Sex and International Tribunals
PENNSYLVANIA STUDIES IN HUMAN RIGHTS
Bert B. Lockwood, Jr., Series Editor
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
Sex and International Tribunals
The Erasure of Gender from the War Narrative
Chiseche Salome Mibenge
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used
for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this
book may be reproduced in any form by any means without
written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mibenge, Chiseche Salome.
Sex and international tribunals : the erasure of gender from the war narrative / Chiseche Salome Mibenge. — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (Pennsylvania studies in human rights)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4518-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Rape as a weapon of war—Case studies. 2. Criminal investigation (International
law) 3. Rape as a weapon of war—Rwanda. 4. Rape as a weapon of war—Sierra Leone.
5. Women—Violence against—Rwanda. 6. Women—Violence against—Sierra Leone. 7. Rwanda—History—Civil War,
1994—Women. 8. Sierra Leone—History—Civil War, 1991-2002—Women. I. Title. II. Series: Pennsylvania studies in human rights.
KZ7162.M53 2013
341.6'9—dc23
2013012709
To Matilda Mwale, who loved us all
Contents
Introduction: Gender and Violence in the Market and Beyond
1. The Women Were Not Raped: Gender and Violence in Butare-Ville
2. All the Women Were Raped: Gender and Violence in Rwanda
3. All Men Rape: Gender and Violence in Sierra Leone
4. All Women Are Slaves: Insiders and Outsiders to Gender and Violence
Conclusion: There Are No Raped Women Here
Introduction
Gender and Violence in the Market and Beyond
During my first year as a student at the University of Zambia, when I was seventeen, I left campus one Friday for a weekend with my family. It was not yet dark, and the Lusaka Central Market was busy. The lines for the minibus to Kabulonga were extremely long, but I waited patiently for my turn to board. I actually enjoyed the commotion all around.
Then two young men approached me. I recognized one as Chitumba, a friend of my cousin Natasha. They joined me in the line, and we chatted briefly before they invited me to join them in a taxi ride home, at their expense, as they lived beyond my parents’ home anyway. I agreed readily, and we walked together, one on either side of me, stepping over vegetables and past vendors until we got into a parked taxi. As we did so, an old woman shouted after my young men, “You’ve done well. Take her away from here. They were going to strip her naked!”
I remember my shock at realizing that the commotion—whistling and shouting from the young men loitering around the market—had been directed at my legs and thighs. My cotton floral summer dress, a gift from my mother, was apparently attracting mob justice. It is an infrequent occurrence, but an occurrence nonetheless, that an “indecently attired” young woman in Lusaka is pursued by a gang of vigilante youths ostensibly trying to preserve the dignity of Mother Zambia and traditional African values. If she is captured, the woman is normally stripped naked, groped, and roughed up as an appreciative crowd gathers to witness the spectacle. The woman might escape the mob if she is rescued by a shopkeeper and his workers, who will barricade her in their shop until the police arrive to disperse the party.
My two young rescuers were better acclimated than I was to the body and gender politics on the streets of Lusaka and foresaw that I was on the verge of falling victim to a sexual assault. Chitumba admitted that the taxi invitation was a ruse to get me away from danger. I recounted this story to my parents that evening, choking on tears of rage. My father tried to rationalize: “You should understand our culture, mama; those people are grassroots people.” I shouted in response: “They’re not grassroots! They don’t know anything about our culture! They’re just thugs!”
In the southern African society of my youth, sexual violence was the bogeyman of morality tales, articulated through commentary or narratives that attached to and sexualized specific body parts and conduct. The shape and tone of these narratives was often censorious of women and girls irrespective of the sex of the narrator. Girls who showed their thighs, girls who stayed out after dark, girls who did not respect themselves—these girls attracted aggressive sexual attention from men, name calling, and ostracism from women’s peer groups. If they really pushed the boundaries, they would get the punishment of rape.1 However, rape was not the ultimate punishment. The ultimate punishment would be that nobody would believe it was rape, or, if they believed it was rape, the conclusion would be that it was well earned by the victim and perhaps even overdue. The social narratives I grew up on often married gender with violence: for example, they easily attached such adjectives as “drunken,” “careless,” “wild,” “provocative,” or “stupid” to women victims of sexual violence.2 These narratives made words such as “no,” “consent,” “force,” and “coercion” ambiguous on my university campus. If I believed in the narratives, I would have had to accept that it was the shapeliness of my bare legs that threatened public morality and order as well as my own dignity and physical integrity in the Lusaka market. However, this acceptance would require submitting to the narratives of gender and violence and their objective of privileging men by policing women’s autonomy.
In