Denis Mukwege - The Power of Women

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To my mother, my wife, my daughters, and my sisters.

To all the victims of sexual violence.

Its unusual for a man to campaign for womens rights. I know this. Ive sensed it during conversations with friends, at social gatherings, and occasionally in professional meetings. Ive noted the uncomprehending looks and quizzical expressions. Every once in a while, I encounter hostility, whether open or implied. Some find my choices suspicious or even threatening.

I remember dinner parties earlier in my career, in Congo and in Europe, when my turn would come to talk about my work. I would explain that I was a gynecologist who ran a hospital specializing in treating injuries caused by rape. And that I campaigned for womens rights. The table would fall quiet afterward, or someone would ask a polite follow-up question and then switch the subject of the conversation.

In the moments of awkward silence, I could sense sympathy in the eyes of other guests, too: what terrible work, and how I must struggle with my identity, I imagined them thinking. I adopted a strategy of emphasizing how I was also happily married and had children, as if this would make me seem more normal or easier to relate to.

Upon arriving back home afterward, Id lie on my bed or in my hotel room, resenting that Id felt the need to justify myself. This will be familiar to anyone who has felt the sting of not quite fitting in for reasons of origin, identity, or experience.

At other times, people around me would be more blunt. I remember a conversation with an old friend of mine, a classmate from school who became a politician in my province. His words still stick in my mind all these years later. I feel like since youve been working on sexual violence, youve started thinking like a woman, he once told me. Though this should have been a compliment, it was not intended as such.

I recall the flush of reassurance and kinship I felt when I first discovered the writings and work of Stephen Lewis, a Canadian diplomat and activist who has been a tireless campaigner for AIDS/HIV victims in Africa and womens rights generally. Stephen made me realize that there were other men who thought as I did. I now count him as a dear friend.

You might think that I no longer have to explain my choices after two decades of caring for and treating survivors of sexual violence, but youd be wrong. And its not only men who find it hard to understand.

A few years ago, I attended a meeting with a senior figure at the United Nations in New York City. She agreed to receive me along with fellow campaigners working on womens rights and conflict resolution in my country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We made our way to the upper floors of her building and were shown to her office, with its large meeting table and extraordinary views over the East River to Queens and Brooklyn beyond.

I was caught off guard by an aggressive interrogation. Why are you here talking about womens rights in Congo, rather than Congolese women? our host snapped at me from her place at the table. Arent there Congolese women who can speak for themselves?

The very reason I was there was to request that the UN support initiatives to promote womens voices in Congo. My hospital and foundation have helped survivors find strength in unity and supported individuals in developing their public-speaking and advocacy skills. You will meet many of these inspiring women in this book.

One might argue that the UN official was right to be on her guard against a man seeking to claim a platform for himself that belonged to women. That is a legitimate issue and one that I am always happy to address.

For my own part, whenever I have found myself questioned, at dinner parties or in UN offices, I return to my core convictions. I defend women because they are my equalsbecause womens rights are human rights, and I am outraged by the violence inflicted on my fellow humans. We must fight for women collectively.

My role has always been to amplify the voices of others whose marginalization denies them opportunities to tell their stories. I stand at their side, never in front.

As you will read, I am in many ways an accidental feminist and campaigner. There was nothing inevitable about my path in life. I set out to become a physician, which was already a lofty ambition for a child born in a shack at a time when Congo was a Belgian colony. But my life has been shaped by events beyond my control, above all the wars since 1996 that have ravaged Congo, and women in particular, under the mostly indifferent gaze of the rest of the world.

Circumstances forced me to become a specialist in treating rape injuries. The stories of the patients I encountered and treated drove me to join a much larger fight against the injustices and cruelties suffered by women. Recognition of my grassroots campaigning has led me to address you in these pages.

My life is intertwined with my war-torn country. Its tumultuous history of exploitation and conflict cries out for much wider understanding. The unrest of the last twenty-five years, the deadliest conflict since World War II, with more than five million dead or missing, has been allowed to metastasize without resolution since 1996. I write of the tragedy of Congo in hopes of encouraging politicians in the West and elsewhere to engage with it, to work toward the peace and justice so desperately desired by the Congolese people. But I have not written an autobiography and still less a book that seeks to explain Congos wars in full.

This book is a tribute to the power of all women, and in particular those who have raised, educated, and inspired me. As you will see in chapter 1, I start at the very beginning, with the woman who faced down danger and uncertainty to deliver meand was then called on just days later to save me from illness. The endurance and bravery my mother displayed at my birth was matched only by her lifelong commitment to me and all of her children. She shaped the attitudes of the young man I became, and she also pushed me, occasionally using the benevolent arts of maternal manipulation, to pursue my dreams of becoming a doctor. She was my first hero.

Joining my mother in these pages are many others who have moved me with their courage and kindness, their resilience and energy. They are activists, lawyers, or academics, but they are also patients of mine or the survivors of sexual violence I have met during my years of work in Congo and my travels to Korea, Kosovo, Iraq, Colombia, or the United States, among other places.

The backdrop might appear bleak, for the lives of many women in this book have, like my own, been overshadowed by violence. But these women are each a light and an inspiration, demonstrating how the best instincts of humanityto love, to share, to protect otherscan triumph in the worst-possible circumstances. They are the reason I have persevered for so long. They are the reason I have never lost my faith and sanity even when my work grappling with the consequences of wickedness risked overwhelming me.