Editor’s Corner
October 23, 2009
What Came Before
By
Andrea Pitzer
Our latest Notable Narrative, “Sexual Warfare in the Democratic Republic of the Congo” from The Sydney Morning Herald, presents a horrifying picture of both rapist and survivors in a long-running conflict in this traumatized African country. Several print stories have been similarly striking, including this semi-narrative story from The Washington Post , whose anecdotes illustrate the links between the assaults, soldiers, and corruption endemic to the Congolese military.
Herald photojournalist Kate Geraghty and reporter Jonathan Pearlman deserve credit for showing how even the rapists may be conscripts once forced to join the fighting as children. Their work follows in the footsteps of Lisa Jackson’s 2008 HBO documentary The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, which also recorded assailants discussing the systematic use of sexual violence.
A recent post on Nieman Storyboard explores a TED talk from novelist Chimamanda Adichie on the danger of a single story—having only one story about a place or people. Midway through the video (around 10 minutes), Adichie summarizes Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti’s argument that “if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with ‘secondly’… Start the story with the failure of the African states and not with the colonial creation of the African states, and you have an entirely different story.”
What came first in the Congo is the part of the story that is missing in the midst of some fabulous narrative coverage. Such history is hard to work into the present-moment immediacy of video, but context remains one of the things that print can offer through pieces that take the long view.
The work of Adam Hochschild provides just such perspective. His 1998 book King Leopold’s Ghost recounts the brutal history of this former private colony of the Belgian king. More recently, in “Rape of the Congo” from the August 13 issue of The New York Review of Books, Hochschild heads to the northern Congo and travels with a woman he calls Rebecca Kamate, a survivor of multiple rapes, as she helps other women to document attacks and get assistance.
In addition to looking at the reality on the ground, Hochschild folds in the history of forced labor under King Leopold from more than a hundred years ago, when the king’s private army “would march into a village and hold the women hostage, to force the men to go into the rain forest for weeks at a time to harvest lucrative wild rubber.” The soldiers guarding the women raped them, while officers complained about the trouble caused by the hostages.
Hochschild addresses not only what is, but how it came to be, and what realistically might be done. The end of his essay disabuses the reader of the notion that the people of the Congo are somehow different than the residents of any other place on earth. While he holds no real optimism that change will come soon, surely an important element in narrative journalism is to keep in mind what came before when describing what comes next.