Oppression of women in the Democratic Republic of Congo: “the Rape Capital of the World”

“The
public authorities see to the elimination of all forms of
discrimination against women and ensure the protection and promotion of
their rights.” So reads Article 14 of the 2006 Constitution of the
Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), nominally one of the most
progressive in the world in terms of the guarantee of equality between
women and men. And yet, in 2010, a senior UN official described the DRC
as “the rape capital of the world”[1],
a place in which so little regard is given by armed groups of men to
the humanity of women that rape is used not as an expression of power
over an individual but as a weapon of war to humiliate and degrade
entire families and communities.

There can be no greater abuse of the rights of a woman than to make
her the victim of sexual violence, so how do the epidemic proportions of
this brutal practice square with the dazzlingly enlightened
constitution of the DRC? Using a materialist analysis and understanding
the experiences of the Congolese people we can explain the origins of,
nature of and solution to the inequality between the sexes in the DRC.

One of the accusations levelled at Joseph Kabila, the current
President of the DRC, is that he is more concerned with the appearance
of his country to the outside world than with the reality of living
conditions within it. While the country’s Constitution proudly presents
to the world the polished face of a legal system which respects the
rights of women, the country’s 1998 Family Code tells a murkier story:

– A wife owes obedience to her husband as the head of the household (Article 444)

– A husband’s permission is required in order for a wife to effect a legal act (Article 450)

– Only a husband has a right to establish a matrimonial home (Article 454)

– Adultery by a husband is penalised in a more limited range of
circumstances than adultery by a wife which is penalised in all
circumstances (Article 467)

As it is in the law, so it is in other areas of Congolese life. The
Government of the DRC boasts a Ministry of Gender, Family and Children –
a department charged with working to promote equality between women and
men, run by Madame Marie-Ange Lukiana. But below the apparently calm
surface of a government committed to championing the rights of women, we
find the tumultuous currents of discrimination resulting in only 7.2%
of political positions in the DRC being held by women despite the fact
that women make up 63% of the electorate.

The conviction of a former Colonel in February 2011 for ordering an
attack which resulted in the rape by his soldiers of more than 35 women
echoed through news stories around the world as an example of progress
in the DRC, but this echo has been drowned out by the release of a
report by Amnesty International in August 2011 which has documented the
continued use of sexual violence against women by the Army and other
armed groups in the DRC.[2]
The unequivocal promise in the Constitution that public authorities
will promote equality between the sexes is proved to be nothing but
empty rhetoric by the cold fact that while 12% of men are in state-waged
employment, the same can be said for only 2.8% of women.

Conversations with the Congolese themselves add a chilling human
dimension to the steely evidence of institutionalised discrimination.
According to one mid-level local government official, sex-based violence
is simply a cultural norm. Explanations for violence against women
ranging from “the man is usually provoked by the woman” to “by hitting a
woman a man is really showing his love for her” illustrate an ingrained
understanding of women as inherently different from men in terms of
their behaviour and emotions. But this concept of inherent difference is
adopted and accepted by women as well as men with both sexes believing
that “a woman must always marry an older man” and “a woman must be less
intelligent than her husband” because otherwise “she will not obey her
husband and will go mad and do crazy things” (in the words of a 15 year
old boy) – an affliction to which men are apparently immune.

So why is the situation in the DRC one of such manifest sexual
inequality despite the official, albeit somewhat flimsy, cover of parity
between men and women?

Engels’ theory on the origins of the family

To answer these questions we can turn to the method of historical materialism and Engels’ work The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State.
Engels’ discussion centres on early human history and the transition
between societies based on subsistence methods of production and those
based on surplus-creating methods of production, respectively known as
Palaeolithic/Epipalaeolithic and Neolithic in modern archaeological
terminology.

Engels draws on the research of Morgan to establish that in the
Palaeolithic era of subsistence production two important facts were
clear. Firstly, labour was divided along the lines of sex due to the
biological fact that women were required in the “home” for pregnancy,
childbirth and breastfeeding. Secondly, recognition of the pivotal role
of women in the continued development of society prompted cultivation of
a symbiotic relationship between all the women and men of a particular
clan rather than the parasitic relationship of the modern patriarchal
family. As Engels points out in his description of Palaeolithic society:

“Communistic housekeeping, however, means the supremacy of women in
the house; just as the exclusive recognition of the female parent, owing
to the impossibility of recognizing the male parent with certainty,
means that the women – the mothers – are held in high respect.”[3]

However, as human society developed, so too did the means of
production and, with the advent of the Neolithic revolution, the
widespread use of farming practices meant that, for the first time in
human history, a surplus of goods above and beyond what was needed for
basic survival was created. This fundamental change in the mode of
production brought with it fundamental changes in the social
organisation of Neolithic society. Not only did the creation of surplus
pave the way for the development of class distinctions based on how much
surplus one clan was able to produce relative to another, it also
created a relationship of inequality between men and women. The centre
of production shifted from the household to the fields, agriculture and
cattle rearing producing surplus and being male occupations, this led to
a dominant role of the male in the family.

As more surplus wealth was created, men were able to assert
themselves as more important than women within families by virtue of
their ability to satisfy more of the immediate needs and wants of the
family. Thus the notion of the private ownership of surplus goods is the
cornerstone of a society in which men hold power over women.

This newly acquired economic power manifested itself most
significantly through a change to the laws of inheritance within
families. In order that the male was able to pass his surplus wealth on
to his children the line of inheritance had to shift from the mother to
the father, but this presented the problem that communistic living and
transient relationships meant that the biological father of many
children was not easily ascertainable. The solution to this problem was
marriage which could be used to enforce monogamy upon women in order
that men could guarantee the “legitimacy” of the children to whom they
would bequeath their wealth. Engels describes this shift in the power
dynamics of families as follows:

“The overthrow of mother-right [of inheritance] was the world
historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home
also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the
slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children.”

Control and dominance of women by men arose alongside the control and
dominance of one class by another. Both forms of exploitation are the
product of privately owned surplus wealth and as long as such private
property exists, class and sex based exploitation will also exist.

So how does this analysis help us in explaining why sexual inequality
in the DRC has such firm roots? To answer this we must briefly examine a
history of the Congolese economy. The DRC economy is one of the weakest
in the world with 2010 estimates placing it as the joint second poorest
country in the world with a GDP per capita of only US$200 and an
average life expectancy of 47. Unemployment stands at around 40%, and
even those in employment are not guaranteed to be paid on time or at
all. This stands in juxtaposition to the estimated wealth of the
Country’s natural resources at over $24 trillion and this contrast
provides fertile conditions for foreign mining and timber companies to
exploit the people and resources of the DRC.

Brief history of the DRC

The modern practices of foreign businesses range from exploitation of
child labour to financing armed groups which still operate in the East
of the country in the hope that continued political fragility can work
to their financial advantage. But these imperialist practices are not a
new phenomenon for the people of the DRC. The Congo Free State was
formed around 1890 as the private property of King Leopold II of
Belgium. The exploitation by Leopold of both the people and the
environment in pursuit of cheap rubber became one of the worst scandals
of the 19^th Century.

The Belgian government claimed that their annexation of the country
from the King in 1908 represented progress for the Congolese people, but
in reality the opening of the country to the ravages of the free market
simply legitimised in the eyes of the Western world the same
exploitation by a plethora of companies as had been practiced by
Leopold’s monopoly.

By 1960 with the growing Congolese independence movement Belgian
imperialism was forced to relinquish direct control of the country.
However, the Belgian imperialists were not going to give up the most
naturally wealthy country on the planet without a fight, so while
granting formal independence they aimed to continue controlling the
country’s wealth through other means. They felt threatened by Lumumba’s
increasingly radical nationalist stance and deliberately fomented
secessionism in Katanga. Katanga’s declaration of independence in 1960
was the result of a plot by Belgian business interests to create a
puppet state and took place with the backing of 6,000 Belgian troops.
Belgian imperialism, aided by the CIA, supported Mobutu’s coup against
Lubumba, who was subsequently assassinated in 1961.

Mobutu’s dictatorial rule of the country he renamed Zaire lasted
until 1997. The regime was a Bonapartist one and its rule saw Mobutu
appeal to the nationalism of the people by insisting on a purge of all
colonial influences from the country. He renamed the major cities,
prohibited any Western names or clothing and renamed himself Mobutu Sese
Seko Nkuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga, which roughly translates as “The
all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and iron will to
succeed, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake”.

He cultivated this strong-man image by banning all opposition
political parties and occasionally holding elections in which he and his
party were the only candidates. However, as mass opposition mounted,
often resulting in riots and rebellions against his regime, he leaned on
the Army for support as well as turning to the USA for help crushing
the rebellions. The support of the USA was due to Mobutu’s strong
anti-communist politics and this protection allowed him to plunder and
abuse the people and country of Zaire without repercussions. Some
estimates suggest that at one time he had amassed a personal fortune
equal to the national debt of the entire country.

The ravaging of the DRC by capitalist imperialism ever since its
creation, coupled with the bloodiest war since the Second World War
which was fought on its territory between 1997 and 2003, exclusively by
Nations and armed groups with mining interests in the country, has left
the economy weak, unregulated and wide open to yet more exploitation by
foreign state owned and private companies, and it is Congolese women for whom this burden is heaviest.

Class structure and the political Left in the DRC

By virtue of the fact that these foreign companies are the only
businesses able to guarantee a secure job, the wages are low and there
is barely a trace of union activity – with such a large unemployed
population anything even remotely antagonistic to one’s employer is seen
as a dangerous move. The underdeveloped nature of the country is seen
in the fact that only 35% of the Congolese population live in urban
areas, with the rest spread out over the vast rural stretches of the
country. However, this relative weakness of the urban working class is
not and never has been a reason for renouncing a genuine socialist
policy. The Bolsheviks in the conditions of Russia 1917, where the
working class was also very weak numerically, demonstrated that even
where the working class is a minority, with a correct revolutionary
programme, it can gather around itself the agricultural labourers, the
poor peasants and other poor layers in society. Today, if there were a
mass party of the workers which appealed to revolutionary
anti-imperialism in a serious way, such a party would gain massive
support in the Congo, regardless of the class composition of the
country. The lack of a serious socialist organisation is where the
problem lies.

Although he categorically denied being a communist, Prime Minister
Lumumba was motivated by a strong desire to free the Congo and the whole
of Africa from the influences of “those bent on ruling Africa”. He
encouraged pan-African unity and special trade agreements between
African nations. He was clear that his country’s policy towards foreign
nations would be dictated solely by their policy towards the
Congo. Thus when the Western capitalist states met his government with
hostility and antagonism, he turned to the USSR for help. His
association with the USSR caused Lumumba to increasingly move towards
the Left, and his speeches railing against “mercantile exploitation” and
lauding the “social and economic revolution of our great and beloved
country”, as well as his emphasis on the roles of both sexes in the struggle for African freedom, resonated with the Congolese workers and youth.

Lumumba’s murder took place in 1961 but the material conditions for
his ideas were still present so that, in 1965, Che Guevara and a group
of around 150 Cubans arrived in the Congo to help Laurent Kabila, a
self-proclaimed Marxist guerrilla who would become (a decidedly
non-Marxist) President in 1997, in his efforts to spark a socialist
revolution. The failure of these efforts and the rise of Mobutu crushed
and disfigured all Left political thought in the country to the extent
that few modern political parties which declare themselves loyal to
Lumumba’s ideas are able to coherently explain what those ideas actually
were.

Trotsky’s theory of the Permanent Revolution explains that in the
more backward countries, where the bourgeoisie has come on to the scene
of history too late to play an independent role from imperialism, the
tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution can only be carried out and
completed by the working class. Unless the working class is led by a
revolutionary party, then the local weak bourgeoisie, acting as mere
errand boys of the imperialists, will continue to dominate the country.
Without a lead from the working class, the mass of peasants are kept
under the influence of the local elite, who also have an interest in
applying the method of “divide and rule” within their own country, and
among these is the divide between men and women.

This social situation means that the peasantry will swing between the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat, constantly vacillating between the
two:

“[A]n insurmountable obstacle on the road to the creation of a
peasants’ party is the petty-bourgeoisie’s lack of economic and
political independence and its deep internal differentiation. By reason
of this the upper sections of the petty-bourgeoisie (of the peasantry)
go along with the big bourgeoisie in all decisive cases, especially in
war and in revolution; the lower sections go along with the proletariat;
the intermediate section being thus compelled to choose between the two
extreme poles.”[4]

Trotsky points out that this does not mean that the peasantry cannot
play a role in the democratic revolution, but it does mean that such a
revolution will never be successful in overthrowing bourgeois dominance
without leadership by the working class organised into a Communist
party.

It is worth noting, however, that the social and economic situation
in which the DRC currently finds itself is not unique in terms of world
history. At the close of the 19^th Century, when the Congo
Free State was barely a decade old, those struggling against the
bourgeoisie in Russia were grappling with a landscape not unlike that of
modern day DRC: an extremely large country with a majority of its
population distributed throughout the country rather than being
concentrated in towns; the small working class sections of the urban
population were exploited to an extreme degree due to the plentiful
supply of cheap labour power; some of the world’s largest supplies of
minerals which were poorly managed by the ruling regime; and severe
inequality of women among the peasantry.

The Russian working class, though weak in numbers in comparison to
the peasantry, effectively lead the peasants in the revolution of
February 1917 – which, by the way, was sparked off by women workers
protesting – and to the establishment of the provisional government.
That government, after being exposed in the eyes of the masses as a mere
tool of the bourgeoisie, eventually gave way to the socialist
revolution of October 1917, a transition which was only made possible by
the presence of the Bolshevik party, without which the revolution would
have been crushed. Alan Woods highlights the importance of the
preparatory work of the Bolsheviks in that period in ensuring the
victory of the socialist revolution in his book ‘Bolshevism: The Road to Revolution’:

“By skilful and flexible tactics, the Bolsheviks succeeded in
drastically increasing their influence in the soviets in the months
before October, to the point where, together with their allies, they
could command a majority at the Soviet Congress. That, and that alone,
explains the relatively peaceful character of the October insurrection.
The reason was not primarily military, but the fact that nine-tenths of
the work had already been accomplished beforehand. The most vital arena
of struggle was in the soviets themselves.”

Following the victory of the Russian proletariat in October 1917 the
workers set about abolishing capitalism, thus setting the material basis
for eradicating the oppression of women. They began to address the
rampant inequality between the sexes that was the hallmark of the
tsarist regime, having learnt through the revolutionary struggle that
sex-based differences are fomented and exploited by the ruling elite in
any form of society based on private ownership of the means of
production. Advances were made in the socialisation of childcare and
cooking; women and men were paid equally for the same work; rights to
abortion and contraception were introduced; and maternity leave was
extended and legally enshrined.

The solution to women’s oppression in the DRC

This comparison with the achievements of the working class in Russia in the early 20^th Century can lead us neatly into an analysis of what the future holds for the people of the DRC.

Through analysis of Russia’s experience and with the aid of Trotsky’s
writings on the family, as Marxists we can offer only one answer to the
DRC’s problems, concisely summed up by Marx and Engels in the Communist
Manifesto, “Abolition of private property”, i.e. expropriating the
commanding heights of the economy and placing them under the democratic
control of the masses for the benefit of society. Only through a planned
economy based on socialist principles can working hours be reduced,
housework be socialised and women be set free of male dominance. As
Trotsky explains in the context of Russia after the 1917 Revolution:

“We need more socialist economic forms. Only under such conditions
can we free the family from the functions and cares that now oppress and
disintegrate it. Washing must be done by a public laundry, catering by a
public restaurant, sewing by a public workshop. Children must be
educated by good public teachers who have a real vocation for the work.
Then the bond between husband and wife would be freed from everything
external and accidental, and the one would cease to absorb the life of
the other. Genuine equality would at last be established.”[5]

Unfortunately there is no party offering such a perspective to the
Congolese working class at the moment. There is, on the other hand, a
seemingly infinite multitude of human rights charities currently
operating in the DRC, NGOs and other organisations, some of which are
specifically tasked with women’s rights, and some of which take a more
general approach to human rights. The problem in the Congo, as in all
underdeveloped countries is that NGOs play a pernicious role by their
very nature of being based on charity and not struggle or
self-organisation. They are completely dependent on and accountable to
their Western funders, not the people in the country. In fact, they were
created precisely to cut across militant class struggle and promote
ideas such as “empowerment of the people”, which means nothing, because
it does not involve overthrowing the very system that creates the
problems the NGOs are supposed to combat!

A materialist perspective shows us that the ideas of people are a
product of their material conditions of existence and not the other way
around. All ideology, including cultural practices and concepts of
ethics and morality, are not universal truths that exist independently
of historical conditions. As Trotsky explains when describing the
development of ideas during the early 20^th Century:

“They [the petty-bourgeoisie] do not understand that morality is a
function of the class struggle; that democratic morality corresponds to
the epoch of liberal and progressive capitalism; that the sharpening of
the class struggle in passing through its latest phase definitively and
irrevocably destroyed this morality; that in its place came the morality
of fascism on one side, on the other the morality of proletarian
revolution”[6]

The concept of sexual equality, like all ideas in society, gains
strength as the material conditions change and as the productive forces
at the base of society change. The dominant ideas in society are those
of the ruling class as these are transmitted down into society through
various means, such as the education system, the media, the Church, etc.
However, at the same time, through the process of coming together in
the class struggle, people’s ideas and attitudes do change, including in
relation to the role of women.

For example, Mary Wollstonecraft published ‘A Vindication of the
Rights of Women’ in 1792 during the Industrial Revolution in Britain,
and Marx famously pointed out that the ideas of scientific socialism
(i.e. Marxism) were only possible giventhe historical conditions present
in his time and the preceding development of scientific, economic, and
philosophical thought.

To expect to be able to achieve full sexual equality without
changing the material base is therefore a utopian fantasy. That does
not mean that Marxists renounce on the struggle for women’s rights in
all countries and all conditions. What it does mean is that Marxists
explain within the labour movement that to achieve genuine, and long
lasting sexual equality, what is required is the expropriation of the
commanding heights of the economy, the taking over of the land, the
banks, and the limited industries that exist. By doing so, the class
interests of the old propertied class of capitalists are eliminated,
including their need to divide the workers by all means, and the
material basis for genuine equality can be established once and for all.

However, to this analysis we must add one very important point, and
that is that the abolition of private property in the DRC alone would
not be sufficient to achieve these goals. Trotsky’s theory of the
Permanent Revolution warns us against ‘socialism in one country’ and
history is littered with the carcasses of states which tried and failed
to implement ‘socialism in one country’. Furthermore, whilst the DRC is
home to an abundance of wealth in the form of natural resources, the
methods of production in the DRC have not been developed to a stage
where they could support a socialist economy on their own. This does not
mean that the Congolese people are doomed to wait for capitalism to
develop to a higher stage. Instead it means that the struggle of the
workers and peasants in the DRC must be part of a general struggle for
socialism in Africa. The struggles in Egypt, Nigeria, and South Africa
show that when the when the working class in Africa move, they can be an
unstoppable force.

In turn, the movement for socialism in Africa must be accompanied by
revolutionary struggles in the rest of the world. It is the
international class struggle which provides hope for the emancipation of
Congolese women as part of the emancipation of the human race from the
shackles of capitalism. Only through a materialist understanding of
history can we explain the situation of the Congolese and all women and
only through struggle on the part of the international working class can
we hope to eliminate the oppression of women. As Marxists we must do
all we can to work for the victory of the working class and
international socialism, and such a victory will bring with it the only
true emancipation of women throughout the world.