down approaches (Roes, 2010).…”