Abstract
This chapter explores the complex imbrications of gender, spirituality, and agency amongst the Luba Mai-Mai before and after the Congolese Five-Year War (1997–2002), in search of practices of hope in a context otherwise characterized by sociopolitical instability and precarity. The story of Chatty Masangu wa Nkulu, a female Mai-Mai fighter, provides an intimate and multilayered ethnographic account of the constraints that normative understandings of gender (based on western feminist scholarship) place on African women, particularly in contexts of conflict. Rather than providing a pathway for increasing the capacity of Mai-Mai women and girl fighters, applying western liberal feminist constructions of agency uncritically in the southeastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (Congo hereafter) paradoxically highlights their vulnerability. However, Chatty’s lived experience as a woman and a warrior in the Upper Lomami province of Congo calls for a reimagining of gender, and a turn toward Luba epistemologies that celebrate personhood, locating agency and hope in the interplay of the material and immaterial worlds.
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Notes
- 1.
This name was changed for reasons of anonymity.
- 2.
According to a 2013 United Geological Survey report, mining accounts for almost 21% of the Congolese GDP, with total exports in 2013 valued at over $10 billion (Thomas R. Yager. 2013 Minerals Yearbook: Congo (Kinshasa) [Advance Release]. U.S. Geological Survey (U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey Minerals Yearbook, 2016).
- 3.
I use the language of “western feminism” broadly to describe the scholarship of feminist writers from or trained in the western hemisphere. In using the qualifier “western” I am referring to the physical and cultural context in which the scholarship is derived. As Elizabeth Evans points out in The Politics of Third Wave Feminisms: Neoliberalism, Intersectionality, and the State in Britain and the US (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 53) feminisms are multiple and rich in their particularities (and third-wave feminism in particular).
- 4.
In lieu of employing the term worldview to indicate western conceptions of and apprehension of the world, I am using Oyèrónke´̣ Oyěwùmí’s concept of world-sense. She critiques the western prioritization of sight as the primary sense operating in social interaction that creates a subject that gazes upon an object (Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 3).
- 5.
Chris Coulter defines bush wives as women and girls who were abducted during the decade-long war in Sierra Leone that began in 1991 and concluded in 2002, and were taken as wives by ranking militia officers. Coulter distinguishes bush wives from sex slaves, the latter who are women available for rape to any member of a militia at any given moment. While sex slaves were often coerced into combat alongside men, bush wives lived in the household of the militia commander, where they performed household functions under the supervision of favored wives.
- 6.
In “Warriors of the Water” (2018), I offer a thick description of the metaphysical and ensuing moral implications of the mai ritual which transformed Chatty, her sister, her father, and numerous other ordinary people in the village of Kabumbulu into redoubtable fighters.
- 7.
Simon Bockie (1993, 46–47) uses the Manianga or Lingala term kindoki to designate an ambivalent psychic power, or spells and medicine that either protect (kindoki kia lunda) or psychically consume one’s vitality and fortune (kindoki kia dia or eating kindoki), The root of kindoki is the verb koloka or to overpower, which Christian missionaries have erroneously translated to “bewitch,” and kindoki to “witchcraft.” Although the syncretism of the Congolese indigenous lifeworld resists the use of static religious identities, Congolese Christians are careful not to associate themselves with the Mai-Mai.
- 8.
M. Shawn Copeland (2009) critiques the dualist heritage of Christianity in the West, which swings from a hyperawareness of the body that uplifts a particular image of God (white, male, and heteronormative), to a complete somatophobia that promotes a theology of immolation and surrogacy—usually to the detriment of non-white and non-gender-conforming people.
- 9.
For example, on May 17, 2017, followers of Bundu Dia Kongo (BDK)—a movement that MONUSCO has labeled a religious sect—staged the largest prison break in Congolese history, freeing thousands of inmates (some local sources say over 4000) from the Makala maximum-security prison in Kinshasa, the nation’s capital, reportedly stabbing and beheading prison guards with the use of blunt sticks (see Wembi and de Freytas-Tamura 2017).
- 10.
See Magesa (1997) and Murove (2009, 163). Murove resists the use of the concept “vital force” to characterize the essence of interconnectedness in African moral consciousness given the aggressive and predatory nature of force, given Belgian missionary Placide Tempels’ essentialist hypothesis that force and violence characterizes African morality.
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Ledgister, G.I.M. (2019). “I’d Rather Die than Wrestle”: Gender, Spirituality, and Agency Amongst the Luba Mai-Mai. In: Willhauck, S. (eds) Female Child Soldiering, Gender Violence, and Feminist Theologies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21982-6_5
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