The Healing of Memories by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

Chapter 6

“When the Foundations are Destroyed” (Psalm 11:3)*

Lament, Healing, Social Repair, and Political Reinvention in Eastern Congo

Emmanuel Katongole

In this chapter, I explore the broad range of healing practices and responses undertaken by Christian social activists in Eastern Congo in the wake of the violence of the “Congo Wars.” I map and discuss, using concrete cases, Christian responses to Congo’s politics of trauma under four broad categories: (a) laments, (b) trauma healing, (c) social repair, and (d) political reinvention. The overall aim of the chapter is to describe the theology that is operative within each category so as to highlight the range of Christian/biblical resources available to Christians in the face of politically induced trauma.

Here are the ashes of your father

Burned alive this morning at 6:00 am

As the sun rises

Lighting up the village in the sight of everyone

Here are the entrails of your mother

Cut into pieces by machete

After being raped by the belligerents

At 12:00 pm when the sun reached its zenith

Look at the debris of your little brother

Poor baby crushed with force by his sister at 3:00 pm

As the sun rays were burning

In the extremity of the village horrified by these demons!

Hold the clothes of your suicidal brother who they forced

To watch to the rape of his mother at 4:30 pm

At the time when the sunlight was still shining

On all our villages terrorized in the sight of all

Look at the path traversed by your sisters

Under the deathly threat of the cursed ones

At 6:00 pm when the distant sun rays

Still shine on the baggage they carried by force

Know that in the next nine months

Your sisters will come back to the village, all pregnant

To give birth to children who will not know their fathers

And yet, who will be our future leaders

O Misfortune.

(Baraka 2012)1

“When the Foundations are Destroyed”

I begin with this poem by a young Congolese artists Joêl Baraka because it helps to capture both the magnitude of the devastation as well as the depth of the trauma arising out of ‘the Congo Wars’ (Turner 2007). The reasons, motivations and facts surrounding the fighting that has been going on in the Congo in the last twenty years are complex. At its height, the fighting involved the armies of nine countries, multiple groups of UN peacekeepers, twenty armed groups and has left over 5.4 million people dead, many more millions displaced from their homes, tens of thousands of women raped and Congo’s 67 million people among the world’s most impoverished. There have been attempts to locate the violence within Congo’s social history (Prunier 2012; Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002; Van Reybrouck 2015) none perhaps as moving as Jason Stearns’ Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (2011). What I find particularly helpful in Stearns’ account, even more than his historical reconstruction, are the personal testimonies of ordinary people caught up in the fighting. Through the stories of the victims and survivors one is able to glimpse the depth of suffering as well as the national, communal and individual trauma and disintegration underway in the wake of the fighting. Moreover,

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