Mertens, Charlotte (2016) Sexual Violence in the Congo Free State: Archival Traces and Present Reconfigurations. The Australasian Review of African Studies, 37 (1). pp. 6-20.
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
Western imaginings and colonially scripted images of the Congo as barbaric, savage and the Heart of Darkness have dominated understandings of events in the DRC since its colonial inception (Dunn 2003). The contemporary global focus on sexual violence in the armed conflict of eastern DRC has only reinforced such framings. While sexual violence has always captured the social imagination before the Congo, the political frame through which it is articulated has made sexual violence “the major horrendous crime of our time” and “an exceptional form of brutality”1. Drawing on largely unused archival material, obtained at the Royal Museum of Central Africa and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Belgium, this paper sheds light on how sexual violence prefigured our own times in King Leopold II’s Congo Free State (1885 – 1908). The vivid memories and testimonies of the grotesque and spectacular violence inflicted upon the Congolese are similar to the sexual atrocities that have taken place in the current conflict in eastern DRC. These memories are in Mbembe’s (2007) words “traces and fragments” of colonial violence and excessive abuses. Yet, today’s international security discourses occur in the midst of an almost complete absence of such history and its memories. Ultimately it is argued that viewing the contemporary and colonial violence as “repetitions in history” (Hunt 2008) is crucial to understand how colonial “traces” live on in the present and are naturalised by history and politics.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Subjects: | 8. Belgium and colonial justice 8. Belgium and colonial justice > 1. Organisation and general information > 3. Violences and maintenance of law and order 8. Belgium and colonial justice > 4. Congo > 1. Congo Free State (1885-1908) |
| Divisions: | UNSPECIFIED |
| Depositing User: | Guillaume Vaneukem |
| Date Deposited: | 17 Oct 2017 14:06 |
| Last Modified: | 17 Oct 2017 14:06 |
| URI: | http://www.just-his.be/eprints/id/eprint/7369 |
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