Capturing Congolese Women’s Memories of War and Peacemaking

Repeated cycles of war and violence against women have been part of the institutional and public narrative in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) since the start of the first civil war in 1996 that led to a second in 1998. Stories of men in power and men who took up arms, whether governmental or rebel group actors, have dominated Congolese public discourse about the first and second civil wars and the 2003 Pretoria peace agreement that was to end them. Male-centred narration of war and peacemaking in public discourse, institutional archives, and even academic study has perpetuated the exclusion of the narratives of Congolese women who struggled for peace, whether as non-combatant civil society activists, combatants in rebel groups, or governmental representatives, over the course of many failed peace accords and at the Sun City proceedings known as the Inter-Congolese Dialogue (ICD), erasing stories of their contributions. This article retrieves those contributions through interweaving narratives gathered from oral history interviews of over 30 such women in 2022 and highlighting materials from their own personal archives towards correcting the official record of war and peacemaking in the DRC that excludes women’s experiences, actions, memories, and memorabilia. As a DRC war survivor and peace activist specializing in narrative inquiry in feminist International Relations, I focus on my encounters with women most central to organizing for peace during the ICD, telling not only their stories of living under war and working for peace, but also offering thick descriptions of my interviews with them.