When a woman comes to Jeanne Nacatche Banyere after being raped, “Maman Jeanne” doesn’t start by asking about what happened. Instead, she draws the woman into a warm hug. If the woman wants to sit down, she sits down with her. If the woman wants to lie down, Ms. Banyere lies down, too.
“I adapt to her,” says Ms. Banyere, who runs a women’s shelter here. “I wipe her tears. I show her love and affection. She feels broken, as if she no longer matters, so I must help restore her sense of worth.”
Ms. Banyere has been doing this work for three decades, through war after war in her native eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. In that time, she has seen the same pattern over and over. Fighting breaks out, and women’s bodies become a battleground.
Why We Wrote This
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Eastern Congo’s rape crisis was once a major world headline. The world’s attention has turned elsewhere, but local activists refuse to give up.
When a Rwandan-backed rebel army called M23 seized Goma in January, the familiar cycle began again. In the first week of its occupation, some 50 desperate women arrived at Ms. Banyere’s doorstep. But this time, she could do little more than hold them and then write down their names. Her shelter, once funded largely by international nongovernmental organizations, had run out of money.
That predicament is indicative of a harsh reality. At times, the use of rape as a weapon of war in Congo has drawn global condemnation. Western celebrities such as Angelina Jolie, Emma Watson, and Ben Affleck have campaigned against it, and the U.S. government has spent millions educating communities about sexual violence and providing counseling to survivors. Twice, Ms. Banyere was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, which was won in 2018 by another anti-rape activist in Congo, Dr. Denis Mukwege.
But the need here has outlasted the interest, and as the world turns its attention elsewhere, local activists like Ms. Banyere are picking up the pieces alone.
A weapon of war
When M23 arrived in Goma in late January, a 19-year-old woman the Monitor is calling Chantal and her family were sleeping in a tent in a relative’s yard. They had fled their own home months before to escape M23.
Now, war had found them again.
“We couldn’t sleep because of gunshots” as M23 marched into the city on the night of Jan. 28, says Chantal, who is using a pseudonym because of the sensitivity of her story. Amid the crack of bullets and crash of mortar shells, she huddled with her mother, father, and older brothers, terrified to stand up.
Then, seven heavily armed soldiers came to their tent, Chantal says. The men didn’t identify themselves, but they spoke Kinyarwanda, the primary language in Rwanda, so she believes they were members of M23.
Two fighters dragged her father and brothers outside, beating them savagely. Three others moved far away with her mother.
Then, on the cold ground outside of the tent, two men raped Chantal. In the distance, she heard her mother screaming, and knew that the same was happening to her.
The soldiers left with her father and brothers; Chantal and her mother have not seen them since. “We don’t know … whether they are dead or alive,” she says. She wonders if they were forced to join M23.
Although the Monitor could not independently verify Chantal’s story, our reporter interviewed three other girls and women, of ages between 14 and 22, who say they were also raped between Jan. 27 and Feb. 2. Two told stories nearly identical to Chantal’s. Their accounts also align with what human rights groups have documented.
“Since the M23’s resurgence in late 2021, we saw in multiple different locations how M23 fighters would enter villages and often rape or gang-rape women,” says Clémentine de Montjoye, a senior Africa researcher with Human Rights Watch. “Since last year, we have been hearing increasing reports of forced recruitment of young men, and some concerning boys as well.”
According to the United Nations, around 900 people were killed in the latest offensive, and at least 572 women were raped.
Learning to survive
In the days after the attack, Chantal’s mother refused to speak about it. Instead, she urged her daughter to seek counseling. So Chantal traveled without her to the sprawling compound where Ms. Banyere works.
“I got a big hug,” Chantal says. “I felt at home, like part of the family.” But afterward Ms. Banyere sent her back to the tent.
“They are coming in large numbers, but when they arrive, I tell them that I have no means,” Ms. Banyere says.
Now, Chantal sings to forget. She particularly likes songs about salvation. But after speaking to a Monitor reporter, she softly sang, in a high and clear soprano, a melody about a merciless world.
Sexual violence once dominated headlines about Congo, to the point that it became synonymous with the conflict here. Newspapers and activists regularly proclaimed eastern Congo “the rape capital of the world.”
Now, Chantal feels forgotten. “People talk about [rape], but they are not heard,” she says.
Life goes on
Meanwhile, the women continue to come to Ms. Banyere. In the month of March, with Goma firmly under M23 control, she estimates that around 100 women sought help that she could no longer provide.
An orphanage that she operates faces similar issues. It houses 285 children whose parents died in war, and it is also running out of money. A dozen caregivers and counselors work as volunteers.
Walking past children playing in puddles, Ms. Banyere gestures to where she’d like to build a new women’s shelter, and to another empty lot where she hopes that rape survivors will someday learn embroidery. In her imagination, buildings spring from the spaces among unkempt grass, rocks, and wildflowers.
It brings her joy, she says, that women come here and find the strength to start again. She wishes they never had to come at all, but she knows rape is likely to continue to be a weapon of war in Congo.
One rape survivor who came to her during the M23 offensive remembers how Ms. Banyere comforted her.
“You are neither the first nor the only one to go through this,” she recalls Maman Jeanne saying. “But you must understand that this is life, and life always goes on.”
