Births, Deaths, Labour and Militarized Border-Crossing Among Sex Workers in an Area of Armed Conflict in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

Chercher La Vie : Births, Deaths, Labour and Militarized Border-Crossing among Sex Workers in an Area of Armed Conflict in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

Anna-Louise Crago

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Anthropology Department University of Toronto

Chercher La Vie : Births, Deaths, Labour and Militarized Border- Crossing among Sex Workers in an Area of Armed Conflict in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

Anna-Louise Crago

Doctor of Philosophy

Anthropology

University of Toronto

2020 Abstract This dissertation is a study of sociality and power in armed conflict. It is based on ethnographic research with two groups of women who sell sex in eastern Democratic Republic of

Congo, self-identified “ bambaragas ”. These women travel back and forth across militarized lines in areas of armed conflict to perform sex work and other complementary labour and to trade with a variety of different state and non-state armed groups. This study argues that any attempt to understand sociality and power in war must grapple centrally with non-violent death. The combined effects of armed conflict and privatization contributed to mass infant, child and maternal death. Bambaragas and their children bore a distinct and disproportionate death burden.

Hospitals sat at the intersection of governance of health as a private commodity rather than a public entitlement, by both the state and non-state armed groups. This resulted in policies within hospitals of refusing emergency care, abusing and punishing women suspected of abortion, imposing debt and extracting payment, and forcibly detaining women who couldn’t pay for their or their children’s care.

This study also contends that gender is central to the workings of power in armed conflict. Armed groups’ governance of bambaragas fluctuates around a central tension: while

ii their labour was relied upon by armed groups, to the point of becoming at times a stake in the conflict, their gendered independence and border-crossing meant they were treated with suspicion and, at times, targeted and killed not as civilians nor as military actors but as what I call “sovereign women/gendered traitors”. Bambaragas’ mutual recognition and collective practices of assistance, secrecy, care and housing allowed women to navigate dangerous conflict environments and predatory privatized health governance and was, at times, what allowed women to keep their children alive and in their care.

iii Acknowledgments

I am profoundly grateful to the bambaragas of Maneno in South Kivu and Mugunga in

North Kivu whose insights and experiences are at the center of this work. I am also thankful to the bambaragas of Kadutu, Birere, Masisi, and Uvira who shared their time and wealth of knowledge with me. I am particularly indebted to Rho for all she taught me and for her patience and generosity. Readers who would like to support the work of UMANDE, the by-and-for sex worker organization in eastern DR Congo, are encouraged to contact [email protected].

I am grateful to my supervisors at the University of Toronto. Professor Christopher Krupa provided tremendous encouragement, empathy and generous critique. Professor Holly Wardlow diligently gave such careful attention and considered reflection to my work. I appreciate the incredible amount of time and labour over many years such undertakings represented. Their efforts pushed me further than I could have hoped. I am thankful to Professor Janice Boddy,

Professor Marieme Lo and Professor Catherine Lutz for their thoughtful comments. I owe many thanks to Natalia Krencil, the Graduate Coordinator in the Anthropology Department for all her help and patience over the years. I am also very grateful to have been graced with Letha Victor as my graduate mentor – or rather, menticorn – and Seth Palmer as my colleague.

This research project would not have been possible without the generous funding provided by the Trudeau Foundation and SSHRC. I am thankful to Josée St-Martin, previously of the Trudeau Foundation, for her administrative skill and exceptional kindness. I was lucky to be among a wonderful group of Trudeau scholars and am particularly grateful for the support and friendship of Sylvie Bodineau and Carla Suarez. I am also grateful to Dr. Jenny Butler for her efforts to support my research early on and for her insights into health.

iv During a time when I felt paralyzed by fear, Professor Christine Bruckert took me under her wing. For over a year, for nothing in return, she gave me an hour of her time every week to help me problem-solve, find my way, and express my worries. It was pivotal to my ability to take the intellectual and emotional risk to try and write what I had learned. It was also a real joy. I am truly thankful.

I owe a special thank you to the friends and family who supported me and my immediate family through these past years. In particular, thank you to Diane Mondor, Jonathan Crago, Peter

Crago, Gwenaëlle Tual, Martha Crago, Bartholomew Crago, Isabelle Ferland, Joan Peddle,

Karen Peddle, John Peddle, Keith Cormier, Doris Cormier, Liz Cameron, Anna-Aude Caouette,

Maija Martin and Tobey Black, Jenn Lafontaine and Emmy Pantin, Carmen and Nicole

Chapman, Andrew Pierre and Jim Kaiser.

To my children, Ty Jean, Isis Collette, and Aliyah Ida, you inspire me every day with your bravest of hearts. You teach me to keep going when it is hard, to not be afraid to grow and to remember to laugh. Je vous aime . Kesaluloq . To my love Katrina, Kesalul . There should be

100 more pages of acknowledgement with just your name in 72 font size. You have been so kind, generous and steadfast through this whole journey. There are no words that can adequately express the depth of my gratitude to you four.

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... IV MAP OF EASTERN DR CONGO AND FIELD SITES ...... VIII FREQUENTLY REFERENCED ARMED GROUPS ...... IX CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION ...... 1

LIFE AND SOCIALITY IN ARMED CONFLICT ...... 4 SOVEREIGNTY , ARMED CONFLICT , GENDER AND POWER ...... 10 SEX WORK AS A SITE OF INQUIRY ...... 19 FIELDWORK AND CONFLICT ...... 25 A BRIEF ROADMAP ...... 33 A NOTE ON NAMES AND TERMS ...... 35 CHAPTER TWO WAR, SELLING SEX AND THE SEARCH FOR FREEDOM: A HISTORY IN BAMBARAGAS ’ WORDS 37

THE SOCIAL CATEGORY OF BAMBARAGA ...... 37 Femmes Libres and Ndumba ...... 39 POLITICAL AND MILITARY OUTLINES OF THE CONFLICT ...... 50 MANENO , SUD -KIVU ...... 55 Maneno and War: A History in Bambaragas’ Words ...... 59 MUGUNGA , NORD -KIVU ...... 71 Mugunga and War: A History in Bambaragas’ Words ...... 75 ENDNOTE ...... 90 CHAPTER THREE LIFE AND NON-VIOLENT DEATH IN ARMED CONFLICT ...... 92

IF-SHE -LIVES : MATERNAL , INFANT AND CHILD DEATH IN ARMED CONFLICT ...... 92 NAMING , SANGHA AND HÔPITAUX : IDIOMS OF INFANT , CHILD AND MATERNAL DEATH AND THEIR RELATION ..... 103 “We Are Unable to Find Those Responsible for These Murders”: The Dangers of Speaking of Maternal, Infant and Child Deaths ...... 123 CAMIONNE , BAHATI AND JIBU : HIS NAME WAS LUCK ...... 128 CHAPTER FOUR THE POLITICS OF BIRTHS AND NON-VIOLENT DEATHS IN ARMED CONFLICT ...... 131

CONFLICT , PRIVATIZATION AND THE POLITICS OF NON -VIOLENT DEATH ...... 131 HÔPITAUX : THE GENDERED AND CLASSED POLITICS OF DEATH IN THE SPACE BETWEEN A COMPLICATION AND ITS OUTCOME ...... 139 Infrastructure Collapse ...... 142 Pasqualine: Withholding Care, Refusing Care ...... 144 Julie: Detention, Debt and Indentured Labour ...... 149 Jeanne: The Other Children ...... 155 Camionne and Jibu: Delay ...... 161 Escapes and their Aftermath ...... 163 BIRTHING EACH OTHER ...... 168 Safari (South) ...... 168

vi Births in the Settlement (North) ...... 175 Births in the Forest (North) ...... 180 CHAPTER FIVE SEXUAL LABOUR IN ARMED CONFLICT ...... 186

CHERCHER LA VIE : SEXUAL LABOUR STRATEGIES AND NON -VIOLENT DEATH ...... 186 I WON ’T STARVE , I REFUSE TO STARVE : THE ECONOMICS AND POETICS OF SEXUAL LABOUR STRATEGIES ACROSS MILITARIZED LINES (N ORTH ) ...... 191 IF THERE IS WAR : SHIFTS IN LABOUR CONDITIONS , HUNGER AND VIOLENCE DURING EPISODES OF OPEN CONFLICT (N ORTH ) ...... 197 THE MOVEMENT OF MONEY : SEX WORK AND OTHER WORK IN MINING ENVIRONMENTS (N ORTH AND SOUTH ) . 208 Jeanne: Combining Work at the Mines (2014) ...... 208 Bambaragas at the Mines ...... 212 TRANSNATIONAL /N ATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS INTERVENTIONS INTO “C ONFLICT MINERALS ” AND GENDERED LABOUR (N ORTH AND SOUTH ) ...... 224 Jeanne: Aside from Starving, There’s no Problem. (North and South) ...... 230 CHAPTER SIX CROSSING MILITARIZED BORDERS IN ARMED CONFLICT ...... 235

MOBILITY , MILITARIZED BORDER -CROSSING AND GENDERED /B AMBUTI SOVEREIGNTY ...... 235 I CANNOT SPEND THE NIGHT , UNLESS IT IS NEXT TO A BAMBARAGA : COOPERATIVE STRATEGIES , COLLECTIVE TIES AND MILITARIZED BORDER -CROSSING FOR SEXUAL LABOUR ...... 252 IF BY GRACE , I SURVIVE AND YOU SURVIVE , COME FIND ME: MILITARIZED BORDER -CROSSING , SOLDIERS AND WAR (N ORTH AND SOUTH ) ...... 262 Jeanne: Beginnings ...... 263 Jeanne: Selling Sex, Soldiers and War ...... 266 NECROPOLITICS AND THE MILITARIZED REGULATION OF GENDERED LABOUR ...... 276 CONCLUSION ...... 286 REFERENCES ...... 291

vii Map of Eastern DR Congo and Field Sites

The approximate locations of my two main field sites (Mugunga in North Kivu and Maneno in South Kivu) are indicated with blue stars.

Original Map (Rift Valley Institute 2016)

viii

Frequently Referenced Armed Groups

FARDC

FARDC is the acronym for the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo , the official state army of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo). During my fieldwork, the

FARDC routed the Rwandan-backed and Tutsi-led M23 rebels, then began a series of military operations against the Hutu FDLR. The FARDC has also been known to cooperate with the

FDLR (Florquin et al 2016; Vogel 2018).

FDLR

The FDLR is an acronym for the Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda , a Hutu rebel group that has an ongoing presence in both South and North Kivu, maintaining strongholds in forested areas. The FDLR is descended primarily from the Rwandan Hutu Interhamwe militia and the Hutu-dominated Forces Armées Rwandaises (FAR) that perpetrated the Rwandan genocide. Upon their defeat in Rwanda in 1994, they fled into Eastern Congo where many members initially regrouped under the banner of ALiR (Armée pour la liberation du Rwanda)

(Stearns 2007). The FDLR has at times allied with local armed groups known as Mai-Mais

(Stearns 2007) and even at times, albeit tacitly, with the Congolese army to oppose Tutsi and

Rwandan-backed groups (Florquin et al. 2016). During my fieldwork, the FDLR was targeted by the FARDC in a military operation.

ix M23

Led primarily by Congolese Tutsis, the M23 emerged in 2012. It continued a long history of

Tutsi-led Rwandan-backed armed groups in eastern Congo such as the CNDP (Congrès national pour la défense du people ) and prior, the RCD (Rasssemblement congolais pour la démocratie ) and involved many of the same protagonists (Vogel 2018). In 2013, the M23 was defeated through the joint efforts of the FARDC and MONUSCO.

Mai-Mais

“Mai-Mais” is “an umbrella term for groups employing discourses of self-defense and native belonging” (Verweijen 2016, 21). It refers to a host of past and present non-state armed groups with varying motives, practices and alliances. The Mai-Mai Padiri is perhaps the most famous

Mai-Mai group. It played a significant role in defending large swaths of eastern DR Congo against Rwandan-backed forces in the second Congolese war (Vlassenroot 2001). Mai-Mai means “water-water” and refers to the spiritual beliefs of some armed groups that rituals involving water can protect soldiers against bullets.

MONUSCO

MONUSCO is the English acronym for the United Nations Stabilization Mission in the DR

Congo . The mission was formerly known by its French name Mission de l'Organisation des

Nations Unies en République démocratique du Congo and french acronym (MONUC).

MONUSCO is a multinational force established in 1999. It is unique as the first international peacekeeping mission to have a combat mission alongside and independent of government armed forces (Sperotto 2014). In 2013, during the beginning of my fieldwork, MONUSCO allied with

x the government army to push back and then defeat the Rwandan-backed M23 rebels in North-

Kivu. During my later fieldwork, in 2014 and 2015, MONUSCO was responsible for taking control of and defending 14 “ îlots de stabilité ” (“islands of stability”) in North Kivu, small areas surrounded by larger areas under control of various armed groups.

Raia Mutomboki

The Raia Mutomboki (meaning “The people are enraged”) first appeared as a local armed self- defense group in Shabunda in South Kivu in 2005 (Vogel 2018). It then went dormant until 2011 when it began to spread across South Kivu and into North Kivu. The Raia Mutomboki was initially known for its attacks on the FDLR. By the time of my fieldwork, it had become involved in conflicts with the FARDC (Stearns 2013a). Many of those who adhered to the Raia

Mutomboki in the Bunyakiri area had previously been affiliated with previous Mai-Mai groups in the area such as the Mai-Mai 106 and prior to that, the Mai-Mai Morgane and the Mai-Mai

Padiri.

xi 1

Chapter One Introduction

This dissertation is a study of sociality and power in armed conflict. It is based on ethnographic research with two groups of women who sell sex in eastern Democratic Republic of

Congo (hereafter DR Congo), self-identified “ bambaragas ,” a term which literally translates as

“prostitutes,” referring to unmarried women who sell sex. These women travel back and forth across militarized lines during periods of intermittent conflict to perform sex work and other complementary labour and to trade with a variety of different armed groups. Bambaragas undertook these labour and entrepreneurial strategies as a primary means to mitigate the high risk of undernutrition and maternal, infant and child mortality that they and their children face.

Armed groups’ governance of bambaragas fluctuates around a central tension: while their labour was relied upon by armed groups, to the point of becoming at times a stake in the conflict, their gendered independence and border-crossing meant they were always treated with suspicion and, at times, targeted and killed.

This study’s first core argument is that any attempt to understand life and sociality in war must grapple centrally with non-violent death. Conflict-related non-violent deaths not only far exceed violent death, they also disproportionately affect women and children (Ghobarah, Huth and Russet 2003; Lacina and Gleditsch 2005; Wagner et al. 2018) to the extent that women’s mortality is actually far more affected by conflict than men’s (Plümper and Neumayer 2006).

Non-violent death was not my intended focus of research. However, the central place maternal, infant and child death occupied in bambaragas ’ lives and the distinct and disproportionate death burden that bambaragas bore as single and often poor women became inescapably apparent to me during my fieldwork. Equally unavoidable were the workings of power, that along with

2 armed conflict, generated mass classed, gendered, and racialized (black/African) 1 non-violent death. Hospitals are particular institutions in conflict areas because they have the potential to mitigate mass treatable death. In eastern DR Congo, hospitals sit at the intersection of governance of health as a private commodity rather than a public entitlement, by both the state and non-state armed groups. The resulting health infrastructure collapse, along with policies and practices within hospitals of refusing emergency care, abusing and punishing women suspected of abortion, imposing debt and extracting payment, and forcibly detaining women who couldn’t pay for their or their children’s care all contributed to the high death burden experienced by bambaragas and their children. Furthermore, the existing health system not only disproportionately imposed the economic costs of reproduction on women, it also produced a gendered transfer of wealth by systemically extracting money from women to augment the private fortunes of the mostly male authorities overseeing the health sector. Because of this, my study is also concerned with demonstrating how the governance of health by both state and non- state armed groups is key for understanding and evaluating the gendered dimensions of governance in armed conflict.

This study also contends that gender and classed gendered labour are central to the workings of power in war. Bambaragas ’ experiences of war-time governance trouble many of the assumptions about women’s roles and relationships in armed conflict and about a neat

1 Depending on the context, I use the terms racialization and racialized in reference to transnationally circulating racializations such as “black/African” or “white” (such as above) or in reference to locally circulating racializations (that at times intersected with transnational ones). Locally, the category of “ blanc(he)s ”/“ muzungu ” (“white”/ “non- African foreigner”) referred primarily to those perceived as solely of European or European-American/Canadian ancestry but could at times include anyone who was not considered black/African. The category of “ noir(e )”/ “Africain(e) ” (“black”/ “African”) was frequently used as a descriptor for “les Congolais ” ( “the Congolese”) and was generally seen to encompass the racialized sub-categories of les nilotiques (which designated traditionally pastoral peoples such as the Tutsis), les pygmées or la race des pygmées (which designated traditionally forest- associated peoples of small-stature) and les bantous (which designated traditionally agricultural peoples). However, at times “ noir(e )”/ “Africain(e) ” or “les Congolais” could be conflated with bantous underscoring the perceived racialized difference, “allochtony” or marginality of peoples deemed nilotiques or pygmées .

“civilian/military” divide. As such, they offer a unique and privileged vantage point to examine how war and armed conflict not only “make gender” (Sjoberg 2013), but also make sovereign power. Bambaragas were regulated by militarized groups and authorities as civilians, as militarized actors and, at times, as neither, but rather as what I call “sovereign women/gendered traitors”. The shadow that persistently adhered to bambaragas due to their frequent crossing of militarized-borders and refusal of sovereign claims made upon them, was that of gendered traitors. If bambaragas were always at risk of being tortured and killed by militarized actors for gendered treachery – and sometimes were – it was generally not for actual allegiance or support to another armed group, nor as civilians (“the other side’s women”), but due to their own independence in the face of armed groups’ competing sovereign claims to them: it was bambaragas ’ gendered sovereignty – that is, their determination to be autonomous and govern themselves – that needed to be extinguished. This complicates the longstanding civilian/military actor divide in research on armed conflict that frequently assumes that women are presumptively conferred civilian status under a gendered “immunity principle” in war (Sjoberg 2013).

Lastly, this study demonstrates how poor bambaragas resisted both non-violent and violent death through labour and mobility strategies in and across militarized zones. These strategies were enabled by bambaragas’ mutual recognition and collective practices of assistance, secrecy, care and housing that often transgressed ethnic conflict alignments.

Bambaragas’ mutual support allowed women to navigate dangerous conflict environments and predatory privatized health governance and was, at times, what allowed women to keep their children alive and in their care.

A number of recent interventions into the study of armed conflict have drawn on, and made significant contributions to, the study of warlord and (transnational/local) “privatized”

4 governance (see Mbembe 2003; Marriage 2018; Meagher 2012; Raeymaekers et al. 2008; Reno

2000), the anthropology of labour (Hoffman 2011; Jackson 2002, 2003; Lubkemann 2008), the study of gendered violence (see Aretxaga 1997; Coulter 2009; Hutchison 2000; Mibenge 2013;

Sjoberg 2013; Theidon 2007; Utas 2005), and the epidemiology of non-violent death in conflict

(Ghobarah, Huth and Russet 2003; Kandala 2014; Lacina and Gleditsch 2005; Lindskog 2016;

O’Hare and Southall 2007; Plümper and Neumayer 2006). This project places these diverse yet overlapping interdisciplinary fields of research in discussion with one another and inquires into issues that sit at their nexus by asking: How might an understanding of sex workers’ experiences of life and labour in armed conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo enable us to theorize wartime power and sociality differently?

Life and Sociality in Armed Conflict A number of scholars have sought to understand and explicate social life in war. In response to discourses of the “meaninglessness” of violence in Africa, a great deal of recent anthropological work on war in Africa has focused on explaining the (socio-cultural) rationalities that pattern war (Hoffman 2011). From this, an emergent vein of anthropological work has sought to shift analytical focus away from how culture shapes armed conflict to how armed conflict effects culture. Some of this work has focused on violence in war as a determining cultural force. Early theories asserted that large stressful events and dislocation led to a cultural conservatism and involution (Scudder and Colson1982). As Lubkemann has pointed out, a significant body of recent anthropological work has instead asserted that violence in armed conflict destroys and disorders existing social worlds (2008). Nordstrom takes this premise further, arguing that the attack on one’s life and world in war requires the forging of a wholly

“new universe of meaning and action” (1997:13) that overwrites and “cross-cuts people’s

5 differences to create new shared communities” and novel or unique warzone cultures “across tribal, language, gender, class and combat(ant) divisions” (1997:38-39).

In response, Lubkemann has posited that wartime social experience is only partially informed by violent events and is significantly shaped by contests that emerge out of longstanding social dynamics (2008). This is echoed most notably in the significant body of scholarly work that has examined ethno-nationalist subjectivities that arise in war and attributed them to a convergence of multiple social-political processes. Hutchison, in turn, points to military policies and ideologies and changes in weaponry that removed cultural constraints in battle and changed ethnic subjectivity from performative to primordial (2000). For Mamdani, it was the combination of the experience of violence in war with the political institutionalization and racialization of ethnic categories that forged new ethnic subjectivities in Rwanda, at once primordial and endangered, and contributed to their meaningful deployment in the genocide (2001). For Malkki, it was a massacre, exile and the quotidian wartime circumstances of “social and spatial isolation” in Hutu refugee camps in Tanzania that bred rigid ethno-nationalist identities and their dehumanizing oppositions (Malkki 1995:3). In contrast, refugee settlement in towns resulted in more flexible cosmopolitan identities (Malkki 1995). This scholarship challenges us to engage seriously with social realities in war that are not solely produced by combat violence.

Scholarship on ethno-nationalism also offers insights into gendered subjectivities in war.

Yuval Davis and Anthias theorize that ethno-nationalisms implicate women in multiple ways: as biological reproducers, boundary-setters (through sexual and conjugal prohibitions), cultural (re) producers, signifiers of ethnic difference and as members of nationalist struggles (1989). Women may also be implicated as a group needing to be further subjugated and controlled within ethno- nationalisms that cast ultra-dominant patriarchal forms as the embodiment of an ethnically pure

6 nation (Taylor 1999; Mibenge 2013). The wartime hardening of ethnic subjectivities from something permeable to something threatening and ontologically knowable is socio-politically iterated in gendered ways. Hutchison argues that this is particularly true in patrilineal contexts where women occupy “liminal” ethnic positions that can change with marriage (2000). In

Rwanda and Burundi, racialized discourses cast Tutsi women, who often married Hutu men in patrilineal systems, as treacherous (Gourevitch 1998; Malkki 1995; Mibenge 2013) or impure

(Taylor 1999) and asserted that traits of cunning and deceptiveness were phenotypically expressed through Tutsi women’s beauty (Taylor 1999). In Sudan, the shift from flexible to essentialist ethnic identities meant both that prohibitions on killing women on opposing sides of the conflict disappeared and that women found themselves pressured and coerced by men “on their side” to “reproduce” the ethnic group (Hutchison 2000).

Women frequently become the “locus of moral panic” in times of political or social crisis

(Hodgson and McCurdy 2001: 14) like war. Socially marginalized women, such as single women with no children, were particularly targeted as “witches” and attacked by armed groups in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (Morvan 2005). Historically, women identified as

“prostitutes” have often been seen to incarnate such a threat in times of war and have been targeted for mass killing by both state and non-state actors in three conflicts in the past century

(Roos 2002; Mojab 2000; Hosseinkhah 2012). And women (and men) on the social margins may be neither included nor targeted, but simply socially deprived of material and emotional resources that diminish as conflict strains a “political economy of compassion” (Theidon 2013).

Armed conflict can change dominant gender roles in ways that at times benefit women.

Women frequently have similar social roles to men in conflicts where the front-lines are within the community (Yuval-Davis 1997). In a number of conflict settings, women have gained greater

7 education or employment opportunities in IDP or refugee camps, altering their power relative to husbands or other male family members (El-Bushra 2003). However, El-Bushra writes, while conflict may change gendered parameters, “in doing so it seems to rearrange, adapt, or reinforce patriarchal ideologies rather than fundamentally alter them”’ (2003, 166). For instance, when women take on greater economic responsibility in war, they often do not make accompanying gains in freedom and decision-making power and in fact, may face greater spousal violence (El-

Bushra 2003).

Gender patterns not only life, but also death in war. Men make up between 58% and 90% of violent fatalities in war (WHO 1998 and WHO 2004 respectively), largely due to their predominance in combat functions. However, where civilian attacks increase, so do killings of women (Plümper and Neumayer 2006; Sjoberg and Peet 2011, 2019). Sjoberg and Peet write that gendered social constructions in war frequently frame women as innocent “beautiful souls” to be protected by valiant (masculine) warriors. This particular status, they argue, makes women prime targets of intentional civilian attacks that seek to undermine an opposing side’s sense of its masculinist ability to “protect” its feminine civilian “property”. In support of this theory, a high ratio of women victims is statistically associated with violent incidents that intentionally target civilians (versus those that accidentally harm civilians) (2011, 2019).

If men are far more likely to die from direct (violent) conflict causes, women (and children) are far more likely to die from indirect causes of conflict (Ghobarah, Huth and Russet

2003). As mentioned above, women’s overall mortality is more highly impacted by conflict than men’s (Plümper and Neumayer 2006), pointing to the frequently larger effect of conflict on indirect rather than direct deaths. Lacina and Gleditsch, in their examination of data sets on mortality in armed conflict, state that combat-related deaths do “not provide a remotely adequate

8 account of the true human costs of conflict” (2005, 148). Plümper and Neumayer theorize that women are disproportionately affected by indirect deaths due to an interplay of what they term the economic, displacement and sexual violence effects of conflict which contribute to “among other [factors], reduced access to food, hygiene, health services and clean water” (2006, 724).

And scholars have shown that maternal mortality is elevated in countries with armed conflict

(O’Hare and Southall 2007, Urdal and Che 2013) and among women living near conflict events

(Kotsadam and Østby 2019). Plümper and Neumayer (2006) found the highest impacts on women’s mortality in civil wars involving ethnic antagonisms and in wars involving “failed states”. These factors overlap in that civil wars often lead to “failed states”. Such disintegration of the national political order can lead to an inability to provide public goods such as healthcare and security to offset the direct and indirect harms of conflicts (Plümper and Neumayer 2006).

Ethnic conflicts for their part tend to be of longer-duration and associated with greater displacement and targeted violence against women (Plümper and Neumayer 2006). Other authors have noted that in what Kaldor (1999) termed the “new wars” (post-Cold war conflicts involving among other dynamics failed states and both inter and intra-state conflict) the distinction between “war fronts” and “home fronts” became blurred creating greater harms to civilians, and by extension to women (Pankhurst 2008). Recent research has found that living within 50 km of conflict events is associated with an increase in women’s mortality rate and that women’s mortality rates are most profoundly affected in high-intensity conflicts (an increase of 202%)

(Wagner et al. 2019). 2

Children bare a major and often neglected death burden in war. Conflict-affected countries have higher rates of child mortality under the age of five (O’Hare and Southall 2007).

2 High-intensity conflicts are defined as being in the top tenth of conflicts when ranked for direct combat-related deaths.

Infant mortality has been found to increase 26.7% in conflicts with more than a thousand deaths

(Wagner et al. 2018). Armed conflict is associated with an increase in infant mortality up to 100 km away from a conflict event and up to eight years after conflict (Wagner et al. 2018). In

Africa, from 1995 to 2015, the number of infant deaths related to conflict was more than three times the number of direct deaths from armed conflict (Wagner et al. 2018).

A significant number of public health scholars have examined the health effects of war

(Krug et al. 2002; Murray et al. 2002; Ghobarah, Huth and Russet 2004). A smaller group of medical anthropologists have studied how the experiences of illness relate to war and sociality.

Jok draws ties between women’s war-time “reproductive suffering”, gendered social coercion to reproduce and the militarized deaths of men in Sudanese communities (1999, 198). Green writes of the illnesses of Mayan war widows in Guatemala as “embod[ying] the violence of their social reality. Indeed, through illness, the bodies of these Mayan widows testified to and constituted social memories of death and disappearance of their loved ones” (1998, 5). Jambai and

MacCormack showed how war-time social practices, namely the recognition and formalization of the roles and authority of traditional midwives in the war-time camps of displaced Sierra

Leoneans, helped mitigate some of the harms of conflict on maternal and infant health (1996).

Despite the many contributions from public health outlining the magnitude of conflict’s impact on health, scholars are only beginning to grapple with the social experience of illness in war.

I draw on Lubkemann’s insight that many inquiries into war grant a “totalizing and sensationalizing” effect to violence, leading them to give it “hegemonic status as both the single determinant of agency and the sole genitor of all warscape social processes” (2008: 10-11). This study examines multiple social, political and health processes underlying and generated by life in an area of armed conflict. In so doing, it aims to broaden and nuance understandings of life in

10 conflict and to contend with the importance of poor women’s lives and labour. And finally, it tries to reckon with the overlooked yet central place of non-violent death in war.

Sovereignty, Armed Conflict, Gender and Power Anthropologists have long been haunted by the specter of the European state in their attempts to discern forms of order or in their presupposition of the state as a universal form

“waiting on the threshold of reality” for stateless societies (Das and Poole 2004:8). As a result, it is perhaps not surprising that many current debates on African governance remain deeply entangled with European theories and histories of the state, often far more so than with their own specific histories (Mamdani 1996, 2001).

Beginning immediately in the post-colonial period and coming to prominence after the cold war, a significant body of scholarship analyzes African statehood in terms of a Weberian ideal-type of the rational-bureaucratic state (Niemann 2007). In this schema, African states are frequently found lacking, if not “failed”, with the DR Congo frequently appearing as the paradigmatic example (Niemann 2007). This conceit began with the earliest post-colonial studies of African politics. Hyden posited that East African peasantry – and thus large swaths of Africa - were uncaptured by the state (1983). For Hyden, networks of reciprocal social ties often linked to subsistence (what he termed the “economy of affection”) – not the state - were at the center of political and social life in Africa (Hyden 1983, 8). Hyden saw such affective links as explaining a wide range of phenomena from mutual aid, to patron-client relationships, to what others might call practices of political corruption (Hyden 1983). Sandbrook similarly saw African states as weak but saw systems of “personal rule” as a product of this fragility (Sandbrook 1986, 321).

Confronted with tenuous legitimacy, political authorities maintained power by purchasing the allegiance of elites in strategic areas through the allotment of political and economic privileges.

For Sandbrook, the maintenance of such patronage dynamics took precedence over policy in the national interest leading to political and economic decline (1986). Similarly, Callaghy posited that the African state was characterized by a patrimonial-administrative nature and ingrained aversion to legal-rational and economic functionality (Callaghy 1984). This view was further carried forward in theories premised on African statehood’s assessed weakness or empirical questionability, seemingly propped up primarily by external juridical recognition (Jackson and

Rosberg 1982, 1986).

More recently, measures imposed by international financial institutions (IFIs) have been credited with “ending” the sovereignty of African states (Plank 1993) or creating “fractionated sovereignties” by placing African states under the “tutelary government” of international financial institutions (Mbembe 2001:74). Some have theorized IFIs as reinforcing political authority, by facilitating the enrichment of political elites involved in brokering licenses and deals with foreign business elites. Indeed, Bayart has theorized that African states are divided in two. Le pays légal (the legal country) is the externally recognized state through which élites capture rents in strategies of extraversion (i.e. contracts with foreign or transnational corporations). Behind this façade is le pays réel (the real country) where every day governance occurs through rhizomatic networks of patrimonial élites (Bayart 2006).

More recent theories have built on many of the insights above, but placed armed conflict centrally in their theory of African statehood, as either a technique of rule or a measure of chaos.

Reno argues that the erosion of African governments by IFIs has led to “shadow states”, that is, forms of personal rule or “warlord politics” that use the legitimacy of the legal state to seek out external economic partners to control access to both formal and informal economies. These states, he argues, strategically minimize the delivery of public services and stir up social disorder

12 to maintain control and rapidly exploit resources (Reno 1998, 2000, 2001). More recently,

Marriage has drawn attention to the role of tax havens 3 in laundering the plundered gains of an alliance of western profiteers and local political and militarized elites in the Democratic Republic of Congo and contributing to widespread disenfranchisement that is violently maintained (2018).

Mbembe has posited that the rise of forms of “private indirect government” in Africa have led previous clientelist networks to be replaced by more concentrated forms of power upheld through widespread terror in which the “privatization of public violence” is deployed for “private enrichment” (2001, 85).

From this, Mbembe has coined the term necropolitics to identify a mode of rule “whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations” (2003, 14). It is exemplified by the “terror formations” of colonialism, African-American slavery and contemporary manifestations of power in many post-colonial African states where a plethora of armed groups have emerged following the gutting of “economic underpinnings of the state’s authority to govern” by international financial institutions (2003, 33). Mbembe has elaborated that:

Necropower is wielded both by states and by what, following Deleuze and Guattari, we

should call “war machines.” War machines are made up of segments of armed men [sic]

that split up, merge and superimpose each other depending on the circumstances.

Polymorphous and diffuse organizations, war machines are characterized by their

3 Also referred to as fiscal paradises, the term refers to countries with very low taxation on foreign investment and high levels of banking secrecy.

capacity for metamorphosis. They combine a plurality of functions and operate through

capture, looting and predation (Mbembe interview in Höller 2002).

Other theorists have apprehended African governance through schemas of generalized chaos (Ayittey 1998; Chabal and Daloz 1999) or morally inflected legal disorder (Bayart, Ellis and Hibou 1999). Bayart, Ellis and Hibou (1991), for example, argue that the intermeshing of

African political regimes with international organized crime groups, such as drug trafficking cartels, has resulted in a shift from regimes based on “kleptocracy to the felonious state”.

Responding to these analyses, recent scholars have started to criticize what they identify as a tendency to consign African governance to “pathological categories” according to teleological and idealized Weberian referents (Hagmann and Péclard 2010,1; Raeymaekers

2010). Indeed, it could be argued that in their persistent definition of the inherent nature of the

African state in the negative, they risk reproducing the trope of the continent as lacking, monstrous and in permanent decline (Mbembe 2001) or of scripting Africa as “violent darkness” in counterpoint to “European enlightenment” (Donham 2006, 17). In reaction, a number of scholars have posited the need to recognize the functional nature of privatized forms of statehood or “arrangements between state and non-state actors regarding the management of local security, public services and resources” (Raeymaekers, Menkhaus and Vlassenroot 2008, 8). Under the rubric of “governance without government” (Menkhaus 2007; Raeymakers et al. 2008),

“mediated statehood” (Menkhaus 2008) and “negotiated states” (Hagmann and Péclard 2010), these authors have tried to move away from what they deem a “normative, state-centrist notion of (good) governance”. Raeymaekers for instance, argues that the RCD-ML armed group in eastern DR Congo succeeded in providing localized governance in the form of goods, services

14 and rights. Such rebel groups, he argues, have the added legitimacy of being embedded in local networks (2010). However, with regards to health and education, the “public goods” he cites are not entitlements but elite business men’s charitable donations to hospitals and schools. War is central to these theories too, recast as productive in generating “pluralizing moments” and

“novel” political orders where in lieu of a centralize state, regulatory authority is spread across multiple and at times cooperating state and non-state groups (such as rebels, businessmen and public officials) (Raeymakers 2010: 573). Many such theories draw on Tilly’s (1985) history of medieval European state formation as a contested and violent process (see for instance Boege et al. 2008; Raeymakers et al. 2008; Hagmann and Péclard 2010; Menkhaus 2006; Niemann 2007).

Tilly argued that modern European states arose out of the centralization and legitimation of what was essentially racketeering, different from most organized crime only in its success and recognition. Specifically, states grew out of armed groups’ practices of war-making (the elimination of external enemies), state-making (the elimination of internal enemies), protection

(the elimination of menaces to the population under their control) and extraction (the collection of taxes or other generation of revenue to pay for the first three practices) (1985). However,

Meagher argues that contemporary theorists of non-state governance in conflict emphasize

“pluralizing” dynamics as opposed to the centralizing forces Tilly describes and are best described as “neo-Tillyan” (2012).

In turn, critics of the neo-Tillyan school have reproached the unqualified celebration of non-state orders as an essentialist inversion of their theoretical predecessors (Meagher 2012).

Leander discredits parallels to Tilly’s history of medieval European state making wherein protection rackets and war-making eventually centralized power in a state on which citizen demands could be placed. She points to crucial contextual differences facing African states, such

15 as external financial dependence and the influence of powerful transnational private interests and proxy armed groups (2004), and concludes that hybrid or non-state governance arrangements are far more likely to be subject to capture by powerful private interests than to undergo an eventual

Tillyan-esque centralization of power and the development of any mechanisms of public accountability (2004) . Indeed, to her point, Raeymaeker’s theory of hybrid governance in the DR

Congo is based on the RCD-ML armed group. However, rather than being a locally-acountable governing body that emerged from local social processes, the RCD-ML were a proxy for the

Ugandan government that is credited with having looted areas in the DR Congo under its control on such a massive scale that it dramatically altered the Ugandan GDP (see Prunier 2008; Stearns

2011). Meagher draws on two case studies, a vigilante justice gang in Nigeria and the RCD-ML rebel control in northern DR Congo to find that hybrid (state and non-state) governance structures often replicated global neo-liberal logics (not to mention historical colonial and authoritarian post-colonial logics) of minimal public services and reduced civilian power, diminished labour conditions and maximal exploitation (2012).

There are significant gendered ramifications of the extreme privatization of public goods, including health, under masculinist authoritarian rule, be it state or non-state. However, most theorizing of non-state or conflict governance is profoundly mute on the question of gender. . An anthology on war and non-state governance in Africa entitled “African Conflicts and Informal

Power: Big Men and Networks” contains scant analysis of gender as it relates to its core themes beyond one footnote that states that “Big Man is not a gendered concept” because “women can also be Big Men” (Utas 2012). This is a simultaneous erasure of the strikingly gendered dimensions of the power under study and an abdication of the responsibility to analyze their gendered effects. Yet, it is not unique. The paradigms of security and justice explored in many

16 theories of “informal” or “non-state” governance are inherently gendered in their disregard for the conditions of women’s lives, labour and deaths.

I contend that health is a key site to explore the gendered facets of governance by state and non-state armed groups in conflict. There is little academic literature on non-state armed groups’ governance of health (Gordon, Cooper-Knock and Lilywhite 2015). However, there is empirical evidence that non-state armed groups have varied approaches to health care and that a number of them conceive of health as a public good, provide medical services, or even operate medical facilities (Gordon, Cooper-Knock and Lilywhite 2015). In general though, the medical interventions of non-state armed groups tend to prioritize military-specific emergency medicine

(i.e. treating battle wounds) and communicable diseases (i.e. sexually transmitted infections) and to exclude women’s health (Lilywhite 2015). As well, non-state armed groups’ expenditures on health services are often vulnerable to the prioritization of military spending (Gordon, Cooper-

Knock and Lilywhite 2015). Indeed, a similar dynamic exists for states and is exacerbated by armed conflict. O’Hare and Southall found that country-level spending on health was significantly lower and defense spending was significantly higher among conflict-affected states in Sub-Saharan Africa (2007). Furthermore, medical services provided by the state, by non-state armed groups and by private entities frequently overlap. Gordon, Cooper-Knock and Lilywhite

(2015) found that while non-state armed groups generally provide their own ambulatory battlefield care, they are often dependent on access to civilian (state or private) institutions for emergency medical services. This dependency tends to decrease if civilian medical care is less available or accessible or if non-state armed groups have more internal differentiation of roles and specialization (factors that often correspond to their size and level of control over a territory)

(Gordon, Cooper-Knock and Lilywhite 2015). As well, both state and non-state armed groups

17 frequently target medical facilities in combat. The International Red Cross Committee (ICRC) recorded 2,398 incidents of armed violence targeting health care facilities in 11 countries between 2012 and 2014: 700 incidents were committed by non-state armed actors and 790 were committed by state armed actors (ICRC 2015). Such attacks can have diverse objectives such as the harming of civilian populations, the destruction of infrastructure or the killing of wounded combatants receiving care. In DR Congo, where health care is commercialized and a significant amount of money flows through even public hospitals, armed group attacks on health facilities have occurred in order to steal money, equipment for resale and mobile phones (see Aizenman

2019).

Meagher, De Herdt and Titeca assert that: “The value of hybrid governance approaches depends on clarifying whether negotiations between state and non-state actors are shaping a social contract, fragmenting formal authority, or empowering illegitimate social forces” (2014,

7). Meagher further calls on scholars to neither pathologize nor romanticize forms of non-state governance, but to qualitatively assess their effects through an empirical assessment of the impacts on popular living and working conditions (2012). Meagher is not alone in centralizing labour in analyses of wartime governance. Jackson examined how armed-group-control of mining sectors led to deteriorated working conditions for artisanal miners, forced labour and the exclusion of middle-men and women (2002, 2003, 2006). Hoffman, for his part, uses Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “war machines” (1987), loose deterritorialized assemblages of violent power, to theorize the mobilisation of young men’s labour by transnational capital for a range of dangerous work, including combat (“the barracks”), branding this the central paradigm of West

African post-modernity (2011). As “the barracks” might suggest, there have been few analyses that focus on wartime feminized labour and its conditions (and none that consider women’s

18 labour to be paradigmatic of a region and an epoch). Two notable exceptions are the literature on women and girls serving in military capacities (see Jeannen et al. 2011; Baaz and Stern 2013 a;

Coulter 2009) and that which analyzes women’s labour as a product of masculine militirization

(Enloe 1990, 2000; Moon 1997). However, as Mibenge points out, even the attention to girl and women soldiers has focused primarily on sexual violence and eclipsed all of their (voluntary or forced) labour (2013). Yet, control of women’s productive labour is often a critical aim of military strategy and factor in conflict dynamics (Turshen 2001). Moreover, as Enloe has argued, women’s labour is central to political economies of war (2000).

I heed Meagher’s call to empirically explore popular labour and living conditions as a means of assessing and theorizing wartime governance (both state and non-state) and its implications. In so doing, I also align myself with the historical literature that has placed labour and labour conditions centrally in analyses of colonial and post-colonial violence and rule in the

Congo (Bernault 1999; Hunt 2008; Mamdani 1996). However, I hope to further contribute to these debates in two ways. Firstly, I give central focus to feminized labour. In particular, I examine sex work. However, as almost all sex workers perform a variety of other forms of labour, including agriculture, mining, beer-brewing, market-selling and food preparation, their perspective also allows for examination of broader considerations of feminized labour in war.

Secondly, I examine women and children’s health, and in particular, their births and deaths.

This study concerns itself not only with techniques of rule and the gendered ways in which they are instantiated (by sovereigns and under governmental influences) but also with the effects, overlaps and gaps of such techniques. It builds on historical literature on the DR Congo that found that imbricated centers of economic and political power combined to exert profoundly coercive force over women’s mobility and labour, and yet that women were occasionally able to

19 accrue power and autonomy in the gaps and struggles between power-blocks (Hunt 1991;

MacGaffey 1987; Mamdani 1996). Humphrey posits that individuals living under sovereignty call upon “prior experiences and alternative lives people construct for themselves,” what Nugent artfully calls past “states of imagination” (2001, 274), to assess and maneuver power (2004,

435). Sex workers in the DR Congo drew on their present perceptions and conceptions of multiple competing groups making sovereign claims in order to cross militarized borders and to navigate the consistencies and discontinuities of power, including their own.

Sex Work as a Site of Inquiry

This dissertation is premised on the notion that sex workers’ living and working conditions are a particularly rich locus from which to understand broader questions about wartime governance and wartime sociality. This claim draws on varied bodies of scholarly work that have considered both sex work and social concern with sex work or women who do it, as privileged sites from which to understand broader political and social dynamics. Materialist feminists were among the first to make the claim that the study of sex work could open up wide theoretical horizons. In the 1970s and 1980s, discussions of sexual labour by North American and European scholars were mired in a long history of being over-determined by morality.

Writing in 1990 of dominant trends in research on prostitution, Luise White deplored that:

They have naturalized prostitutes in the language of biological processes, explaining

women’s labor in an idiom of inevitability, corruption and decay. In such scholarship,

actions by and attitudes towards prostitutes are not the result of specific historical and

material conditions, let alone specific interactions of reformers, casual laborers and

police, but biological and cultural absolutes (7).

For White (1990) and other feminist historians studying Africa, a materialist focus was a means to subvert this totalizing effect and allow for a detailed investigation of labour conditions and varying cultural forms of sexual labour. Furthermore, because women who sold sex often occupied many subject positions, and were governed through multiple overlapping categories, studying their labour became a way of apprehending colonial political economies more broadly, including their forms of rule, their inconsistencies and the limitations of their power (Parpart

1994, 2001; White 1990). These insights were carried forward by scholars of colonialism who saw interventions into “colonial prostitution” as contests over the nature of colonialism and the constructions of race and gender (Briggs 2003; Hunt 1991; Lauro 2005; Levine 2003) or evidence of the instability of divisions between colonizers and colonized (Stoler 2010). These scholars departed from the canon in not seeing the study of sex workers and of social concern with them as a narrow focus from which only highly specific findings about their lives could be drawn, or at most, findings about women in general. Rather, they used sex work and its governance to re-theorize entire social and political processes. Luise White, for instance, claimed that the oral histories of Kenyan prostitutes she recorded were nothing short of a Kenyan history:

If this (…) looks somewhat different from earlier histories of Kenya, if for example it

contains more women actors or different insights about urban economics or the colonial

state, it is not necessarily because this is women’s history. It is altogether possible that it

is because this study is political economy written with women’s words (1990: 21).

Similarly, more recent scholarship arising out of critical gender studies has examined the governance of women who sell sex as a crucial window into the racialized, classed and gendered dimensions of governance working in and through such forms as colonial expansion (Lauro

2005; Levine 2003), post-colonial nation-building (Bliss 2001; Parpart 2001), genocidal governments (Roos 2002), nationalist projects wrestling with globalization (Berman 2003;

Jeffrey 2002), militarized imperialism (Enloe 2001; Kapur 2002; Moon 1997), transnational foreign aid (Bernstein 2010; Crago 2014) and post-conflict nationalism (Mojab 2000). Such research has identified a diverse array of regimes and practices deployed by states and colonies to regulate women selling sex including licensing and taxation (Bliss 2001; Moon 1997), forced medical testing and treatment (Decker et al. 2014), detention in lock-hospitals, ‘rehabilitation’ homes or prisons (Levine 2003; Soderlund 2005), state torture (Crago 2014) and mass killings

(Mojab 2000; Roos 2002).

In some instances, prostitution laws, policies and practices are specific to armed conflict environments. The state-supported recruitment of women sex workers and the establishment of regulated sex work venues for troops has been a key facet of militarization (Enloe 2000; Moon

1997). Targeted mass killings of sex workers have occurred under lawful directive in genocidal regimes (Roos 2002) or as ideologically-inspired spontaneous action in revolution (Kalia 2018;

McCoy 2014). Massacres of women suspected of selling sex have also occurred immediately following conflicts as part of nationalist attempts to “purify” a community (Mojab 2000).

This study contributes to sex work studies an in depth examination of contemporary modes of regulating women selling sex in a context of armed conflict. Indeed, the predominant work on the provision of sexual services to members of armed groups has taken a structuralist- feminist position that understands sexual labour as inherently oppressive, if not violent,

22 regardless of coercion (see Enloe 2001; Moon 1997; Sjoberg 2013). This theoretical orientation, in the context of studies of sexual labour more broadly, precludes investigation into diverse

(gendered) laws, policies and practices and their respective relationships to labour conditions

(including levels of violence) that women selling sex identify (Weitzer 2005).

As well, the sensationalist and singular focus on sexual violence in many representations of gender in war, particularly in the DR Congo, has not only drawn dangerously on transnational racialized narratives of barbaric and animalistic (Black) African men and (Black) African women in need of (White) salvation (Baaz and Stern 2013 b; Mertens 2018), it has stymied broader understandings of gender in conflict (Mibenge 2013). This project attempts to heed Mibenge’s call not to limit our understanding of gender in war to the “sexual,” but to engage with the broader gendered and classed dimensions of regimes of labour, torture, slavery, and intentional killings in conflict (2013). It also draws on insights from anthropology about how armed conflict can impact women’s productive and reproductive labour burdens and socio-political status

(Aretxaga 1997; Hutchison 2000;Theidon 2007). Lastly, it builds on the finding that a labour perspective allows for nuanced analysis of the relationship between the governance of sex work and sex workers’ living and working conditions (Benoit et al. 2017; Bruckert 2015; Decker et al.

2014; Shannon et al. 2014).

I thus draw on the assertion that inquiry into sex work is a means to explore how techniques of rule are enacted, experienced, circumvented and subverted (White 1990). This study takes these insights further by applying them to a context of armed conflict with multiple, overlapping and competing forms of rule. I also build on the contention that studying how sex work and sex workers are apprehended both socially and politically can illuminate how gendered, classed, racialized and ethnicized boundaries and subjectivities are constructed (Briggs

2003; Hunt 1991; Lauro 2005; Levine 2003; Stoler 2010). To do so, I adopt White’s method of studying the relationships sex workers develop with their communities, other sex workers and different groups of clients (1990). However, I further add to the study of sex work an exploration of how sex workers’ relationships, subjectivities and collective boundaries can fluctuate in relation to armed conflict.

I further argue that sex workers’ distinct positioning in eastern DR Congo, and perhaps in other conflict contexts, makes them all the more privileged interlocutors to complicate theories of wartime governance and wartime sociality. In eastern DR Congo, women who sell sex frequently cross shifting and fractured militarized borders as they move between cities, towns, artisanal mining camps, armed groups encampments and formal and informal displaced peoples’ camps to perform sex work. They frequently navigate different power structures, forms of violent repression or negotiated accommodation that specifically target them as women selling sex and as “sovereign women/gendered traitors”. As such, they not only have a comparative perspective on sex work governance in different locales in conflict, they also offer insight into how women crossing militarized borders are governed.

In the present research, I take a materialist interest in the conditions and economics of sexual labour and the living conditions of women involved in it. However, I do not presume the motivations for or social meaning of women’s labour. I examine how women who sell sex are understood and apprehended both socially and as sites of governance in a period of armed conflict. I show how women who sell sex understand and explain what they do and who they are, how they accept, reject, rework or reclaim various attempts to categorize them and how they

“categorize back” (Malkki 1995: 8), articulating their own social and political views of the world

24 around them and their place in it as women with “no borders” and “no borders amongst themselves.”

Due to this analytical orientation and focus on labour, I use the terms “sex worker” and

“women who sell sex”. The term “sex worker” has at times been used to ascribe or presume an identity, a political orientation, a motivation for selling sex or a particular and generalized socio- cultural form of sexual labour or exchange (Wardlow 2002; Wojcicki 2002). Its adoption by multi-lateral and national health agencies across the world in the context of HIV has, for some theorists, further associated it with a somewhat imperialistic biopolitical indifference to, if not disrespect for, local social meanings and their importance in understanding why and how women sell sex (see Hunt 1999b). Wojcicki, who is similarly concerned with ethnocentric concepts of sexual labor, claims that, in sub-Saharan African contexts, one should distinguish between

“commercial sex work” (the ideal-type of which she identifies as inner-city brothels in

Johannesburg) and what she considers to be more socio-culturally embedded “informal” practices of sexual exchange (2002). I choose rather to align myself theoretically with Agustín’s resistance to a commercial-cultural divide through a “cultural study of commercial sex” (2005:

618). This allows for an accounting of the socio-cultural dimensions of women’s experiences selling sex in a context of armed conflict in dialogue with an analysis of the economic context, impact and conditions of their work 4. Women in my field sites generally conceived of their decision to sell sex as a social decision to claim the freedoms denied to married women.

However, the economic pressures of extreme poverty were very significant in motivating their decision to go to highly dangerous conflict contexts to maximize earnings. As well, for a few

4 Due to this interest in the labour dimension of selling sex, I use both “sex worker” as a generic term to indicate a category of worker (much as one might use “agricultural worker” or “soldier”) and the terms that women used to self-identify and socially categorize themselves such as “ bambaragas, ” “ ndumbas, ” “ femmes libres, ” and others which I explore in the first section.

25 women, the economic gains derived from selling sex in such contexts could have socially transformative effects. For sex workers in eastern DR Congo, armed conflict presented distinct and heightened social, political and economic risks and opportunities.

Fieldwork and Conflict This research is based on fieldwork undertaken in the provinces of South Kivu and North

Kivu in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in the summer of 2013 and between September

2014 and April 2015. I remained in contact with many core informants between the two trips and in the years after my return. The time I spent doing fieldwork in the DR Congo is quite short relative to most ethnographic projects and to what I might have desired. Two major factors specific to research in an area of armed conflict placed limits on the amount of time I could spend there. Firstly, doing research as safely as possible in a conflict zone, particularly without sponsorship of an institution with resources on the ground, can be extremely costly. Secondly, ensuring one’s physical and mental safety as a researcher requires taking seriously how the stress of being in an unsafe and unstable environment can accumulate over time and affect one’s mental health (and that of those waiting for your safe return). These factors, and a nearby Ebola outbreak, placed unavoidable limitations on the time I could safely spend in the field. However, I attempted to compensate for this by working on the research almost constantly when I was present and by maintaining a degree of ongoing contact when I was not.

Overlapping with the pragmatic questions of how one can study a context of armed conflict are the many theoretical questions about how one should . Nordstrom has suggested that single-sited fieldwork is not sufficient to research armed conflict with its multiple sites of combat and continual flows of people and commodities (1997; 2004). Rather, she proposes “runway research”, travel from frontline to frontline, from violent conflict event to violent conflict event

(1997, 41). This, she argues, mirrored many Mozambicans’ experiences of dislocation during the war: “Ethnographer and Mozambican alike arrive in new locations and ask for the latest pertinent information in order to understand the war and not make potentially lethal mistakes” (1997, 41).

Gupta and Ferguson have argued that more in-depth multi-sited field work is a key method to challenge “the power of topography to conceal successfully the topography of power” (Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 338). This insight seems particularly relevant to wars with their contested territorial lines. For her part, Argenti-Pillen calls for attention to the far-reaching military and economic alliances and influences that often underpin warfare and cautions that “anthropologists who study civil war without mentioning its translocal context and its distant protagonists are in danger of participating in a spurious indigenization of violence” (2003:202).

Contrary to this method of studying war, Lubkemann has argued for the need to remain focused on how “social relations and social struggles continue to be negotiated in terms that remain as locally specific as the understanding of wartime violence itself” (2008, 220). In this vein, a number of scholars of war have chosen more traditional, spatially-circumscribed field sites in order to gain greater historical or social depth. These include studies of communities over many years of war (including long stretches when the given community itself is not directly in conflict) (Lubkemann 2008), communities of origin and return of people implicated in conflict events (Coulter 2009; Theidon 2013) or the arrival sites of post-war displacement (Malkki 1995).

Some research has also allowed for comparisons between different sites of the social experience of war and fleeing (Malkki 1995).

This study draws on a combination of these methodological contributions with a focus on specific places and on mobility. My primary field sites were two communities: Maneno, a small rural town next to the Kahuzi-Biega forest in South Kivu that had often been on the front lines of

27 conflict; and Mugunga, a large community primarily of displaced people in North Kivu. The bambaragas I spent time with were highly mobile. For safety reasons, my own as well as the bambaragas who assisted me and participated in the research, I could not follow women into the rebel-held or militarized areas where they went to work. However, being located in both Maneno and Mugunga allowed me to speak with women as they came and went from these trips. As well, the boundaries between rebel-held and government-held territory could be somewhat porous and could change quickly. This was the case in the areas around my field sites. Mugunga for a brief time fell under rebel control right before my research began. At the beginning of my fieldwork, and again at the end, Goma was about five kilometres away from front lines. Maneno was a couple of kilometres from a non-state armed group checkpoint at the beginning of my research but was no longer so by the end, as the checkpoint had been removed.

Though Maneno and Mugunga served as temporary or long-term home bases for the women whose experiences I documented, I was faced with the ethnographic dilemma of what to do when all the women I knew were away for work. I attempted to emulate - to an extent - sex workers’ mobility by moving back and forth between different ethnographic sites using their contacts and information to find bambaragas in a new location and understand the environment.

I thus moved back and forth between the town of Maneno (South Kivu), Mugunga (North Kivu), an IDP camp and town in the mountains of conflict-affected Masisi (North-Kivu), poor neighbourhoods in the capitals of Bukavu and Goma (South Kivu, North Kivu) and a “Kijé” or

“QG”, an exclusively bambaraga neighborhood, in Uvira (South-Kivu).

None of my fieldwork or travels would have been possible without Rho. Rho is a bambaraga from rural South Kivu who, through selling sex, got an education and has a graduate certificate in the non-profit sector. I met Rho through her work with a community organization in

Bukavu where she had single-handedly run the sex workers’ project that coordinated a number of local sex workers’ associations (called “ comités de professionelles du sexe ” or “sex professional committees”) and organized condoms to be provisioned to them. Eventually, she would take the project independent under the name of UMANDE. Umande means dew, and Rho named the organization in honour of the morning dew that women brushed up against when they walked home early in the morning after having worked all night selling sex. As part of my ethical commitment relating to the study, I wrote a number of funding applications for UMANDE (one of which was successful), I contributed to the emergency fund that Rho ran and I supported her work to legally register the organization.

Rho was the translator (from Swahili and Bashi to French), the transcriber, the navigator of the dangers of the conflict zone, and openly and unapologetically a bambaraga everywhere she went. She is also a tireless and brilliant advocate and was constantly opening her home to bambaragas and their children coming to the city in the hopes of medical help. For long stretches, she and I travelled together with her bambaraga niece and newborn daughter, living together and finding bambaragas as we went. Rho spent hundreds of hours with me, often en route to destinations, but also over the phone from Canada, explaining, discussing, and sometimes arguing with me about what we had seen and what it all meant. When we were based in Bukavu, I spent a lot of time at Rho’s house, though, for safety and access to communication, chose to spend my nights in what I thought was safer housing. This sense was confirmed during my fieldwork when gun fighting involving militarized individuals broke out next to Rho’s house and bullets flew into her home. Everyone at Rho’s was unharmed, but I felt relieved by my choice. 5 The time I spent with Rho, watching her and her niece negotiate clients, hearing about

5 There was perhaps a delusion though in thinking one could predict where was safer. Two years later, heavy shelling targeted both Rho’s neighbourhood and the block where I had stayed.

29 her bambaraga sisters and nieces, going out to sex work bars, and meeting the client who fathered her first child was fieldwork that Rho generously facilitated. This was nested within the larger fieldwork. It was also the development of a very meaningful personal friendship.

Spending prolonged amounts of time in Maneno presented important conflict-related safety concerns for myself and the women with whom I spent time. Kimberly Theidon speaks of ethnographers in contexts affected by conflict as entering “terror’s talk”. She writes that:

Frankly, there is no “observation” when people are at war and you arrive asking them

about it. You are, whether you wish to be or not, a participant. When terror weaves its

way through a community, words are no longer mere information. Words become

weapons and posing a question must mean you plan to do something with the response.

How does one conduct fieldwork amid terror’s talk? (2008, 13)

It was not only my talk, bambaragas quickly informed me, that implicated me and others.

My presence itself as a muzungu (white person) was an act enmeshed in real and perceived webs of power and violence, carrying consequences which could fall most dangerously on women who interacted with me. If I were to live with bambaragas or just hang around observing, members of the military and non-state armed groups would assume that the women I stayed with were benefitting from large sums of money from an NGO project or informing on men to UN agencies

(UN agencies were directly involved in both military operations and trials of local military and rebel leaders 6). This, I was told, would result in bambaragas – already socially profiled as

6 During my field work, in a historical first, the UN were actively involved not only in a peacekeeping capacity but in direct combat operations (Sperotto 2014). The UN also pushed the government to prosecute the leader of an armed group (see UNHCR 2014) that many locals in Maneno, as well as members of an ongoing armed group nearby, had been involved with.

“traitors” and “spies”- becoming targets of violent extortion or retribution from non-state armed groups or military. Instead, women in Maneno proposed that I stay only during the day, during part of which I would conduct interviews with other bambaragas . This placed me in a less politically threatening yet widely understood muzungu role: I could pass for a journalist to outside observers. I was always open and transparent with bambaragas and anyone participating in the research about its purpose and scope – in fact, bambaragas helped design it. But I respected women’s requests that I obscure my research from others, including authorities, despite knowing that such tactics have created safety risks for other researchers in conflict zones (see

Sluka 1995).

My interview strategy had the added benefit of quelling rumours amongst bambaragas about my presence and keeping fears from settling on the core women in the ethnography by

“spreading” the muzungu around amongst bambaragas . Many, many bambaragas as it turns out.

More by happenstance then by design, on top of all my ethnographic data, I ended up conducting interviews with 215 sex workers. These were semi-structured labour-history interviews. I did not ask women why they started to sell sex (or, for that matter, why they continued), but rather asked them about how they sold sex in a context of armed conflict. This avoided many methodological issues relating to morally-tinged humanitarian/rehabilitation scripts encountered in both war

(Coulter 2009; Lubkemann 2008; Theidon 2013) and sex work (Agustín 2004; Campbell 2003;

Sandy 2007) research. In the process, many women did tell me both the many whys and hows of selling sex in armed conflict, as well as how they balanced labour, housing and childcare. I based my approach and questions in many ways on what I remembered asking other sex workers in order to navigate a new environment when I was myself a sex worker in Québec. As it turns out,

31 those conversations were very similar to ones bambaragas had amongst each other. Though this thesis draws principally on the ethnographic data, its conclusions are also informed by hundreds of hours of conversation with hundreds of bambaragas about life in war.

In Maneno, my specific interest in bambaragas became noted within the community.

Women explained (and occasionally asked me to explain) my presence to men in the community with the partial truth that I had an interest in and concern with sex workers’ health. This was an interest which they felt male power-holders within the community and militarized men around it would see both as non-threatening and, as women’s clients, potentially of benefit to them.

Indeed, the explanation dissipated concerns. In Mugunga, women taught me to quickly and enthusiastically pick up on their lead when they abruptly changed the subject and moved it on to the weather or any random topic. This signaled that someone may have approached their shacks to find out what I - and they - were discussing and the research needed to discretely stop. This happened on a couple of occasions. One time, during open conflict nearby, a man they knew to be a rebel came right up, in their view to overhear our group discussion, and the conversation seamlessly transitioned to shared insights about toddlers.

Shared secrecy was an important practice of survival, solidarity and kinship amongst bambaragas . It was what made my fieldwork possible. It was also what created gaps in what I could know and confusion as I tried to piece together common experiences or the story of a place. Though many women spoke right away and in great depth about complicated experiences in their own lives, there was often an ethnographic limit where one woman’s story touched another’s. Spending prolonged time in Maneno and Mugunga shifted those lines. For example, I had no idea early on in Maneno that the bambaragas I spent time with had all known each other prior through their different engagements with the same armed group. None of the women told

32 me at first. Over time, though, women offered me fragments, threads and some ultimately let me into the secrets of long shared histories to be included in my research.

I believe this was not just an issue of generically “gaining trust”. If doing research in a conflict space implicates the researcher in gendered terrains of power, I consistently and publicly cast my lot with bambaragas to the extent possible given the huge and undeniable power chasm of being white, middle-class and from elsewhere. Save a couple of exceptions for safety, I was open to everyone, including local authorities, about the fact that I was a sex worker 7, that I had sold sex for years, and would again in a heartbeat if I needed to and that I wasn’t married to a man and never would be. My years of public activism and involvement with sex workers’ associations backed up who I said I was, as did my willingness to answer explicit questions about sex, violence and money in my own life. To most women, this made me a “ bambaraga, ” albeit an odd and extremely privileged muzungu one, and I was frequently referred to as one.

This did not complicate the representations women gave of my research because not only was it common to sell sex and do other forms of labour, it was rare not to. To overstate any similarity in our lives and living conditions would be a brutal white-washing. What is true, though, is that, to some extent, my experience as a sex worker mattered and, I believe, over time, it was at least part of why women told me many things.

7 In North America, it is somewhat odd to refer to oneself as a sex worker when one no longer sells sex- or at least is not currently selling sex. This is perhaps in part due to the widely circulating and morally-charged categories of “ex- prostitute” or “former prostitute”. However, the latter are difficultly disentangled from condemnations of sex work and sex workers and signal if not reform, then rehabilitation. I was chastised early on by the late great Gabriela Leite Silva, of the prostitutes’ movement of Brazil that the identity of “former sex worker” reinforced moral judgment and separation from both other sex workers and my own time selling sex. She put it to me that regardless of whether I was currently working to continue calling myself a sex worker, a prostitute or a whore was a political and social act of solidarity and personal integrity. In her view, this also reinforced recognition of sex worker as an occupational category. (Indeed, she was the first sex worker to have “prostitute” indicated as her (retired) occupation on her government-issued old age social security card). The continued appellation of someone as a sex worker or prostitute, or bambaraga for that matter, is also consistent with understandings of sex worker as a gendered social category, such as those that predominate in DR Congo.

As a result, I am left to ponder my own responsibilities of shared secrecy and protection beyond the academic ones to which I have committed. It is unequivocally clear to me that the bambaragas I spoke with were the best able to assess their own safety and to carefully consider what they shared. Though women were given the option to use any name they wished, most gave me their real full names, and I can only assume that they wanted what they deserve: full credit and recognition for their knowledge, insights and experiences. However, through this research I learned how much some of the information shared has potentially dangerous implications for women. Furthermore, it became clear that one woman’s identity could reveal that of another who was somewhere with her. I therefore made the difficult choice to change everyone’s names and the name of the town of Maneno. Doing so is perhaps maternalist. Worse, it potentially robs participants of acknowledgement for their contributions. However, this decision allows me to attempt to transmit what women felt was important for others to know without creating unforeseen risk to them. That, in the end, was the imperfect yet only position that I could live with, as a researcher and as a sex worker.

A Brief Roadmap The first chapter begins with an exploration of the circulating social categories of women selling sex in eastern DR Congo. It then proceeds to an overview of the context of armed conflict militarily and politically. From there, I give a detailed history of the conflict in my two principal field sites: Maneno, a small village in South Kivu and Mugunga, a densely populated area on the outskirts of the city of Goma. The histories of Maneno and Goma are interwoven with and told through the personal histories of the core group of bambaragas in this research.

The second chapter delves into non-violent death in armed conflict and the distinct and disproportionate burden of infant, child and maternal death that bambaragas experienced. It begins by examining the overall relationship between armed conflict and non-violent death in

34 eastern DR Congo before outlining the specific ways that armed conflict fueled risks of infant, child and maternal death in bambaragas’ experiences. It then traces how fear and loss related to maternal, infant and child death emerged in naming practices and idioms such as sangha , hôpitaux and mauvaises personnes . It investigates the dangers of speaking of infant, child and maternal death for bambaragas due to the criminalization of abortion and lastly, it recounts one woman’s experiences of loss.

The third chapter specifically explores the workings of power in the production of non- violent death. It outlines how both state and non-state armed groups govern health not as a public good but as a commodity sold for private profit. It then investigates how privatization has led to infrastructure collapse and policies and practices in hospitals that fuel infant, child and maternal death and disproportionately impact bambaragas .

The fourth chapter examines bambaragas ’ labour and mobility strategies to militarized environments. It begins with an exploration of the economics and poetics of selling sex across militarized lines and then investigates how both state and non-state armed group governance of women’s labour shifted during an episode of open conflict. It investigates mining environments as key sexual and complementary labour destinations and the impact on bambaragas of war- related transnational human rights interventions into mining economies.

The fifth chapter specifically explores bambaragas ’ crossing of militarized borders in armed conflict and their apprehension by armed groups, not as civilians or military adversaries but as what I call “sovereign women”/ “gendered traitors”. I conclude with an exploration of the ways in which bambaragas ’ mutual recognition and care enabled their militarized border- crossing and offered some protection from being violently targeted.

A Note on Names and Terms

All individuals’ names have been changed, as has the name of the town of Maneno.

The prefix “ ba ” indicates the plural form in Swahili. To simplify reading, I have chosen to employ the plural term “ bambaraga ” (literally “prostitutes”) as the singular and

“bambaragas ” as the plural.

I use the Swahili plural form to refer to most ethnic groups (i.e. Bashi instead of Shi,

Bambuti instead of Mbuti) unless the groups are commonly referred to in English in their singular form (i.e. Hutu, Tutsi instead of Bahutu and Batutsi).

I use the term “armed groups” to refer to all militarized groups including both rebels and the army. I use the term “rebel groups” or “non-state armed groups” to denote armed groups that are not part of the state military. I use the terms “soldiers” “ soldats ” or “armed actors” in line with local usage to refer to individuals affiliated with either the state military or non-state armed groups.

The term Bambuti, particularly among anthropologists, generally refers to a people whose traditional land is in the Ituri province in north eastern DR Congo, while the term Batwa is used to designate a people whose traditional land is farther south in North and South Kivu. All of the bambaragas who self-identified as Bambuti would be identified in most traditional anthropological or cultural classifications as Batwa not as Bambuti. However, “Batwa” commonly refer to themselves as “Bambuti” in the region, particularly since “Batwa” can have stigmatizing associations (Akilimali 2012; Lewis 2000). All the bambaragas I interviewed used

“Bambuti” as a self-identifying term that grouped all peoples racialized as “ pygmées ”. The only distinction among groups that women made was by indicating their region of provenance according to the ethnic customary authority that governed the territory i.e. “Bambuti-Hunde”

“Bambuti-Hutu”. I defer to their self-appellation and classification and use the terms Bambuti or

Bambuti (Batwa) to refer to them and Bambuti in the sense that they use it unless otherwise specified. I place a reminder of this in the notes of each chapter to avoid any future confusion.

Chapter Two War, Selling Sex and the Search for Freedom: A History in Bambaragas ’ Words

The Social Category of Bambaraga

“Niko bambaraga ” “I am a bambaraga ”. It was a simple declaration that opened up access to some social worlds and just as surely shut down others. All of the core group of women in my fieldwork used the sentence at some point. “ Bambaragas ” was who they were and how they saw themselves. “ Bambaragas” generally refers to cis-gender women 8 who are unmarried

(single or divorced), who almost always live alone or with other women and children, and who sell sexual services often along with other complementary care and food services for varying lengths of time. Bambaragas literally translates as “prostitutes” ( mbaraga is the singular form

“prostitute”). Its derivative “ kimbaraga ” translates as “prostitution” and is generally used to refer specifically to the sale of sexual services. For instance, the official large poster produced by the

UN and plastered at the entrance to the UN mission’s offices in Goma spelled out in thick letters that kimbaraga is prohibited (for UN staff under UN policy) accompanied by a cartoon illustration of an African woman in a form-fitting mini-skirt, make-up and high heels.

8 The category of bambaragas was broadly socially understood to apply to cis-gender women. I was able to interview four sex workers who identified as trans women or with non-binary gender identities in Bukavu. However, they did not identify as bambaragas . (This was possibly because those I encountered had a higher education and came from a wealthier class background than most women who were called bambaragas ). There were only cisgender women in Maneno and at the settlement in Mugunga which curtailed an exploration of possible transgender, non-binary or same-sex sex worker identities and experiences. Further work is needed to explore where the experiences of cisgender women, cisgender men, non-binary and transgender sex workers overlap and diverge in armed conflict. As Nyanzi writes of post-conflict settings: “Although inter-related, problems and issues pertaining to sex work are distinct from those of non-heteronormative sexualities and nonconforming gender identities” (2013, 466).

While there was a general expectation that heterosexual liaisons both inside and outside of marriage were accompanied by material or monetary compensation or “gifts” (in line with common expectations that love be materially expressed (Oldenburg 2015)), saliently, bambaraga negotiated payment for sexual services with male clients, often demanding payment (and often up front). Explicit negotiation did not preclude the occasional emergence of affective or long- term ties between bambaragas and clients. As well, bambaragas sometimes also had lovers who gave them gifts or money but from whom they did not demand payment. Of course, there were some grey areas between clients and lovers and clients/lovers who became “ fidélisés ” (“ faithful- ized ” was a term used by bambaragas to refer to when a man committed to financially support a woman with whom he had an intimate relationship and when a woman no longer demanded payment and committed to being monogamous). A similar spectrum as has been described by

Ngugi et al. (2012) and prior to her, by Tabet (1991). However, much as Tabet wrote of the femmes libres in Niger and their various relationships, for bambaragas “the more explicit the negotiation of money for service, the more stigma there is” (1991, 8). Indeed, bambaragas’ demand for payment (and thus control over their own money) and their setting of limits and terms to sexual engagements (and thus control over their own bodies) exemplified their pursuit of economic, social and sexual independence. It was this quest for gendered autonomy, not their provision of sexual and complementary services per se, that rendered them socially transgressive and the targets of social marginalization, repression and regulation. The term “ bambaraga ” unmistakably signaled women’s autonomy as well as their selling of sex. It was thus also a loaded term that could mark a woman. During my fieldwork, older women who sold sex were often visibly uncomfortable by its usage, preferring names that were less blunt or that had multiple conflated connotations such as femmes libres and ndumba (discussed below). This may

also have been in part because the term “ bambaragas ” was associated with poor women. The

few well-off single women who sold sex and lived alone that I encountered did not self-refer publicly as bambaragas . Instead, they opted for specifically classed terms such as “ digitales, ” a play on both such women’s access to digital technologies (an elite status marker) and that it

reputedly cost a fortune to touch them with even just one digit. (In contrast, in my core group,

Mpenda was the only sex worker who occassionally had a mobile phone) 9. Other better off sex workers preferred the old fashioned and slightly ambiguous “ femmes libres ” or the more western and cosmopolitan “ professionelles du sexe ” (“sex professsionals”) or “ travailleuses du sexe ”

(“sex workers”). The most common names that circulated for women who sold sex

(bambaragas , ndumbas , femmes libres ) could be affixed to women in stigmatizing or even violently repressive ways. However, these names were also the reclaimed terrain of long histories of subversion, redefinition, resistance and gendered alliance.

Femmes Libres and Ndumba The category of bambaragas both overlapped and contrasted with other gendered social categories with long histories. These included most saliently femmes libres and ndumbas (also

9 In some contexts, cell phone usage has been democractized to the point of no longer being an élite status-marker (Archambault 2017). In line with this trend, cell phone use was relatively common for sex workers in the large urban poor neighborhoods of Kadutu and Birere. However, the bambaragas in my core group could rarely access mobile phones and when they could, it was not often for long or with any guarantee of functionality. As discussed in Chapter 6, cell phone communication in rural areas was particularly inaccessible; not only was network coverage extremely partial, cell phone towers were frequently out of service due to repeated thefts of gas from their generators or due to being targeted in militarized attacks (for destruction or for gas). Charging cell phones presented its own significant challenge. Neither Maneno nor the settlement at Mugunga were on the electrical grid. Access to electricity for charging cell phones could be expensive and difficult to obtain outside of larger towns where such services were sold at small charging station huts. Finally, the cost of air time was often prohibitive for most poor women. The rapid spread of mobile phone use across Africa has given rise to new dynamics of participation in sexual economies (see for example Archambault 2017). Some of the bambaragas in my field site were acutely aware of new sexual labour modalities that cell phones introduced while nonetheless being excluded from them. In Maneno, Bintu lamented not having a cellphone with which to sell sex comparing herself to the poor ambulant peddlers known as “pita-pita ” (literally translated as “walk-walk”). “I don’t have the money for a cell phone where clients can reach me so I have to be pita-pita . I have to walk and walk all day to find clients. ‘ All ô!’ ‘ Allô !’ (‘Hello!’ ‘Hello!’). You see? I am pita-pita . I am allô-allô !”

40 spelled ndoumbas ). According to Hunt (1991), femmes libres (literally translated as “free women”) was a colonial taxonomy that was initially used to refer to women “freed” from polygamous marriages by missionary efforts. Hunt writes that “The term became synonymous for prostitute instantly, when these women could not so easily be controlled and were assumed to be publique ” (Hunt 1991, 490). Verhaegen has argued that femmes libres was simply a colonial classification for unmarried urban women (1981). The latter is consistent with the term’s usage across large swaths of western Africa, where it refers to unmarried women and as a synonym for

“prostitute” (Tabet 1991).

The adoption of the term in the first quarter of the 1900s overlapped with the influx of unmarried (or formerly married) women into colonial cities in Congo who supported themselves through petty trade and the selling of sexual services (Gondola 1997a). Having left the control or rural customary authority, these women were understood to be “ détribalisées ” (“detribalized”)

(Gondola, 1997a). Attempting to stem the gendered migratory tide, the colony imposed a tax on

“femmes vivant théoriquement seules ” (“women theoretically living alone”) in the city that was frequently referred to as the “ femmes libres ” tax and translated into Swahili as the “ kodi ya malaya ” (“prostitute tax”) (Hunt 1991; Lauro 2005). The tax accounted for 20 to 55% of all tax revenues in some cities (Lauro 2005). Both femmes vivant théoriquement seules and femmes libres then came to encompass and conflate various categories of women, from single women who sold sex, to single women who did not sell sex, to hidden polygamous wives (Lauro 2005).

In its present usage “ femmes libres ” referred principally to adult women who were single or divorced 10 . It retained an association with sex work that was principally classed. Poor femmes

10 Widows occupied a liminal space. They could at times be considered femmes libres particularly, if they were known to sell sex, but often were simply referred to as “ veuves ” (widows) and benefitted from greater social and kin acceptance and support.

41 libres were generally assumed to be selling sex, and thus, to either be “ bambaragas affichées ” or

“bambaragas cachées ” “ (“‘out’ bambaragas ” or “hidden bambaragas ”). Well-off femmes libres or femmes libres with other formal employment were not always assumed to be bambaragas.

However, the overlap between the two categories was significant enough that women selling sex often called their associations Associations de Femmes Libres (such as in Goma and in Masisi).

Those wishing to avoid the stigma that trailed “ bambaragas ” often used the term femme libres.

Much like femmes libres , ndumbas was a gendered category with many slippages and a long history. Lauro (2005) describes it as referring to unmarried women (possibly as far back as the 1800s), then later as a term for prostitutes. Gondola (1997b, 57) defines ndumbas as a category of unmarried “young women or better yet, ‘courtisans’” that came to prominence in

Congolese cities in the 1950s and played a central role in the popularization of music and innovations in fashion, most famously in Kinshasa. Some ndumbas eventually married, while others amassed small fortunes selling sex and went on to become the first women bar owners in

Kinshasa (Gondola 1997b). Bars sponsored ndumba “sociétés d’élégance” associations whose members paraded in bars in the newest collectively coordinated fashions (Gondola 1997b).

Ndumbas were often associated with glamour, female wealth and freedom and being the center of attention. These are the qualities conveyed by the lyrics from a popular song, Nfanda Ndumba cited in Gondola’s study of ndumba and popular music:

Maman, I want to become a ndumba

The ndumba earn money

The ndumba dress up

I am tired of all the arguments in this household.

(Bokelo 1968 cited in Gondola 1997b) 11

The “anciennes, ” or older women who sold sex around Maneno and Goma, generally eschewed the term bambaraga and referred to themselves as ndumbas. They often referred to the period between independence (1960) and the first war (pre-1996) as the time when they

“reigned”. It was a time that had come and gone when single women who sold sex had cultural influence and were even admired. Many of the ndumbas spoke glowingly of how they left home to find, follow and create “ l’ambiance ”. The “ ambiance ” (“ambiance”) referred to a party atmosphere that combined music, dance, fashion and sexual attraction and ndumbas were described as those who “ gèraient l’ambiance ” (“managed the ambiance”). The latter meant to keep the party going but could also be a euphemistic way to refer to ndumbas capitalizing on their sexual allure. Women would play on both these meanings in suggestive boasts that they had been very popular sex workers due to their skills at “ gérer l’ambiance ”. Central to their memories of this time was not only the significant money they earned but how they danced. A number of the older women requested I play music on my phone, watch them dance or take photos of them dancing. Outside of the Bambuti (Batwa) women, for whom dance played a different cultural and ceremonial role, for most married women in the region, dance was frequently limited to marriages. The ndumbas were the women who danced and danced to be watched. The woman I knew who called herself M’Pongo Love was not the famous Congolese

Samba singer of the Mobutu era who likewise had a leg paralyzed from polio. But it was what she asked me to call her. It was what adoring men had cried out, she recounted, when they saw her dance and desperately tried to approach her or buy her beer. Once in Bunyakiri, she had

11 Translated into English from the French translation of the Lingala in Gondola 1997b.

43 gotten up to dance to the wistful strains of Tala mwana mwasi oyo a mini lokola , a song about a man whose new wife only looks at other men. As she told the story, she stood up and began singing in a quiet raspy voice as her body swayed with precision: “ Oh God! The person I gave my heart to now rejects it. I will start to divide my love, to never give more than half, than half .”

When she was young, it was during that refrain that a colonel sitting with her client had called out: “Look how that girl dances like M’pongo Love. In fact, she is more M’pongo Love than

M’pongo Love!” Later that afternoon, I heard that M’pongo Love had bragged to everyone in town, and in particular to the two notables’ wives who ran the local anti-rape NGO, that I had come all the way from abroad to hear her story. The story of how she came to be called M’pongo

Love and how she danced. The locals may have forgotten the ndumbas . The anti-rape NGOs may have stolen the spotlight. But she was there to remind them that even in the countryside, there was a time when all eyes were on the ndumbas .

Indeed, despite how both sex work in general and the figure of the ndumba in particular are almost only ever associated with urban environments, a number of the “ anciennes ” (elder sex workers) I met didn’t leave their rural areas, or even their familial homes to become ndumbas.

Among the very oldest women (I estimate they were between 60 and 80-some years old) were those whose fathers had designated them as a “ ndumba ” and given them a small home on the familial parcel of land, to live in and in which they received clients. Often these women were daughters in patrilineal families with no sons, and their sons conceived in the kimbaraga would take their maternal grandfathers’ name and continue their family’s lineage on their land. What resources ndumba gained from sexual barter or selling were shared with the family. In turn, their mothers would take on substantial childcare responsibilities and resources from agriculture or other trade were shared with them. Some ndumbas took great pride in supporting their families

44 productively and reproductively in this arrangement. Indeed, their role was pivotal to familial identity, land tenure and fulfillment of a duty to ancestors. Furthermore, since they were not mobile, their powers of attraction had to be recognized to the extent that hunters, merchants and others would seek them out and bring them and their families objects of value.

Women who sold sex but lived under male paternal authority faced neither the same stigma 12 nor the regulatory schemes (or reputation for ambiance and adventure, for that matter) faced by autonomous women selling. Another category of women who remained with their families, at least for a time, were those who described becoming ndumbas or bambaragas when they were selected as young adolescents in the 1980s to become the rural danseuses for

Mobutu’s local political pageants. This was a role that came with the expectation of providing sexual services to any authorities who requested them. This led to very specific local rural repressive and regulatory schemes and a complex mix of victimization, power and stigma for the young women involved (Crago, forthcoming).

Nonetheless, most ndumbas I spoke to had left home, often to find some freedom from paternal control or that of a potential husband. A number settled into living in a small room in the QGs (Quartiers Généraux), neighborhoods of ngandas (bars/sex work venues) and women selling sex. Others began a mobile life of sexual labour moving frequently to new towns or mines, or from QG to QG. 13 It was very difficult for this mobile older generation of women selling sex to find a means of both keeping their children in their care and of continuing to work to support their families as unmarried women. As a result, it was very common among older

12 The social acceptability of these ndumba bares some similarities to the status of what Douglas described as “village-wives” who were supported by multiple partners (in contrast to “private (monogamous) wives” (1966)) in a socially accepted role in some communities in Congo. 13 Most QGs disappeared with gentrification and contests over land, though one still existed in Uvira that I visited at the time of my fieldwork.

45 women who sold sex to have permanently placed their children with members of their extended family while regularly remitting earnings to cover their care.

These realities factored into alternate representations of the ndumba as a pitiable figure whose independence, and thus freedom of movement and relationship, meant that she belonged nowhere and to nobody. These attributes are highlighted in the lyrics to another song cited by

Gondola:

A big drinker of beer : no pot, no plate, no bed to sleep in. If you see her in the

street, you think you are dealing with a respectable woman. Whereas, she is just a

nothing who sleeps all over. (Ngombe Baseko in Gondola 1997 b).

Though many continued to sell sex at a very advanced age, many of the women I encountered who identified as ndumbas saw themselves as remnants from another time. They had been replaced by the bambaragas who they viewed as crasser and less dignified than them.

This was not due to bambaragas ’ more explicit negotiation but due to perceptions that they had damaged the terms of trade. Bambaragas did not charge enough (“We didn’t use to open our pagnes (traditional wax cloth wrap skirts) for less than the zairois equivalent of USD $5!”) or didn’t charge up front. They accepted clients who were disrespectful and did not require that clients pleasure them, in fact they were somewhat reticent to even discuss pleasure: “Unlike today, we required the men not only to fill our pockets, but fill our pleasure too!” one older woman admonished. Furthermore, ndumbas complained, bambaragas were not meticulous about their appearance and their clothes were too revealing. Lastly, bambaragas had flooded the market. Prior to the war years, when ndumbas dominated the sex trade, there were reportedly

46 relatively far fewer women selling sex than when bambaragas rose to prominence (which may explain the more favourable terms of trade that ndumbas could uphold). Some women cited the war and the advent of massive camps of refugees and displaced people, and in particular, the fact that many young women were away from family and given their own housing in brindilles in the camps, as a turning point that led to so many bambaragas . On the other hand, some ndumbas admired the generation of bambaragas that followed them as more strategic, more knowledgeable, even perhaps, more powerful. Around Maneno, they pointed out how some bambaragas had managed to buy land or invest earnings in other businesses. Others commented with some wistfulness on how remarkable it was that many bambaragas had succeeded in keeping their children in their care which, for most ndumbas, had been impossible.

What linked ndumbas and bambaragas was that they generally saw themselves, and were seen as, the categorical opposite of married women 14 . However, there was an important contrast.

A number of ndumbas stayed under male familial authority for significant lengths of time or after years of independence, returned to live under their brothers’ authority and on their brothers’ land in their twilight years (with the expectation that they provide continued domestic care and agricultural work). In contrast, many bambaragas I came to know conceptualized the process of becoming and being a bambaraga as an explicit rejection of falling under the social, legal and intimate control of men and of their families of origin.

Bambuti (Batwa) women were perhaps unique in that they claimed that their female ancestors who lived autonomously and traded sex for goods or engaged in multiple relationships with men were also bambaragas and related their being bambaragas to being Bambuti. It was not uncommon for Bambuti women to have received intergenerational counsel from elder

14 Married women only ever referred to heterosexually married women. Same-sex marriage was neither legally nor socially recognized in my field sites.

47 bambaraga women about the dangers of marriage. One such example was a story and song that

Nyota said “the grandmothers” had taught them when she was a child. Nyota was a Bambuti

(Batwa) bambaraga at Mugunga , probably in her late 40s or 50s. She told the story and a group of eight Bambuti (Batwa) bambaraga friends and their children sang along. It went as follows:

A young woman in a village a long time ago refused to marry because she wished to “ vivre sa liberté” (literally “to live her freedom,” meaning to live freely). She rejected all suitors. One day a very fancy man came and when she rejected him too, her family threatened to disown her. Not wishing to lose her family, she finally accepted to marry him. The marriage went according to plan, and she left for his village and her new home accompanied by a female friend as was common in her village. However, when her new husband went out to work the fields, he transformed into a toad and lay about croaking and eating insects all day with other toads. One day, she went to bring him food and was shocked to see him in his toad form. He told her: “ I don’t eat food. I eat human flesh.” He and other toads ate her and her friends’ toes; the next day, they ate their hands. The girl’s friend said to her: “I will show you how we are going to escape.

We will kill the toads and return to the village and we will live our freedom. I have dawa

(magical powers) and I can slip into my special gourd and it will take us away. In that gourd my hands and feet will grow back.” They took the gourd to the river and slipped into it. The toads followed them into the river. To conjure the dawa and escape them, the women sang a song.

Nyota began to sing the song to the rapid rattle of a gourd shaker and the sound of halting breath and the women in the shack echoed her. Using her dawa , the girl’s friend raised the water until it drowned the toads. Once back at the village, the girl’s family told her she had gotten what she deserved for refusing marriage. Then, in Nyota’s words, “The girl said ‘Ok, no problem,’ she took some dawa her grandmother had left her and her toes and fingers grew back. She never got

48 married again. She stayed free. She started to do the work of a bambaraga until the end.” The story conveyed not only that marriage was exploitative and violent, but that sex work simply followed the decision to be free of marriage’s oppression. As well, the story construed women’s liberation as possible through gendered alliance (ancestrally and in the form of the chosen kin of close friendships). It was these ties that granted access to dawa , the magical powers to escape what harmed you, to heal, to make whole and to be free.

Formal marriage was relatively recent in some Bambuti (Batwa) communities around

Maneno and it was reportedly not particularly dominant in others. As such, refusing marriage for some Bambuti bambaragas could also be a claiming of ancestral gendered freedoms. In one discussion amongst a group of Bambuti bambaragas, Nyota explained :

Most Bambuti women don’t marry. (…) Married life is not easy. You need to be prepared

for the whip because he will whip you every day. You have to be ready to support the

man and everyone, get the food, the clothing. And the husband will do nothing. He

depends on you and yet there is a whip over you. He is the boss.

Sandrine interjected: “The husband will always find a way to shake the wife, beat the wife.”

Nyota continued: “Instead of that hell, we prefer to be alone and doing the kimbaraga (selling sex). (…)” Women in the room made sounds of agreement. “When I am sick, all the other bambaragas take care of me. They take care of me until I am better. In my freedom.”

Such representations of the constraints and violence within (heterosexual) marriage were anchored in reality. In the DR Congo, single women report experiencing far lower levels of physical violence (33.1%) than married (56.9%) or divorced women (66.8 %) and far lower

49 levels of sexual violence (12.4%) than married (30.6%) or divorced women (40.7%) (EDS-RDC

2014). Indeed, the most common perpetrators of violence against women in the DR Congo are women’s husbands (EDS-RDC 2014). Of married women, 48.3% report having experienced physical violence from their husbands and 27.5% have experienced sexual violence from their husbands (EDS-RDC 2014). Furthermore, under Congolese law, married women have “to obey” their husbands (article 444-448 Code de la Famille, République Démocratique du Congo).

Married women lose many legal rights bestowed to adults: they cannot travel, sign a contract, open a bank account or represent themselves in a judicial dispute without their husband’s permission (Malu Muswamba 2006; Breton-Le Goff 2013). Husbands can prohibit their wives from working or receive authorization under the law to seize all of a wife’s income (Biringanine

2006). Furthermore, the legal recognition of husbands’ authority over wives translates into authority over care of their children (Biringanine 2006). Customary law, under which many couples are married, is similarly systemically discriminatory and repressive to women in familial and marital affairs (Ordioni 2005). These legal norms reinforced intimate dynamics of control and subjugation within marriage. In some conservative contexts, married women reportedly rarely leave their houses, it is femmes libres who are able to occupy public space (Ordioni

2005) 15 .

In Maneno and Mugunga, becoming a bambaraga was primarily understood by bambaragas and the broader community to be a social decision that was the product of gendered social circumstances. However, becoming a bambaraga was also inextricably entangled with

15 My field work took place in an area where the dominant ethnic groups were all traditionally patrilineal. Women married (heterosexually) in matrilineal systems such as those that predominate in southern DR Congo have been found to experience less domestic violence, to have healthier children and to cooperate less with their husbands (Lowes 2017). Matrilineal systems are nonetheless patriarchal (Madungu Tumwaka 2005) and women living in them and married in them remain governed under the systemically sexist legal framework (Breton-Le Goff 2013).

50 economic realities. The decision to become a bambaraga occurred in a context in which poor women were assumed not to be able to earn a living independently of men otherwise. Economic pressures were often central factors in the early age at which women started to sell sex, how often they sold sex, their ability to stop selling sex or not, and the labour conditions and environments in which they sold sex. In turn, the economic gains from women’s sexual labour as bambaragas , in some instances, could alter bambaragas’ individual social circumstances and collective social positioning .

Political and Military Outlines of the Conflict The rise to prominence of the social category of bambaragas occurred in tandem with years of war. The following section outlines the recent history of armed conflict in DR Congo before turning to women’s histories of those wars in my two field sites. A few key historical factors have played a major role in the political tensions that have repeatedly erupted in violence in north eastern Congo. Firstly, indirect colonial rule politically institutionalized (and often fully invented) fixed ethnic identity as the organizing principle for access to land, thereby excluding anyone considered non-indigenous (Mamdani 1996, 2001). The Banyarwanda 16 were thus excluded from customary authority in both North and South Kivu, with the exception of one

“native authority” of their own in North Kivu (Mamdani 2001). Secondly, in the middle of the

20 th century, Belgian colonial authorities kickstarted a plantation economy by evicting local

16 “Banyarwanda” is a term that designates anyone from Rwanda, both Hutu and Tutsi alike, as part of one cultural or ethnic grouping, which was the dominant view in Congo pre-1994. Following the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Congolese Hutu and Tutsi began to divide themselves as Hutu and Tutsi (Mamdani 2001). However, it is notable that both powerful Congolese Hutus and Tutsi rallied behind the Rwandan-backed RCD against the génocidaires in the second Congo war (Stearns 2012a). “Hutu” and “Tutsi” are neither strictly speaking ethnic nor class designators, but have historically been permeable categories that were politicized and institutionalized as “ethnicities” that Mamdani asserts were racialized by the colonial government in Rwanda (2001). There are small communities of both Hutus and Tutsis who are indigenous to Congo and large groups of Tutsis in South Kivu who immigrated in the 1880s and then in the 1950s and 1970s and claim an indigenous identity (though it is not necessarily recognized).

Hunde from their land and bringing in hundreds of thousands of Banyarwanda from Rwanda as labourers, rendering the Hunde a minority. By the 1970s and 80s, a Banyarwandan elite had become powerful landholders who dominated political office through patronage ties (Mamdani

2001; Stearns 2011, 2012 b). Thirdly, in the early 1990s, in a desperate attempt to hold onto power, President Mobutu began a political strategy of inflaming animosity along the colonial fault lines of autochtones and immigrés (the latter being a shorthand for Banyarwanda) and passed laws that withdrew immigrés ’ right to vote or hold office and threatened to remove their land. This strategy has since been repeated by many other politicians (Mamdani 2001). As a result, ethnically aligned armed groups began to mobilize in the North, and class-based conflicts over land became defined through politicized ethnic identities (Mamdani 2001; Stearns 2012 b)17 .

In 1993, these conflicts turned violent in La guerre du Masisi (The Masisi War) (UN OHCHR

2010). For some, the Masisi war was the beginning of the conflict that has raged ever since in the Kivus.

Then, in 1994, over a million Rwandan Hutu génocidaires and civilians poured in to both

Kivus, adding to the violent tensions and complexity of the situation (Prunier 2008). In 1996,

Rwanda, with the support of five other countries and Congolese Tutsis, invaded the DRC and overthrew the government (Prunier 2008; Stearns 2011). Along the way, inter-ethnic fighting intensified. Adding to the death toll, Rwandan forces killed tens of thousands of Hutus, civilians and militants alike, in revenge killings (Joris 2002; Polman 1997; UNHCR 2010). Rwandan authorities were given direct access to power in the new Congolese government, and Rwandan and Ugandan forces remained in eastern Congo where they took control of mining and timber resources (UN 2002). The second Congo war (or “Africa’s World War”) began in 1998, a year

17 Groups that self-defined as indigenous became known as Mai-Mai armed groups. Mai-Mai translates to water- water in Swahili and is an allusion to the rites and objects believed to grant them protection.

52 after the first war ended, when the president ordered the Rwandans who brought him to power to leave the country. This war drew in 8 countries, over 20 armed groups and a UN peacekeeping operation (Stearns 2012 a). The Rwandans resisted leaving Congo for economic and security reasons and created, with Uganda, a proxy militia called the Rassemblement Congolais pour la

Démocratie (RCD). The RCD took control of a quarter of the country before the war reached a bloody stalemate. In the process, many civilians died and the Hutu armed groups, local rebel groups (some of which were supported by the government) and government forces specifically attacked Congolese Tutsi civilians perceived to be a “fifth column” for Rwanda (Stearns 2012 b).

A national peace deal was signed in 2002, and in 2003 the conflict largely ended in most parts of the Congo (Prunier 2008).

However, the conflict has never abated in the Kivu provinces. Although there are moments of relatively peaceful stalemates between armed groups, locally, violence has continued to erupt, at times rivaling levels that occurred in the area during the war (Stearns

2012 a). Nordstrom cites Angolans she met who called this paradox “not-war-not-peace,” what she describes as “A time when military actions occur that would be called “war” or “low- intensity-warfare,” but are not so-labeled because they are hidden by a peace process no one wants to admit is failing” (2004:167).

The 2002 Sun City Agreements peace deal reintegrated the RCD into the army and high- up political office (Prunier 2008). However, fearing that elections would reduce their territories, a number of high-placed former RCD generals defected and, with Rwanda’s support, created the

Congrès National de la Défense du Peuple (CNDP) in 2004 (Stearns 2012a). The CNDP 18 expanded militarily throughout Northern Kivu until a deal between the Rwandan and DR Congo

18 Many locals simply referred to the CNDP as the RCD or as the “Nkunda” in reference to the former RDC soldier who led the CNDP.

53 governments saw them reintegrated into the national army in 2009 (Stearns 2012 a). In 2012, under the name M23, many of the same protagonists from the RCD and CNDP mutinied, again with Rwandan support, and began again claiming territory in North Kivu (Stearns 2012 b). In

March 2013, the UN created a 3000 person intervention brigade tasked with intervening militarily against non-state armed groups in DR Congo (UN Resolution 2098 (2013), UN

Resolution 2147 (2014)). Increasing international pressure and, most decisively, the suspension of American military aid, led the Rwandan government to abruptly terminate their sponsorship of the M23 (Reid 2014). Shortly thereafter, the Congolese army ( Forces Armées de la République

Démocratique du Congo (FARDC)) aided by the UN brigade successfully routed the M23 in

November 2013 (MONUSCO 2013). In 2014, MONUSCO occupied 14 small areas in rebel controlled territory in North Kivu which were termed “ îlots de stabilité ” (“islands of stability”).

Critics charged that the region nonetheless remained overwhelmingly mired in “swamps of insecurity” (Vogel 2014, 1).

The most influential causes of the ongoing conflict in the Kivus are much debated. The theory that has gained the most attention internationally is that local mineral economies in which armed groups are involved act as a motor of war (Autesserre 2012). Another economic explanation centers on the role of transnational predatory economic alliances in fueling conflict, including through mass disenfranchisement (Kabamba 2012, Marriage 2018). Counter to this, some scholars have argued for the primacy of grievances and governance dynamics on a local scale, particularly relative to land, as the oft-overlooked spark of ongoing conflict (Autesserre

2010; Pottek, Kasisi and Hermann 2016). Others argue that the causes and influences are of a broader scale, including the significant role played by invading foreign countries and their proxy

54 groups (Stearns 2013 b), the integration of armed group leaders into political elites (Stearns

2014), and weak state power and failed military integration (Baaz and Verweijen 2013).

In 2014 and 2015, at least eight armed groups, not least of all the Rwandan Hutu Forces démocratiques pour la libération du Congo (FDLR), remained active and controlled swaths of territory in the Kivus (Reid 2014, HRW 2013). 19 Largely in response to attacks by the FDLRs, the Raia Mutomboki arose in South and North Kivu and fought bloody battles with both the

FDLR and the army (Stearns 2013a). Armed groups frequently fused, splintered, or reintegrated with the army only to reemerge a few years later in slightly modified form. In many ways, the

Kivus epitomize the type of conflict that many hold up as emblematic of contemporary war: without traditional circumscribed frontlines, but constituted by a moving patchwork of frontlines and multiple sites of confrontation that appear and disappear (Nordstrom 2007).

While mobility and migration have been a central part of life in the Kivus for centuries

(Jackson 2006), armed conflict introduced a new dynamic of mass migration 20 that has been one of the most salient features of the conflict in Eastern Congo ever since (HRW 2010; Lemarchand

2013; Prunier 2008; UNHCR 2010). By 2007, almost the entirety of the population of South and

North Kivu had been displaced at least once, with the mean being over three times (Vinck et al.

2008). Displacement is often a deliberate strategy of armed groups in the DRC, most famously used as a means to seize land and resources (Leaning 2011). However, combatants also attempt to force migrations or immobility in order to use populations as human shields or as forced labour, to retaliate against populations perceived to be sympathetic to enemies, to gain political

19 In the Kivu provinces, these include the FDLR Rwandan Hutu armed group and their splinter groups (FDLR- and FDLR- RUD SOKI); until this December, the M23, a Rwandan-backed primarily Tutsi and Banyamulenge armed group that mutinied from the army; and numerous local armed groups (Mai-Mai Hilaire URDC, MAC, MPA, Raia Mutomboki, Mai-Mai Sheka, Mai-Mai Kifuafua, LDF, FDC, UPCP/FPC). (IRIN 2014) 20 This is generally explained as “forced migration” (Lemarchand 2013), but I try here to be slightly more nuanced and attentive to both the dangerous constraints and social choices at work in wartime migration that a reductive forced/voluntary dichotomy does not account for (Lubkemann 2008).

55 legitimacy, and to avenge military losses (HRW 2010). As Kalyvas notes: “Civil war involves little fighting between combatants and much action in which civilians play a prominent role (…) the fight must be conducted through the people.” (2002: 6)

As of the latest figures, there are over a million people categorized as “internally displaced” in North Kivu and close to 600 000 in South Kivu. The DRC is also host to 141 000 refugees from Rwanda alone, and a further 450 000 refugees from DRC are in neighbouring countries (OCHA 2013). 21 Such massive population movements triggered by violence have often led to further violence, creating a “deadly and seemingly unstoppable engrenage ” (Lemarchand

2013: 423).

Maneno, Sud-Kivu

My first primary fieldwork site was a small town nestled into the edge of the forest that had been enclosed as the Kahuzi-Biega park at the limits of the “ territoire de Kabare ” (“Kabare district”). The town itself had not existed for all that long. In 1978, the Bashi chef du village

(“village chief”) founded Maneno 22 when he set up a makeshift “ nganda ” (“bar”) in the

“brousse ” (“bush”) to sell beer to tourists visiting the national park. His nganda attracted many

Bambuti (Batwa) who lived nearby and, with time, people from other villages along the park’s edges and even people from the larger town of Kavumu. In his telling, all were drawn in by the melodious sounds of his record player and in particular a song with a one-word refrain that he played again and again. The refrain soon became short-hand for the bar, and then, eventually the name of the town that grew up around it (that here, I call Maneno). It remained so, even after the nganda was no longer.

21 There were 1 032 958 IDPs in North Kivu and 591 627 in South-Kivu (OCHA 2013). 22 In order to protect the anonymity of the bambaragas there, I am not using the actual name of the town.

The town fell under the Bashi customary authority of the chefferie de Kabare, but from its very beginnings, it was a multi-ethnic town that included Bambuti, Barega, Batembo and

Bashi inhabitants. It was considered one of the “communautés riveraines ”23 (“shore-line communities”) because it sat along the “shores” of the forest. Nearby were a number of communautés riveraines that were Bambuti villages. Between the 1960s and 1980s, 6000

Bambuti (Batwa) were forcibly expelled from their forest villages within what is now the

Kahuzi-Biega park (Barume 2000). Forced removals of whole communities accelerated in 1970 with the founding of the park by Mobutu and its expansion in 1975. Many Bambuti tried to resettle along the edges of the park. Bambuti, whether living in ethnically homogenous or mixed communities, faced widespread discrimination and denigration of their physiognomy, their association with the forest and their perceived poverty, often in racialized terms (Lewis 2000).

Many of the communautés riveraines bore a stigma by association related to their poverty, closeness to the forest and to the Bambuti inhabitants of many of them. This intersected with the stigma faced by bambaragas in the figure of the “ bambaraga bushafu ” (the “dirty bambaraga ”).

When I first held meetings with bambaragas in a big brothel in the large relatively wealthy nearby town of Miti to discuss my research, with great poise, Bintu announced to a few mocking giggles: “I am Bintu. I am in the communautés riveraines . I live with the pygmées (“pygmies”).

They call us the ‘ bambaragas buchafu ’. You need to come and see how life is for us.”

Class, and its racialized shadows, intersected with armed conflict to create another dimension to the stigma that the women, and in particular the bambaragas , of Maneno bore.

When I asked Fino, a long-time local client what he knew about the “communautés riveraines”, he answered: “Oh, those are all the violées up there. They were all raped by the Interhamwe [the

23 In other contexts, the “ communautés riveraines ” can refer to Bambuti (Batwa) fishing communities. This is not the case here.

57 armed group of the Rwandan Hutu génocidaires] and then, the FDLR [its offshoot],” he said. The

Interhamwe and the FDLR were often locally referred to as bestial or demon-like and associated with particularly gruesome atrocities. Many felt their malign nature could be transmitted through bodily fluids, and thus “rape” and any resulting pregnancy rendered both woman and child damaged and damaging. In contrast, rape by other non-state armed groups was stigmatized, but far less so, women recounted. The rapes by non-militarized men in the community, extended family, or men in authority (such as priests or officials) were stigmatized the least: “It is maybe a week of discrimination for those,” Mathilde from a nearby town explained, “but the other kind of rape, it goes on and on…”. The widespread humanitarian narrative of rape as the most pressing violation in the conflict and a fate equivalent to - if not worse than - death (Charlotte and Pardy

2017) interacted with local stigma to construct presumed survivors of sexual violence by the

FDLR as permanently damaged.

The years of repeated armed attacks on Maneno by the FDLR, the targeting of bambaragas in particular for violence and enslavement 24 , bambaragas ’ reputed proximity to armed groups and poor bambaragas’ lack of protective social leverage had allowed the presumption of being raped by the FDLR and the concomitant stigma of being intimately tainted by the evil of the war to settle on them. If the stigma of FDLR rape was borne collectively by

24 The disproportionate targeting of bambaragas for violence arose repeatedly in my data in women’s claims but also in the history of who was targeted in Maneno. This is further corroborated by a study that found that single women were statistically more likely to have been abducted and enslaved by armed groups (and to have experienced related sexual violence) (Bartels et al. 2010). One of the most frequent and stigmatizing narratives of the harms of sexual violence is that after rape married women are “abandoned” or stigmatized by their husbands and families leading them to the horrible fate of becoming “prostitutes” (For examples see Gerding 2018 and informants in Kelly et al. 2017). There were only two bambaragas in Maneno who had been raped and enslaved when they were married and were subsequently left by their husbands. In both cases, the assailants were the FDLR. In one case, the husband’s departure was explained as relating to the stigma of having been raped specifically by the FDLR. In the other case, it was attributed both to the stigma of being raped and her husband’s loss of affection for her during the many years of separation due to her enslavement. The first woman insisted very strongly that even though she was married when she was attacked, bambaragas were far more targeted for violence and abduction than married women. She was later attacked by Mai-Mai soldiers behind the shack Isidor rented out to sex workers.

58 bambaragas in Maneno, it was partly because no one knew with certainty who had been raped by the FDLR. Many of the bambaragas that community members actually saw being abducted never returned to Maneno, and bambaragas were extremely protective of each other’s privacy in relation to such knowledge. The exception was one bambaraga , whom locals had witnessed being abducted, and her child, both of whom faced vicious taunting and exclusion. The gendered stigma of being raped in Eastern Congo is predominantly discussed in narratives of the Congo in relation to subsequent abandonment by husbands (see for example Gerding 2018). This narrative is both simplistic with regard to married women’s experiences, the community’s relationship to the armed group, and the role of class. It also does not account for bambaragas. 25

Bambaragas presumed to have been raped by the FDLR faced stigma that had significant consequences. Given the conception of the FDLR’s (in particular) evil as transmissible through bodily fluids, it was more difficult for bambaragas presumed to be raped by the FDLR to get clients or to command a decent price for sex. The stigmatizing of the bambaragas of Maneno as raped by the FDLR intersected with the stigma of their poor and racialized dirtiness ( bambaraga buchafu ) to further marginalize them socially and within local sexual economies. Bambaragas attempted to counter such dynamics using the lack of certainty about their status as “ violées ” to assert deniability (denials were also often true). By contrast, other women had been raped in other towns, and few people spoke openly of the rapes of married women or wealthier women.

As Fino explained, laughing at my naiveté: “No, no, never never. You can’t do that [talk about the rapes of married women]. What will their husbands do to you? Or the town officials!” A case in point were two married bourgeois woman in a nearby town who, as was common for women of their class background, co-presided over an NGO, the Association of Rape Survivors. “Rape”

25 The latter omission is perhaps due to the intersections of such narratives with western tropes around gendered sexual virtue in which women prostitutes as already cast as sexually damaged (see Pheterson 1996).

59 is the most vast and well-funded sector for NGOs in Eastern DR Congo. There are currently an estimated 300 to 400 NGOs and projects that claim to address sexual violence in the DR Congo

(Douma and Hillhorst 2012). Funds for the issue are so abundant that they are greater than the total budget for assistance for over 1.5 million displaced people in the Kivus and are commonly referred to in the region as la caisse d’entreprise (“the treasury department”) (Douma and

Hillhorst 2012 )26 . However, Fino recounted that no one could be caught speaking of whether the married women who ran the association had themselves ever been raped without fearing drastic social consequence. By contrast, all the bambaragas of Maneno were presumed to be “ les violées” .

Maneno and War: A History in Bambaragas’ Words While not all women had experienced violence and enslavement by the FDLR, it was true that the inhabitants of Maneno were no strangers to war. Many armed groups used the forest as a base, and the limits of the forest often became the border between fighting factions. The town had been in the front row, and at times, was the actual front-line, of many episodes of armed conflict for twenty years. At the beginning of the first Congo war in 1996, a coalition of the

Rwandan army and Congolese rebel groups attacked thousands of the Hutu refugees that had remained in camps in the eastern part of the country since 1994 (Prunier 2008, Polman 1997).

One such camp was very close to Maneno. The chef du village remembered Hutu groups

26 Unsurprisingly, this has created perverse incentives for NGOs to falsely claim to be serving femmes violées . Furthermore, it has led to a wide array of services including hospital medical care, housing, education, charitable donations and even local infrastructure projects reserved solely for “rape victims” creating pressure on poor women to advance, publicize or politicize claims of having been raped by armed groups (HSR 2012; Douma and Hillhorst 2012; Baaz and Stern 2013 b; Heaton 2013). Auteserre argues that the immense international concern with sexual violence and related aid flows have themselves altered the nature of the conflict by creating an incentive for armed groups to commit sexual violence in order to be prioritized for demobilization packages or to garner international attention (2010). At the least, accusations of rape have become a common strategy used by NGOs that are fronts for armed groups to discredit opposing parties (Moufflet 2008).

60 resisting near Maneno before retreating, attacking and pillaging the town as they fled into the forest. Fino recalled that the Padiri Mai-Mai set up a front at the edge of the forest a couple kilometres from Maneno to try and block the advancing allied Congolese rebels and Rwandan army. In his telling, back-and-forth fighting ensued that reached down into Maneno before the rebels and army pushed through. 27

During the second Congo war, the Rwandan army and their Banyamulenge (Tutsi)- dominated Congolese proxy militia, the RCD, occupied towns across the east of the country

(Stearns 2012b). However, the Padiri Mai-Mai had grown into the largest interwar Mai-Mai group (Vlassenroot 2001), occupied large swaths of the countryside in South Kivu (Morvan

2005), created state-like structures and enjoyed broad popularity (Vlassenroot, Mudinga and

Hoffman 2016). Fino explained that the dividing line locally was the forest: Maneno was nominally under RCD-control, but its inhabitants were often moving in and through the forest in rebel territory right next door to them. The Padiri Mai-Mai embraced a discourse of nationalism and protection against invasion by Tutsi enemies (Hoffman 2006). At the beginning of the second war, they received support from the government and allied themselves with the former

Hutu Rwandan soldiers and génocidaires operating first under the name ALIR, then as the FDLR to push back the (Banyamulenge-Tutsi) RCD (Stearns 2007).

Mpenda remembered first coming to Maneno around 1999 with a former client with whom she had informally become settled down for a few years and had children. She would vaguely describe him to me as “ un soldat ” ( literally “a soldier,” but a term also used for armed group members). He and many other soldats were stationed in Maneno as a rear base to combat a formerly allied rebel group, the Mudundu-40, that had arisen further south. This makes him

27 Mai-Mai Padiri opposition to the AFDL is supported by de Heredia 2017.

61 almost certainly a member of the RCD 28 . She recalled the town still being mostly bush and that she and other women accompanying the soldiers created an influx of bambaragas who began selling sex once their soldier clients or fiancés were dispatched to the front for a long period. A major conflict ensued when Maneno bambaragas showed up in the wealthier town of Miti looking for clients and were chased out by bambaragas there. In turn, bambaragas from Miti who came to Maneno to find clients among the nearby park rangers were forcibly expelled. This led Mpenda to unite the bambaragas of Maneno in an association and to serve as its leader in order to negotiate a truce with Victoria, the much revered property-owning older leader of the bambaragas’ association of Miti. In Mpenda’s telling, Victoria expressed shock at there being so many bambaragas in Maneno and questioned if they really were bambaragas , perhaps insinuating that they were just desperate wives. Mpenda said she could only speak for herself and pulled out her “ cartes ” from Burundi (literally “cards,” but used to refer to both formal and informal sex work licenses). She had carefully kept the kimbaraga license in her name that she had gotten during the years she worked in Burundi. That sealed the deal. The bambaragas would keep to their own territory and their associations would work together. The Miti bambaragas would also facilitate Maneno women’s access to HIV and STI testing.

The sex work income to be made in Maneno alone was not enough for most women, however. Some of the bambaragas , like Mpenda, also began trading sex with the (opposing)

Padiri Mai-Mais established not far away in the forest. There Mpenda crossed paths with other bambaragas such as Bahati and Mwezi. Mpenda, who was Barega, and Bahati, who was

Bambuti, formed the backbone of the sex workers’ association of Maneno that I encountered years later during my fieldwork. Along with Mwezi (Batembo), Angéline (Batembo, whose

28 During that period, the RCD fought many battles against the Mudundu-40 (Rights and Democracy 2011).

62 connections to Maneno began later, during the Second Congolese War), and Jeanne (Batembo, whose story figures in Chapter 6), made up the core group of women I spent time with in

Maneno.

Bahati had longstanding ties to the area and began selling sex to soldats in the 1970s, long before the war. In her youth, when she was “ AUTANT ” (literally “that much”, meaning

“THAT HOT”) when it came to selling sex. She had even netted a Tutsi captain in the FAZ

(Forces Armées Zairoises), the army under Mobutu, who provided her with welcome money.

Bahati’s father died when she was a young child. On her own, Bahati’s mother was unable to provide for her four children and, pained by their hunger, gave them to an aunt to raise. Bahati, the eldest, began selling sex as a young adolescent to feed herself, her siblings, and her aunt’s family. She was then able to buy her first pair of shoes and some clothes. However, once she bore a child “ dans le kimbaraga ” (conceived in prostitution) and was forced out of her relatives’ home, she sold sex for the purpose of feeding her child. She had the ambitious dream of becoming one of the first women in the area to own her own home, and she began selling sex, beer and snacks at a small shelter made of branches in the bush next to a rebel camp, where she eventually found a longer-term engagement with a rebel soldier.

Mwezi was both a bambaraga and a rebel soldier. She had grown up in a large poor family. Three of her brothers had died of hunger and illness when she was a child. She worked the fields tirelessly. As a girl without schooling, she feared that hunger, hard labour and subservience would always be her fate. She admired the PMF s, the women soldiers in Mobutu’s army: how they stood in their crisp uniforms, how they handled their weapons, the respect they commanded. “Everyone said: ‘ Voici des femmes’ ( ‘Here are some women!’) (…) They were respected by the chefs and by the community; they weren’t controlled like the other women.”

She and two friends would playact being soldiers until one day, one of her friends said she knew how to find the way to the rebel soldiers’ camp in the forest at Nyakakala29 . Mwezi scrounged corn and peanuts from part of the field she tended and secretly sold them to make money to leave. Then, without telling her parents, she and the two other girls, still so young that they

“didn’t yet have breasts,” walked three days through the forest and joined the rebels. Her salary as a rebel soldier was not enough to live on, however, and she began selling sex to other soldiers and allied rebels, angling for new clients ahead of pay day. Nonetheless, she always rigorously observed the strict requirements not to have sex in the week before she went to the front lines.

During the second war, clashes between Mai-Mais and the RCD left many dead in the areas around Maneno and Nyakakala (Rights and Democracy 2011). Batembo chiefs accused the

Mai-Mais and FDLR together of killing 1000 people in one year (Prunier 2008). In one day,

Mai-Mais killed 53 civilians in the district of Kabare (where Maneno is situated), leading a few days later to the execution of 150 suspected Mai-Mai (UNHCR 2010). Hundreds of women suspected of supporting the Mai-Mais were attacked and sometimes killed by the RCD (UNHCR

2010).

Though the war ended in 2003, fighting broke out again in 2004 when the RCD staged yet another rebellion and took the airport in South Kivu. From there, they moved in the direction of Maneno and other towns. Fino remembered that one section of the army retreated through the area attacking and pillaging as they went, and destroyed the only health centre in the area at the time, only to be followed by the RCD attacking and pillaging and taking Miti. 30 Fino said that fighting then ensued in Maneno between remnants of Mai-Mais trying to block RCD from entering the forest and the rear-base of the RCD in Miti. Another section of the army, composed

29 The rebel camp at Nyakakala and many of the details Mwezi described are corroborated by Morvan 2005. 30 The latter is corroborated by Barouski 2007.

64 of recently reintegrated ex-Mai-Mai was dispatched and fought the rebels in Miti, not far from

Maneno and many civilians were killed (Barouski 2007).

Many FDLR (Hutu) rebels were also stationed nearby in the forest during the war. Park authorities at the time estimated there were 15 000 Mai-Mais and FDLR in the park controlling an estimated 99% of its land (D’Souza 2003, 8). Sometime around 2001, Mwezi and Fino recalled the Mai-Mai Padiris splitting with the FDLR and the FDLR becoming far more economically and militarily isolated. This contributed to a series of regular and brutal attacks on the “ communautés riveraines ” that would continue for a decade. There was one shack known to be rented out to multiple bambaragas that sometimes functioned as brothel. It belonged to a married radio repair man named Isidor, known to be kind and shy. Mpenda recounted that in

2006, the FDLR targeted Isidor’s shack, abducting the women inside and taking them down to near l’INERA (the agricultural institute) where they were attacked and all but one was killed.

The surviving bambaraga was Mpenda’s friend and neighbour. She sold the land she bought in

Maneno next to Mpenda’s land and fled.

Meanwhile, in 2003, the commander of the Mai-Mai Padiris integrated the army with some of his subordinates (Kibasomba 2005). His soldiers, along with bambaragas who resided with the rebels, were offered the chance to join the army or to disarm and reintegrate. Bahati and

Mwezi chose to reintegrate and received a cooking pan and some clothes. Bahati and Mwezi then returned to Maneno. By 2005, a former member of the Mai-Mai Padiri who had integrated,

Lieutenant Colonel Egangela, nicknamed “Colonel 106,” defected from the army and set up a rebel base in the bush, west of Maneno (Lake 2017). Around this time (or possibly earlier, when he was part of the military), Mpenda and Bahati recalled him and his men attacking Maneno and

65 abducting young women to be enslaved, including an adolescent bambaraga named Angéline whom he forced to become his wife.

Angéline (of the core group also composed of Mpenda, Bahati, Mwezi and Jeanne) was descended from a prominent family in Bunyakiri. She lived there until her father and his first wife were killed by Rwandan-backed troops in the second war. Then, she recalled, she fled with an older brother to Mai-Mai-held territory until an aunt came and found her and brought her to

Maneno where her mother and younger brother had resettled. Angéline began selling “ le vietnam ” (used clothes usually sent from abroad) and sex between Maneno and the city of

Bukavu to support her younger brother and mother. She was in the now abandoned school house that abutted Bahati’s yard when she was abducted, Mpenda remembered.

Mpenda recalled that 106’s men then began targeting bambaragas in the town for abduction. This was possibly linked to the fact that the chef du village at the time (a different man from the founder and chef at the time of my research) kept a list of where all bambaragas in the town lived that he made available to 106 members seeking companionship – and possibly, one woman speculated, to divert attacks onto bambaragas . Rose did not know if bambaragas were targeted by 106, but she did know that she was violently attacked and injured by Mai-Mais right behind the shack that Isidor rented exclusively to sex workers. Colonel 106 became more broadly known for the reign of terror he imposed on neighbouring communities, where his men killed, attacked and enslaved young women (Lake 2017).

However, the relationship between the 106 Mai-Mai and Maneno was not without some complexity. Mwezi and many former rebels (re)-joined their ranks. Mpenda travelled to sell sex to them. Bahati found a regular client at the rebel camp who was a body guard of Colonel 106.

This drew Bahati closer into Angéline’s orbit and they became good friends. Angéline allowed

66 her to spend time and enjoy some of the privileges with her in the special zone reserved for higher-status wives. Marguerite, for her part, was saved by the 106 Mai-Mais. She was abducted by the FDLR in 2003 with six other bambaragas from right behind Isidor’s and enslaved for two years. However, in a conflict that pitted the FDLR against the Mai-Mai 106, their erstwhile allies, Angéline had recognized Marguerite from Maneno and used her power as the commander’s wife to ensure that Marguerite was rescued by the 106 Mai-Mais. When Colonel

106 went on a highly publicized, internationally-facilitated trial for war crimes during my fieldwork (Lake 2017), no one from Maneno testified against him, not even Angéline. Angéline remained loyal to 106 and claimed she remained in touch with him in prison via mobile phone

(many were dubious of this claim, not least of all because she did not own a mobile phone). She claimed too that he would soon escape prison – a believable possibility given the frequent jail- breaks of hundreds of inmates at a time (see Les Observateurs 2014). She attempted to convert her (previous and possibly present) connection to a high-ranked militarized man into recognition of her as a higher-status bambaraga in an attempt to attain a higher cadre of militarized clients and as a means to threaten clients or locals who disrespected her. As well, Mai-Mai movements were generally respected locally as indigenous resistance to imperial designs on the Congo by neighbouring countries (Vlassenroot, Mudinga and Hoffman 2016) and Angéline tried to carve out a reputation for herself as an important figure in the defense of the region. Angéline may also have distrusted the humanitarian apparatus. Mpenda recounted that during the years at the rebel camp UNICEF had removed some of her children and placed them with distant relatives of 106’s

67 in Kinshasa 31 . In any case, objectively, the humanitarian narrative of victimhood offered her little compared to that of a poweful man’s wife in terms of economic possibility or local social power.

The military arrested Colonel 106 in 2007, and Angéline and Mwezi returned to Maneno which they used as a base for long trips farther north to sell sex in mines under the control of

Mai-Mai Sheka and Mai-Mai Janvier, rebels reputed for their extreme violence (see Chapter 5).

Meanwhile, by 2008, yet another Mai-Mai group, composed of many former Mai-Mai Padiri, had sprung up in the area under the leadership of Colonel Merhegane (or Colonel Morgane)

(Kaganda 2009). Bahati and Mpenda recalled that following a series of bloody attacks on many communautés riveraines by the FDLR in the region, the Mai-Mais sent word they were coming down to attack. Mpenda remembered fleeing Maneno with others who feared the Mai-Mais’ descent. Bahati recalled that when the community fled following an FDLR attack, three bambaraga friends - Sifa, Feza, and Ishara - stayed behind at Isidor’s in Maneno, only to be killed by counter-attacking Mai-Mais. The Mai-Mais were met by the advancing army and a battle ensued in Maneno, according to the chef du village . Upon the community’s return, Bahati and other bambaragas found their friends dead. They called the women’s families in Miti,

Kavumu and Birava to come and claim their bodies. They then pooled their money to pay for their funerals with the families and the young women’s bodies were buried together in a banana field near Maneno. Bahati recalls:

The community [in Maneno] said: ‘Let those bambaragas from elsewhere die. It reduces

their numbers, since there are already a lot bambaragas here. We are forced to live with

31 I could not confirm this. However, the identification of children of the wives and commanders of armed groups as part of the target group for rehabilitation (“children associated with armed groups”) is consistent with UNICEF policies. (UNICEF 2011).

them but we don’t want to. Now, there will be fewer. If that happened, it was their fate,

they are paying [for being bambaragas ]”.

Not long after, a knocked-over candle burned down Isidor’s. He did not rebuild for some time and there was no longer a large collective home or work space for bambaragas in Maneno.

By 2009, Morgane Mai-Mai were demobilized (Radio Okapi 2009). Some of its adherents went on to join the re-emergent Raia Mutombokis armed group (de Heredia 2017).

Between 2009 and 2010, as the army sought to re-organize, the rate of FDLR attacks on communities in the area spiraled upwards (Vlassenroot, Mudinga and Hoffman 2016). One person’s personal archives documenting their involvement in the civil society association between 2009 and 2019 state that during that period there were multiple attacks affecting women, men, and children. A number of attacks were specifically made on bambaragas . A medical note about a child’s injuries, I was told, related to an incident in a nearby town when a sex worker was abducted. Her 12-year old child tried to stop the attackers and had her teeth broken. On June 20, 2011, in another nearby community, two women were attacked: one was abducted and one refused to obey the FDLR and was mutilated and killed. They were bambaragas , I was informed by the local involved previously in the civil society association.

Mpenda recounted that a town “next to Maneno” was attacked. That was how Mwezi had been able to rent a small piece of land to grow beans for very cheap: the owner had been too scared to return. The land, though technically in another town, was 20 feet away from the church in Maneno. The current head of the civil society association told me that although, in this period, the FDLR had attacked the area, he doubted that they had targeted bambaragas . He based this belief on an incident involving a married woman. She had been alone at home when the FDLR

69 attempted to abduct her. She had resisted telling them that she was married and to “Go find the bambaragas !” The armed men responded to her refusal by attacking her. The FDLR attacks also rose in the neighbouring district of Kalehe, where many bambaragas from Maneno went to work

(Vlassenroot, Muhinga and Hoffman 2016). It was in Kalehe at this time that Bahati was brutally attacked for a second time by the FDLR in the forest returning from the mines near Kalonge and that two of her bambaraga friends, Bora and Sara, were killed by the FDLR. At some point between 2008 and 2011, Bahati’s 20-year-old daughter and her father (a former Bambuti client) were also killed during an FLDR attack on a Bambuti village in the forest a few kilometres from

Maneno.

The unrelenting violence prompted the re-emergence and spread of yet another armed group nearby in Kalehe known as the Raia Mutomboki (Vlassenroot, Muhinga and Hoffman

2016). Mwezi joined its ranks and gave Mpenda and bambaragas in Maneno some of her dawa , or medico-magical powers. This took the form of small incisions which Mwezi made on their bodies to protect them from attack. The Raia Mutombokis fought the FDLR in a number of bloody battles and the FDLR sought revenge on civilians (Stearns 2013 a). By 2012, the Raia

Mutombokis had successfully pushed the FDLR out of parts of Kalehe (Vlassenroot, Muhinga and Hoffman 2016). The chef du village told me that during this time, the Raia Mutombokis’ territory stopped at the edge of the park just up the road from Maneno. Mpenda told me that they had set up a roadblock check-point that remained until sometime in 2014. During my fieldwork, many locals were nervous and feared bloodshed because they had heard that the Raia

Mutomboki had sent a letter to the park guards threatening to kill any Tutsi in their ranks. This was dangerous for Maneno too, as a frequent socializing space for park rangers in close proximity. The attack never occurred. The Raia Mutomboki meanwhile became involved in

70 battles with the FARDC nearby in Bunyakiri (Vlassenroot, Muhinga and Hoffman 2016) and bambaragas such as Jeanne (of the core group), arrived in Maneno fleeing those attacks through the forest. Tired of the violence, Mwezi left the Raia Mutomboki after the battles in Kalehe and returned to live with Angéline, and sometimes Mpenda, in Maneno. When she disappeared again and I inquired about her absence, Mpenda said discretely “You know, she is like most soldats , they never really leave being soldats , they just come and go.”

During my fieldwork, rumours circulated about possible renewed FDLR attacks. In

March 2015, a number of people saw what they perceived to be a group of “young men disguised as women” cross the town surreptitiously in the middle of the night. Dressing as women was a reportedly popular ruse used by armed men to move into new territory. Mpenda and her children, and, from her telling, pretty much everyone else ran and spent the night hiding in the fields. The army was dispatched to the area but could no longer find them. At another point, a neighbouring community threatened to create an armed group after soldiers from the army repeatedly robbed women returning from the market at gunpoint.

Taken together, the risks of violence and armed conflict for those living in Maneno were substantial; violence was devastating when it occurred. Nonetheless, most of the time life was peaceful. When I was there, men would sit on benches along the dirt road which ran through the town playing a game with wood trays and small glass pieces. Women moved slowly through the town in their bright pagnes , ferrying heavy loads from the fields or down to the nearest market.

Two groups of about a dozen women sat along both sides of the road at the entrance to town selling small tomato paste cans, peanuts and greens: bambaragas on one side, married women on the other. Songs often travelled through the air from a small wooden church and children always seemed to be milling around. Isidor could often be found leaning on the counter of his rebuilt

71 shack that now included a small store, relaying the news that he heard on one of the radios he was repairing. It was in tranquil periods that Maneno was a destination point both for those fleeing armed conflict throughout the forest and for those from other communautés riveraines destroyed in attacks.

Though Maneno was often referred to as a place with many bambaragas, the extent to which this was true relative to other towns is unclear. Certainly, there were benefits to living in

Maneno for bambaragas . The repeated attacks in the area had made Maneno relatively inexpensive due to the risks of living near the forest (and armed groups) and the stigma against communautés riveraines . Nearby park rangers could be a source of income for sex workers, as could occasional truckers or motorcyclists passing through: on pay day for rangers, most bambaragas were busy behind closed doors or looking sullenly disappointed if they weren’t. The nearby forest was a gateway to labour destinations such as armed camps or mines and the road which passed through Maneno led farther west and north into more dangerous and thus more lucrative territory. Though there was a social separation between married women and bambaragas , discrimination was not experienced as very pronounced at the time of my fieldwork. The founder of Maneno and once again chef du village not only set a tone of general acceptance of the bambaragas , arguing for their need to feed their children, but he was committed to enforcing the property rights of the few women, almost all bambaragas, who bought or inherited land. Mpenda and Bahati who headed up the sex worker association had a very good relationship with the chef . No doubt, bambaragas had been part of his nganda ’s success years ago, the nganda that started the town.

Mugunga, Nord-Kivu

My second primary fieldwork site was a settlement of Bambuti bambaragas in Mugunga.

Where Maneno was small, everything in Mugunga appeared vast in scale. Mugunga was, at least historically, part of the Virunga forest– in fact, for 13 km 2 it illegally encroached on the 8090 km 2 Virunga National Park that extended northwards (CPM UICN 2018). Towering across the skyline to the North was the Nyiragongo volcano. Just to the South was the edge of Lac Kivu, stretching 90 km down to the city of Bukavu and 50 km across to Rwanda. To the west were the steep hills of Masisi, a region of recurrent and brutal episodes of armed conflict. To the east, 15 kilometres away, was the center of the border city Goma. Though the distance to Goma was short, the road was poor and often inundated over large sections that locals called, with some pique, the “ lacs du gouverneur ” (“the governor’s lakes”). Goma had swelled dramatically in recent years with wave upon wave of internally displaced persons to reach a population of a million people (World Population Review 2019). The spiralling cost of land and living there, in part due to the massive influx of aid and humanitarian groups, had pushed many locals, the self- called Gomatriciennes , to its peripheries (Büscher and Vlassenroot 2010), which had now fused with Mugunga.

Mugunga was a dramatic landscape covered in swaths of volcanic rock left behind after the eruption of Nyiragongo in 2002. Tufts of grass grew among large jagged black boulders, but not much else. Small wooden huts and the occasional cement building appeared here and there not far from the road. In contrast, thousands upon thousands of small tents of white plastic sheeting baring the UN logo dominated the rocky landscape. Pitched on branches often only a couple feet high, they were part of the Internally Displaced Camps of Mugunga 1, Mugunga 2 and Mugunga 3 which together were home to 90 000 people (Kasereka 2013). Adjacent to one of

73 the camps, in a field of large rocks, were three large wooden sheds with earthen floors half of which were occupied by Bambuti bambaragas .

Lay-Out of the Bambuti Bambaragas’ Settlement

North to the Virunga Forest 60 feet to the west Married Married Mugunga IDP Bahunde Neema Bahunde Camp Families (“school”) Families (“school”) (“school”)

Camionne and

Jolie

Living area Married Bahunde Families 40 feet to the west

House, alcohol- brewing still and Bintu pig pen of Divine Camionne’s best friend Julienne, her mother and Nyota’s her aunt. (“office”) Married Bahunde

Families

Outhouse

Broken Outhouse Built as a Past International Aid Project

200 feet to the south Masisi Road Goma

South to Lac Kivu *Not to scale. All distances approximated

Mugunga and War: A History in Bambaragas’ Words

The camps in Mugunga were only the latest chapter of a recent history defined by wave upon wave of expulsion and flight. Life was still shaped in part by the first such wave in 1925, when the Belgian King decreed the enclosure of an immense swath of the forest to be a national park bearing his name and forcefully expelled the communities of Bambuti (Batwa) people living there (ACPROD-Batwa et al. 2013, Lewis 2000). Bambuti communities resettled on the forested outskirts of the park where, up until my fieldwork, they still struggled to retain access to the forest and its resources and to survive economically (ACPROD-Batwa et al. 2013, Lévesque

2012). Mugunga was still forested land, partially designated as park, when Camionne was born in the area to her mother, a Bambuti (Batwa) bambaraga, in the early 1980s. Camionne was part of a core of six Bambuti (Batwa) 32 bambaragas who occupied the settlement along with Nyota,

Divine, Bintu and Neema. Together they and their neighbours, the widowed Alphonsine and her bambaraga daughter Julienne, made up the core informants of my field site. Though Camionne was not the “leader” or the “mother” of the settlement bambaragas (that honour belonged to

Nyota), she was its most charismatic and gregarious presence.

When Camionne was a child, she lived in the forest with her mother who would trade sex and hand-woven mats of dried grasses in exchange for meat, clothes, and sometimes money.

Camionne’s father had been a client of her mother’s and though not in a relationship with her mother, he occasionally would come get Camionne and take her on long trips where he taught her to hunt and trap. When Camionne was 10, her mother fell ill and died suddenly. Camionne

32 The women identified as Bambuti. However, they used the designation of the dominant ethnic group where they lived to identify what Bambuti group they were from. Nyota’s family were Bambuti (Batwa) from the Ziralo forest under Batembo governance but she identified as BaHavu because after having been expelled from the area, she lived near the lake under Bahavu governance making her Bambuti (BaHavu). According to those appelations, the women were: Camionne (Bambuti-Bahunde) Nyota (Bambuti-BaHavu/BaTembo, Divine (Bambuti-Bahavu/BaHutu), Bintu (Bambuti BaHutu), and Neema (Bambuti-BaHunde)

76 and her brothers were sent to live with relatives but there was not enough food to feed them.

When she was a young adolescent, Camionne began leaving home to sell sex around the town of

Sake to support herself and her younger brothers. She heard from other bambaragas that there was good money to be made selling sex in the forest to miners and so she began going long distances through the forest. She often went as far as Kanyabayonga because the forest there still had big game and she could also hunt and trap. Not long after she began to make these trips, both the forest and Mugunga were thrown into the war.

The Virunga Forest has been at the “epicenter of ongoing conflict since 1993-4”

(Mardnen, Muhire and Verweijen 2015), and Mugunga, on its southern edge, has repeatedly alternated between being a point of refuge and a target. Months after the Rwandan genocide, in

July of 1994, the holdout Hutu génocidaires in the border town of Gisenyi fell to Rwandan

Patriotic Forces (RPF), and between 500 000 and 800 000 people, almost all Rwandan Hutus, fled across the border to the city of Goma, in eastern DR Congo, in the span of four days (Goma

Epidemiology Group 1995). There was no infrastructure prepared to accommodate the mass migration. Almost immediately, the malnourished and weak refugee population was hit with cholera and dysentery epidemics that killed an estimated 60 000 people in the first month (Goma

Epidemiology Group 1995). Victims of these epidemics often suffered and died openly in the streets (Waterman 2004). As Goma became overwhelmed and people tried to escape the epidemic, thousands fled west out of the city and set up makeshift shelters in Mugunga (Goma

Epidemiology Group 1995). Waterman writes that “Entire families, found dead under their makeshift tents in Mugunga camp, were unable to get to Lake Kivu [for water] 5 km away.”

(2004, 19). In humanitarian disasters, a crude mortality rate (CMR) of 1/10 000 a day is an emergency, 2 is an out-of-control disaster. Mugunga’s CMR in the first month was between 19

77 and 31.2. For unaccompanied children in the camps it was 20-120 and for unaccompanied infants it was 100-800 (Goma Epidemiology Group 1995).

The UNHCR soon formalized mass settlements around the park into refugee camps, including the Mugunga camp (Pearce 1994). The five camps around Goma grew to contain

850,000 people (Prunier 2008). Refugees tried to piece together a life, and the five camps soon included:

2,324 bars, 450 restaurants, 589 shops of various kinds, 62 hairdressers, 51 pharmacies,

30 tailors, 25 butchers, five iron smiths and mechanics, four photographic studios, three

cinemas, two hotels (including one two-storeys high, built entirely from scrap material),

and one slaughterhouse, which was regularly supplied with locally purchased or stolen

cattle (UNHCR field notes 1995 cited in Prunier 2008, 26).

In the process, Mugunga was entirely deforested and animal numbers dwindled in the park as camp occupants cut firewood and poached animals (Pearce 1994, Mushenzi 1997, Pourtier

1999).

Among those in the camps were 40 000 still-armed génocidaires who violently controlled camp occupants, appropriated aid and sought to launch armed incursions into Rwanda (Prunier

2008). In 1996, the first Congo war began when a Congolese rebel group, the AFDL, backed by the Rwandan army, attacked the refugee camps, including Mugunga, to drive the Hutu refugees back into Rwanda and to seize power in Democratic Republic of Congo. The AFDL killed hundreds of people at Mugunga, beginning with executions and shelling of the camp with heavy artillery (UNHCR 2010). Many refugees returned to Rwanda and others fled into the forest

(Prunier 2008). The day before Mugunga fell, Hutu génocidaires in the Mugunga camp killed

500 Hutu civilian refugees who were too weak or disaffected to flee (IRIN 1996 cited in Prunier

2008). The génocidaires fled into the forest, continuing to battle the advancing AFDL and the

Rwandan army who together killed thousands of civilians on the war path (UNHCR 2010).

The war emptied Mugunga of most of its occupants and left behind a scarred landscape where forest had once been two years earlier. Then, on January 17, 2002, amidst the second war, the Nyiragongo volcano erupted. One lava flow went in the direction of Rwanda, a second towards Mugunga and a third was moving towards Goma but stopped seven kilometres before reaching it (Kayser 2002). Then, as the sun was setting, a second eruption sent lava moving at rapid speed right across the middle of Goma, setting fires as it went (Kayser 2002). Between 300

000 and 500 000 people fled to Rwanda and 100 000 fled south to Bukavu or west to Mugunga, fearing not only the volcano but a possible massive explosion if the lava came into contact with gas from a fissure below the lake (CODHO 2007). Four point seven square kilometres of Goma’s downtown were buried in burning lava (USAID 2002), including its cathedral (CODHO 2007).

Camionne was hunting with her father in the forest when the volcano erupted. She remembered the sensation of unbearable heat that forced them to move quickly far away. For

Camionne, the volcano was just a continuation of the war. She swore that when she and her father looked up at Nyiragongo over-flowing, they saw a whole world in the lava that mirrored the one they lived in:

There were vehicles, soldiers firing, people taking transit like you, women with baskets

on their head, people farming, people pasturing their cows (…). [In the volcano, was a

world of] people who had died and gone to live [there] and it was them who destroyed so

much, it was them who came back…

The volcano covered parts of Mugunga, “paved its streets” locals joked (Lévesque 2012), but large sections were untouched. Three days later, as the Rwandan government tried to push the Congolese who had fled the eruption into refugee camps in Rwanda, most returned to DR

Congo and 15,000 people an hour were counted crossing over hot lava flows to get west of

Goma, to destinations like Mugunga (Kayser 2002). Alphonsine was a woman who had managed to get work with a humanitarian group assisting the displaced in Mugunga by pleading that by hiring her they would also be assisting a poor widow. She used her earnings to purchase a small plot of land adjacent to one of the informal displaced camps and to what would later become the settlement where she lived and brewed beer with her bambaraga daughter Julienne. Of those displaced by the volcano, some returned to Goma, but others, having lost their homes and unable either to afford to return or to seize the opportunity of cheap land, settled in Mugunga and along the corridor that connects to Goma. The volcano transformed Mugunga, in the words of one local organization, into “ le quartier le plus populaire et mouvementé (…) de la ville de Goma ” (“the most popular and eventful neighbourhood of the city of Goma”) (CODHO 2007,4). Two years later, a UNHCR update read:

Today, the camps and the killing fields have largely disappeared. Meadows of bright

green grass cover the unforgiving volcanic rock at Kibumba, north of Goma, where

several hundred thousand people squatted and died for two years, corpses sewn into

bamboo or cloth shrouds and left daily alongside the road for collection. At Mugunga

camp, thousands of displaced civilians whose homes were destroyed by the eruption of

nearby Mount Nyiragongo in January 2002, long after the refugees returned home, have

replaced those earlier squatters, but their huts of plastic sheeting, wooden bits, twigs and

breeze bloc are eerily reminiscent of that earlier, dark age. Signs now warn of the dangers

of crevices in the volcanic rock where noxious gases from nearby Lake Kivu seeped

through and killed unknown numbers of refugees. A network of yellow, orange and red

flags are hoisted to alert the population to the possible dangers of another volcanic blast.

Goma, once a glamorous retreat of the region’s wealthy and then the nerve center of a

multi-billion dollar humanitarian operation lies partially buried by the recent lava flows.

Two-storey buildings, now reduced to only one level, and rusting vehicle hulks lie

trapped forever in the hardened rock (Wilkinson 2004, 24).

Though the war had nominally ended in 2003, it was alive and well in the Kivus and continued to shape Mugunga. In 2004, the advance of the Rwandan-backed RCD into South Kivu displaced

100,000 to 150,000 people from Minova and other parts of Kalehe on the northern border of

South Kivu (Radio Okapi 2004, Tempête des Tropiques 2004 cited in MONUC 2009). It was most likely at this time that Divine and Nyota left Minova and fled North 33 .

Divine grew up next to the lake by Minova. Her mother was descended from Bambuti

(Batwa) fisher people and her father was a Bambuti (Batwa) hunter who originated from a Hutu- dominated forest area to the north. When she was 10 her father died of malaria and her mother of an unknown illness. Divine was taken in by a bambaraga aunt who was already caring for six

33 It is also possible that Divine left later, perhaps in 2007 when fighting between the RCD and the military on the outskirts of Minova created hundreds more displaced people, though most of those settled in the centre of Minova (Radio Okapi 2007, Radio Okapi 2008).

81 children and who saw her as nothing more than a workhorse. “Her daughters were like men, they did nothing (…) It was always me (…) I was the one sent to the lake, I was sent to get the wood,

I had to pound the manioc, I had to make flour, it was always: ‘It’s Divine who will do it.’”

Divine ran away repeatedly, but neighbours would always bring her back. She vowed to herself that one day she would leave for good and become a bambaraga . “I knew that because I was an orphan any man could make me suffer because he would know there was no one to help me.

When they said: ‘You will marry,’ I said ‘No’.” She waited for the chance to leave:

Then the war came. The Tutsis came and they were fighting the government soldiers. The

FARDC told us we would be exterminated. I hadn’t started the kimbaraga yet (selling

sex). I took advantage of the war to flee my aunt, to flee my family. (…) I walked all

night along the road on foot with all the other displaced people (…) I came to the

[informal displaced people’s] camps. I had my own burende (or “brindille”, small shelter

made of sticks and dried grasses).

Almost as soon as she arrived, Divine, who was then a young adolescent, searched for and found

Bambuti bambaragas in and around the camp.

Then, I started to go out with the other bambaragas to find clients, fiancés [fiancé

was used as a slang euphemism among Bambuti bambaragas for clients] at Amour

[a busy intersection in Mugunga]. When one of us [Bambuti bambaragas ] would

find food, we would eat together and each go back to our brindille . I consider that I

grew up in the camp. Not long after I arrived, I got pregnant. Both my children

were born in the camp.

As for Nyota, she was “ née dans le kimbaraga ” (literally “born in prostitution” meaning born to a client of her bambaraga mother). She had grown up in a mobile Bambuti community in the forests of Ziralo that accepted her and her bambaraga mother and who cared for her during her mother’s absences of a few days to find clients. Then, their Bambuti community was displaced from the forest and its members found themselves eking out a living on the edge of the lake near Sake. It was there that she was taken by authorities to become an official danseuse for

Mobutu, the authoritarian president. Her mother resisted and was imprisoned briefly. The young women danseuses between the ages of 12 and 20 were expected to dance in public political displays called animation publique . They were also expected to provide sexual services to any political authority who desired them, for which they received payment (See Crago, forthcoming).

Linked to this, danseuses were understood in many places to be bambaragas , though not every danseuse was targeted for sex. Nyota never spoke of authorities approaching her for sex, though she placed her time as a danseuse in the chronology of her becoming a bambaraga . Not long after, she moved with her family to Minova where she was abducted and raped for a week by a local man who sought to force her to be his wife.34 Nyota escaped with the clarity that she would become a bambaraga. “I had hated marriage for a long time and I really saw what it is.” Not long after she approached her older sister about learning how to trade sex and they departed into the forest: “I said: ‘I want to make my own life too. I want to know how you do it.’”.

34 Other women described similar practices linked to forced marriages. They often involved an older man perpetrator who could be assisted by young armed men for the abduction and who subsequent to sexual violence sent word to family members that they had raped their daughter but would compensate the family and marry her.

In the ensuing decade, Nyota travelled back and forth through the forests and across the region trading sex with soldats and other clients. Unable to simultaneously care for her children and travel across a militarized landscape for work, she placed them all with an older brother to be raised by his family and regularly sent them money. She was in Minova when war came and she fled north with a group of Bambuti people. First they settled on land in Kanyarucina but were evicted to an informal encampment of displaced people at Lac Vert a few kilometres to the South of the Mugunga camps.

It was there, around 2007, that a muzungu (white man) recruited her to inhabit a skills- training-center for Bambuti he was setting up. She and 24 other Bambuti “households” set up their brindilles in a field just to the south-east of one of the Mugunga camps where the center was to be built. As they waited for the center’s completion, Nyota continued travelling back and forth all over the Kivus. The other bambaragas held her spot while she was gone until they all began to leave. The Bambuti families left too. They sold their “spots” to Bahunde families.

Nyota was the only Bambuti and the only bambaraga left, and she decided she needed to assemble other Bambuti bambaragas to camp out with her on the land or she would be pushed out. She already knew many of them in the area. “I sent the word out to Divine in the camp and to Camionne. I said, ‘Send the word to Neema, wherever she is, to come down and come here.’”

Then, she met Bintu in a nganda in Sake and told her to come too. They all set up brindilles next to Nyota and took turns travelling and waiting. She had a group of Bambuti bambaragas again and they had their land.

While Nyota and Divine arrived in Mugunga fleeing from the south, Bintu and Neema came from the north. Bintu grew up in Masisi. Her Banyarwandan (the Rwandan language)- speaking Bambuti family fled the massacres in Mumbichi that killed many in their community

84 and settled in Mushake. She felt the weight of the events even as a child, internalizing and following her grandmother’s order that she needed to learn many languages so she wouldn’t be killed for being taken for a Rwandan. Her most immediate source of fear though was her parents.

They were violent and harsh and, as a young adolescent, life felt unlivable at home: “They hit me, they insulted me, they didn’t love me, I just could not.” Bintu wanted to escape but she did not want to marry. “I did not know how to do sex work. I had a cousin and she saw how I was suffering and she counseled me: Flee. She said: ‘I wander. I go places. You, they are beating you here. You mustn’t suffer like that.’ So, I left with her.”

They walked for two days, sleeping in the forest under their pagnes . When they arrived in

Numbi, they were abducted and raped by a man who wanted to force them into marriage. They escaped and found each other, and Bintu’s cousin taught her how to find other bambaragas in a new place who would shelter and care for them. Bintu’s family eventually sent her a message to return, but she could no longer live in her home community. Bambaragas were only allowed on the outskirts of town. “[My bambaraga cousin] was hated by the community. She was isolated away from other people like for [two kilometres]. She couldn’t drink water with anyone.”

Instead, Bintu kept on moving, first with her cousin and then on her own, and made her way to the town of Sake, right outside of Mugunga. There, Bintu remembered dancing one night in a nganda :

I find a girl Nyota, who tells me to go live with her. ‘Live with you where?’ She said she

had had other bambaragas with her who had left and to follow her to Mugunga. (…) I

told myself ‘ Bambaragas have no barriers’ and so we left and came here together.

Neema, on the other hand, had first heard of Nyota’s plans to have a home in Mugunga with other bambaragas , deep in the forest near Ziralo, in North Kivu. Like Nyota, Neema grew up in the forest, though Neema grew up near Bufumandu. Neema’s parents died when she was young and she was sent to live with a paternal aunt, who was a bambaraga, and her children . Her aunt beat her, worked her to the bone and often deprived her of food. Neema would escape into the forest for days at a time to calm and steady herself.

I wasn’t scared [to sleep alone in the forest as a child]. It was better than the

alternative. I didn’t think about a lot of things. I searched for berries. I covered

myself with big leaves. Sleep is like death, you forget, you just stay there.

After a few days, people would ask her aunt where she was and her aunt would go find her and punish her for having left.

I suffered so much my friends said: “You are suffering here. Let’s leave. You

need to get out of here. Can’t we go to Minova?” I said: “ I can’t. I don’t know

anyone there. If those who know me treat me like this, imagine those who don’t.

Finally, her bambaraga maternal grandmother, seeing her pain, came and took her home to her burende in the forest. Her grandmother was a gentle and kind woman. She nurtured and cared for her, taught her to hunt, tattooed her to enhance her beauty and gave her wise counsel.

Her grandfather (a former client of her grandmother’s) lived not far away and took her hunting

86 and taught her to weave baskets. Her grandmother, who had done well for herself trading sex for meat and clothes, then for money, advised her to become a bambaraga too:

She said: “Life in marriage is not a life. It is a life of suffering. You are better off in the

kimbaraga because we feel better, we are free. (…) Do as I did, and you will live well. I

was able to raise your mother and uncles because I was not married. If you marry, the

man will give you nothing, he will help you with nothing. You are there like his slave. He

exploits you, you have children. You alone have to figure out how to clothe them, feed

them, make them survive. You understand? When you are free [and you need money],

you find someone who is searching for your body and after that he leaves. If you live

with a man, are faithful to a man, you earn nothing.”

One day, Neema met Nyota’s niece who told her she could travel and find clients as she went and so Neema left to become a bambaraga . Her grandmother missed her and brought her home, but there was no longer enough at home to sustain them both, so Neema soon left again to sell sex. In the forests of Ziralo, she met Nyota and was awe-struck by how she moved all over the region selling sex. She asked Nyota to teach her how she could get to Mugunga and the big city. Nyota answered that she was going to have a place in Mugunga and that Neema should come one day. Neema made it to Ishasha where she became pregnant, then moved on to Minova where she gave birth. Eventually, she made it to Mugunga, where she got a brindille in a camp and began traveling back and forth from there. On three occasions, she walked three days through the forest on foot to return home and visit her grandmother. Then, war returned to the

87 area. If Bintu and Neema left Masisi when it was relatively calm, the conflict meant they could no longer return. “I can’t go back,” Neema explained.

There is too much illness there in the forest (…). There are too many atrocities committed

by armed groups and military in the forest. (…)There the work is kimbaraga (selling

sex), but it became only enough to buy soap or clothes, all [your earnings] go to basic

necessities. There was too much war and it wasn’t easy. With the war, there were no

longer any people. (…) Everyone started fleeing into the forests and the fields at 6 pm

(sun down), then you fall into the hands of rebels and then it isn’t work anymore and it

doesn’t pay, it is just rape.

The work of kimbaraga is work that we chose. And we as Bambuti [ bambaragas ], we

often live together in solidarity. But since the entrance of the war, it has become harder

and harder. It is good work, it allowed us to live. We bought a lot of things in our work as

bambaragas , but with pillage, the arsons, [we lost a lot]…and that is why we suffer a lot.

In the fall of 2007, thousands of people fled the fighting in Masisi in the north and arrived in Mugunga. Soon, the camps held 80 000 people (UNHCR 2007). The UNHCR began formalizing and running four camps for displaced people— Mugunga 1, Mugunga 2, Buhimba and Bulengu— and, in 2008, opened a fifth, Mugunga 3 (UNHCR 2008). In late 2007, the war caught up with Mugunga when the RCD attacked the military right outside the camps and in one night, 20 000 people fled from Mugunga (Radio Okapi 2007). Although most displaced people returned in the next days (UNHCR 2007), the muzungu (white man) who promised to build a

88 training facility and lodging never returned. His project manager pilfered most of the funds, but in 2008, he threw up three large wooden sheds on the property, with three rooms each. Nyota told the bambaragas she had assembled to pretend to be the original Bambuti bambaragas who had deserted the site. When the property manager finally summoned those who had been promised housing, the “new” Bambuti bambaragas assumed the names of the Bambuti bambaragas who had left and slowly began moving out of their brindilles and occupying five portions of the wooden sheds. When the nyumbakumi ’s (local neighbourhood authority) census records burned in a fire, they were able to discretely re-register as the occupants under their real names.

In the following years, the Bambuti bambaragas faced numerous eviction attempts and other threats to their shelter. First the project manager sought to take over the sheds as his own.

Nyota went to the forest and brought back dawa to protect their homes. A ritual was performed over each of the bambaragas ’ doorways and then an ash tattoo was drawn over their hearts in anticipation of a meeting with him. In Neema’s telling, the dawa in the heart tattoos had the power to open his heart to them. They went to meet with him and the matter was settled. Nyota expressly refused to say any of what was said in the meeting that led to the understanding – and no one else told me either - but she did note that “He still plans to try and throw us out one day but we have decided to never leave. The day he comes to try and throw us out, is the day he will encounter his certain death.”

In Nyota’s absence, military soldiers sought to take over their homes and were only dissuaded once the nyumbakumi weighed in after having been paid off by the women. Later, again while Nyota was away, the same nyumbakumi , threatened to expel the women due to alleged complaints of moral indecency and only let them stay after extorting $5 US from each of

89 them. Nyota was enraged to learn of the occurrence. Many people remembered her yelling at him and performing dawa to rid them of the threat he posed. Not long after, he was unseated as nyumbakumi and left the area. Then, in yet another trailblazing move, Alphonsine, the spry white-haired, beer-brewing, property-owning widow next door, whose bambaraga daughter was best friends with Camionne, became the nyumbakumi and the women’s rights to their homes were protected for the time being.

However, armed conflict always threatened to unsettle their ability to stay in the blink of an eye. In November 2012, the Rwandan-backed M23 rebels attacked Goma to the east of

Mugunga and the town of Sake to the west. Goma fell after 10 days of fighting and was briefly occupied. Sake was mostly abandoned (Gordst 2012; MSF 2013). Retreating government soldiers from Goma moved south and attacked 126 women in the town of Minova (UN 2012).

Thousands fled towards Mugunga from all directions (Gordst 2012; MSF 2013). However,

Julienne, the widow Alphonsine’s daughter, went in the opposite direction. She travelled to one of the M23 camps and began accumulating a nest egg by trading sex. This may ultimately have placed her in a safer situation. The following month the Mugunga 3 camp was attacked by armed men with machine guns and rocket throwers who pillaged, abducted young people and attacked women (Le Monde 2012). Many locals believed the assailants to be M23 (RFI 2012). In May of the following year, weeks before my fieldwork began, Mugunga was caught in heavy shelling between the military and the retreating M23 with shells landing directly in the camps (MSF

2013). The Bambuti bambaragas at the settlement all fled to other areas. Neema, fearing that retreating soldiers or rebels would could catch up to her on land, fled on a boat to the island of

Idjwi. Over the following weeks and months, the women returned and the M23 surrendered.

After M23’s retreat, Mugunga remained within a few hours walk of a Hutu FDLR rebel camp to

90 the north and an assortment of Hutu and Mai-Mai groups to the west in Masisi, each of which presented its own income opportunities and safety risks for those living in Mugunga.

During my fieldwork, there were some, albeit limited, opportunities for bambaragas to make money selling sex in Mugunga proper. There were small amounts of money to be made in the IDP camps, but doing so meant risking detention and physical torture at the hands of camp police, as well as eviction and removal from food aid for those who inhabited the camps. On the road to Goma from Mugunga was the rond-point Amour (“Love intersection”), a large road crossing that was home to a cluster of shops and ngandas . It was a bustling spot as large FUSO trucks stopped on their way to or from the city of Goma or the mountains of Masisi, loading passengers and goods high above their truck beds. Amour , as it was sometimes called in shorthand, was a popular work and transit destination for bambaragas . At night, the stretch of road leading to the camps became heavily policed by the military who frequently violently extorted or attacked any bambaragas on the road at night (York 2012). To the west was the town of Sake where many bambaragas worked in local ngandas but where competition for the right to work had resulted in groups of bambaragas fighting each other. Of course, there was also Goma itself, the bustling city that Mugunga had grown to be a part of.

The lives and labour of bambaragas in Maneno and Mugunga shaped and were shaped by the distinct histories of armed conflict in each place. Through their mobility though, the core group of women in this study were also continually tied to other places, other conflict events, and other bambaragas across the region.

Endnote Though the social categories of women selling sex changed over the years, the apprehension of women selling sex as a gendered social category remained preeminent. The

91 emergence of the bambaragas was intertwined, at least in eastern DR Congo, with two decades of armed conflict. As a result, bambaragas ’ social status and political regulation was intertwined with militarized logics, gendered threats and economic possibilities. If ndumba were

“detribalized”, bambaragas were “nobody’s women”. For bambaragas , this was a socially marginalized and often repressed position of ethnic and familial dislocation, yet one that opened up the possibilities of new gendered allegiances and reciprocal recognition as they sought to survive the violent and non-violent threats of war.

Chapter Three

Life and Non-Violent Death in Armed Conflict

If-she-lives: Maternal, Infant and Child Death in Armed Conflict I sat on Angéline’s bed as she packed on the dirt floor of her bedroom. The sound of raucous male laughter poured in from the front room, which functioned as a bar when she was in town. She was stacking crates and calculating how many cases of beer she could afford to bring to the mines in the disputed areas of Walikale or Bunyakiri and what her return on investment would be. She was trying to convince Rho to invest too. According to her, an acquaintance worked for the UN and would smuggle her and her beer most of the way. She would sell sex and sell the beer. She wasn’t worried about all the insécurité, the armed conflict that had been going on in recent weeks: it was stable this week , and prices would be good if fighting had slowed merchandise and other bambaragas headed there. Her 10-year-old daughter came in carrying her baby son, dropped off a plate of warm food, the meal for the day, and went out again. “When did you have Sylvie?” I asked, after her daughter left. “I was with the rebels.” Then, by way of explanation, she offered: “There was a lot of insécurité then.” She nodded in her daughter’s direction with a twinkle in her eye. “ Sylvie ,” she emphasized. I didn’t get it. Sylvie struck me as a particularly non-signifying name. Unlike the myriad women I’d met in eastern DR Congo whose names meant joy or luck or war or hatred, for me, it did little to conjure the circumstances of her child’s birth. If anything, it reminded me of my home and countless women I’d grown up with. “Sylvie?” I asked. “Sylvie,” she drew it out, “Si-elle-vit. When I first saw her I thought, si elle vit … If she lives…”

In Maneno and Mugunga, the fragility of life was ever present, woven through periods of terror and moments of joy. Though death always threatened to arrive, it was not, as one might

93 expect in a place of armed conflict, usually through violence. If our understandings of social life in armed conflict are often overdetermined by violence (Lubkemann 2008), so too, are our understandings of death in armed conflict. This chapter explores how infant, child and maternal mortality 35 , and the pressing need to elude their toll, were central in bambaragas ’ lives. Indeed, they were central to life in the area of armed conflict as a whole – and beyond it. Despite the impression given by sensational coverage of sexual violence or conflict minerals (Autesserre

2012), it was death from hunger and preventable or treatable illness that accounted for most death in the DR Congo throughout two wars and protracted intermittent conflict (Lacina and

Gleditsch 2005; IRC 2007). In eastern DR Congo, the combined effects of armed conflict and the privatization of health care fuelled non-violent death on a mass scale and placed a distinct and disproportionate death burden on bambaragas and their children. The threat of non-violent death, and individual and collective efforts to escape it, were central social realities of life in armed conflict in eastern DR Congo. Women expressed loss, fear and pain related to infant, child and maternal death most commonly through practices of child-naming and idioms such as the

“sangha ” and “ hôpitaux ”. While some women spoke openly about their experiences of such deaths, the ability to do so was circumscribed by social blame and opprobrium of bambaragas who lost children and the targeting of bambaragas for abortion-related repression.

One of the most exceptional aspects of the conflict in DR Congo is the magnitude of human loss that has occurred (Lemarchand 2013). An estimated 5.4 million people died of war- related causes in DR Congo between 1998 and 2007 (IRC 2007) 36 . In recent years, violent death

35 Maternal mortality rates refer to all deaths “while pregnant or within 42 days of termination of pregnancy, irrespective of the duration and site of the pregnancy, from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management but not from accidental or incidental causes” (WHO 2004). Infant mortality refers to death in the first year of life and child mortality generally refers to death under the age of five. 36 In what has now become a well-known public debate, these figures have been contested by the Human Security Institute claiming both that household surveying is a flawed methodology and that the pre-war baseline mortality estimates were too low (HSR 2009/2010). The authors of the IRC estimates acknowledge the limitations of war-time

94 has been a common feature of life in north-eastern DR Congo, for civilians and combatants alike.

A full 41% of households in the Kivu provinces had a member killed between 1993 and 2007

(Vinck et al. 2008). In 2009, of all deaths in the towns of Masisi and Kitchanga in North Kivu,

39.7% and 35.8% respectively were due to violence (Alberti et al. 2010). However, as has become the case in many recent conflicts, the vast majority of deaths in the eastern DR Congo are not directly attributable to violence (Lacina and Gleditsch 2005; IRC 2007) 37 . During the second Congo war only one sixth of deaths were violent and less than half of these were battle- related (145 000) (Lacina and Gleditsch 2005). Most deaths during the conflict years have been from preventable and treatable causes and have disproportionately affected women, infants and children (IRC 2007, ESH DRC 2014). At the height of the first war, UN agencies on the ground reported that the conflict was fueling maternal death on a large scale (Morris 2000). Conflict dynamics, particularly mass displacement, exacerbate a lack of access to medical care, clean water, food and rest which in turn contribute to otherwise preventable deaths from causes such as diarrhea, malnutrition, pneumonia, malaria (IRC 2007). Further, lack of access to medical care particularly impacts pregnancy-related deaths and deaths in early infancy (Lindskog 2016).

Such “indirect” deaths are generally highest in areas and periods marked by the most violence (HSR 2005). Indeed, higher infant mortality in DR Congo is statistically associated with living in provinces experiencing a high number of violent conflict events during the second

Congolese war (Lindskog 2016). The relationship between conflict and non-violent death is also complex. In the decade that followed the second Congolese war, though conflict persisted in both

mortality estimates, but stand by their methodology and figures. If they had used the higher base-line estimate, the total would have been 3.3 million deaths (IRC 2010). Prominent Congolese scholars and regional experts have examined the IRC methodology and judged that it was based on sound methodology (Stearns 2010) and offered the most reliable available estimates (Lemarchand 2013). Stearns noted that because household surveys avoided areas that were too dangerous for surveyors, estimates could also conceivably be too low (2010). 37 Between 1998 and 2001, the IRC surveys placed violent deaths at 8% of excess war-related deaths (IRC 2002).

South and North Kivu, rates of non-violent death are markedly different in each province.

Stunting caused by malnutrition (the latter being a major cause of and contributor to infant and child death (Mulongo 2017)) is extremely high in both North and South Kivu, an association attributed to conflict (Kismul et al. 2018). However, whereas South Kivu has the highest rates of infant death and under-five mortality across all provinces, North Kivu has the lowest rates infant death and under-five mortality in the country (though nonetheless extremely high) (ESD-RDC

2014). This finding may be due to the displacement of war-affected mothers in North Kivu to safer areas outside of the province, but most likely it is due to the very significant humanitarian investments in health in North Kivu (Kandala 2011; Lindskog 2016). Notably, hundreds of thousands of people in North Kivu live in Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps (OCHA

2013), and relocation to IDP camps has been found to improve access to health care and mitigate conflict effects on health due to UN and NGO provision of free health services (Chi et al. 2015)).

Kandala et al. write of the variability in rates of child mortality by province across the DR Congo that:

Although conflict undoubtedly confounds the observed mortality rates, (…) conflict

is not the only factor contributing to the excess mortality risks. Possible explanatory

factors are the lack of programmes to improve child health and survival and the

lack of access to adequate health services (2011).

As well, it is important to note that there can be wide variability within a province and amongst various populations in terms of conflict’s impact on health. Such divergent effects

96 have been found in conflict contexts where urban centers are more stable and rural zones are in greater tumult (Cutts et al. 1996), much like the Kivu provinces.

Research by Médecins Sans Frontières in DR Congo offers one explanation for how conflict and lack of access to health services due to privatization interact. Researchers examined differences in mortality rates due to illness and access to medical care within a number of localities differentially affected by conflict within the same province (communities outside of combat zones, communities close to troop fall back areas and communities at the front lines).

Mortality from illness was highest at the front lines, lower in fallback areas and lowest outside of combat zones. Access to health showed an inverse pattern: lowest at the front lines, higher in fallback areas and highest outside of combat zones. The overwhelming reason that people reported that they could not get medical treatment was an inability to pay the costs imposed for health services. The latter was directly related to the conflict. The communities closest to combat had been prey to the most looting and destruction. The resulting economic losses meant that members of those communities were less able to pay for medical care and died more (Herp et al.

2003).

Conflict has also been found to directly fuel maternal death through the destruction of health infrastructure and killings of health personnel (Chi et al. 2015), and it is hypothesized to fuel preventable and treatable deaths among women due to the effects of displacement, economic losses and sexual violence ( Plümper and Neumayer 2006). For bambaragas in Maneno and

Mugunga, armed conflict had fueled the risks of non-violent death in a number of overlapping ways: economic losses, displacement, immobilization and enslavement, familial separation, and destruction of health infrastructure/displacement of health personnel.

1. Economic Losses

Conflict created significant economic losses for many bambaragas that directly impeded their ability to pay for medical care and to feed themselves and their children. Most directly outbreaks of active combat compromised bambaragas’ ability to work. As well, conflict deaths sometimes included men that women were financially dependent on, leaving women suddenly with few resources for care. Furthermore, when bambaragas themselves were killed in conflict, it left their children extremely vulnerable as orphans.

Communities like both Maneno and Mugunga were targeted for looting by armed groups.

Furthermore, in the area around Maneno, bambaragas’ homes were often specifically and repeatedly targeted for looting by armed groups and by unidentified assailants (who may have been militarized men or simply men who were able to avail themselves of weapons that were rampant due to the conflict). Many women believed they were targeted because armed groups felt they were “safer” or “easier” to loot: they lived without men and were often away from home traveling for work. Marie-Ève’s home (in a community near Maneno) was, according to her, the only place in the area to have been looted three times by members of various armed groups. Bahati’s home in Maneno had also been looted repeatedly and was targeted again by unidentified assailants during the course of my fieldwork.

Lastly, bambaragas , due to their mobility, frequently passed through checkpoints where they were forced to pay extortion/taxation to armed groups and soldiers. As well, they often faced theft of all their earnings from armed groups or soldiers as they came and went from militarized areas.

2. Displacement and Gendered Exclusion in Displaced Persons Camps

Bambaragas, like the population in general, encountered shortages of water, food and access to medical services when fleeing conflict. However, bambaragas were particularly vulnerable in a number of ways. Firstly, a number of bambaragas reported being excluded from communal sharing or assistance when the community fled as a group because many community members believed their presence was bad luck, blamed them for attacks by an opposing side or feared that their presence attracted attacks (this was linked to beliefs about bambaragas

“bringing in the insécurité ”, as discussed in Chapter 6). Secondly, bambaragas were almost always single parents, often living away from extended family. Women recounted that their high child-to-adult caregiver ratio made it very hard for them to locate all their children in situations where they had to flee immediately. This could lead to short or long familial separations.

Thirdly, most displaced people found refuge in the homes of relatives or friends. However, bambaragas reported being frequently turned away or shut out with their children due to fears that they would seduce men in the household. Fourthly, bambaragas were often discriminatorily cut off from food aid, had their shelters burned and were expelled from both informal and formal settlements and camps for displaced people due to being bambaragas . Finally, in some IDP camps, bambaragas were routinely extorted, detained and tortured by camp police which compromised their health, wealth and ability to be present to care for their children. Thus, displacement was a direct risk in the short-term. In the long-term, it could also result in economic losses and render access to food and shelter precarious for bambaragas and their children.

3. Immobilization and Enslavement

Bambaragas were frequently targeted for abduction and enslavement by armed groups

(See Chapters 2 and 6). For women in such conditions, it was generally impossible to attain

99 medical services or to adequately feed and care for themselves or for children who were with them, let alone those who were not. Angéline and Jeanne both gave birth while living at different rebel camps (the 106 Mai-Mai and the FDLR respectively) after having been abducted. The alternative would have been to attempt an escape from their armed guards while in advanced pregnancy and hope that they wouldn’t be killed, that they could survive fleeing through the forest and that they could later find medical care with no money. That is what Marguerite had done. Marguerite described how while pregnant and enslaved at a FDLR rebel camp she had to survive by eating grasses for extended periods. At 8-months pregnant, weak and terrified, she fled for four days through the forest with a forest ranger who had been abducted and enslaved with her. As for Valentine, the thing that pained her most about her recollection of being enslaved for years by the FDLR was that it had stopped her from being able to send home her sex work earnings to support feeding and clothing her only child, Marie-Ève, who was in the care of relatives. Marie-Ève remembered experiencing constant and acute hunger during the period of her mother’s enslavement.

Whether they were voluntarily residing with an armed group, travelling or even living in their home communities, bambaragas could also be immobilized and unable to reach medical services for them or their children due to conflict events or tensions. Lastly, women in advanced pregnancy or with complicated pregnancies were sometimes physically unable to flee. A

Congolese NGO worker who had recently returned from a reconnaissance trip in a conflict area reported having recently encountered a bambaraga too pregnant to flee and an old single woman who stayed behind to help her deliver. The community was a ghost-town of empty homes, market-stalls and an empty health center, completely vacated except for the two women.

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4. Familial Separation

Conflict could lead to bambaragas being separated from their children when they were immobilized in a given area, enslaved or lost from each other in the course of fleeing. As well, the dangers of travelling to and working in many sex work destinations in militarized environments led many bambaragas to make the difficult choice of leaving their children behind in the care of others for what could be long periods. Children and infants separated from their sole parent were left in situations of great vulnerability. One 18-year-old young woman living near Maneno had been struggling to support herself and her severely malnourished younger siblings by selling sex since she was 11 and her bambaraga mother had left for work to a militarized area and never returned.

5. Destruction of Health/Infrastructure/ Displacement of Health Personnel

Bambaragas, much like the general population, were affected when local health facilities were looted or destroyed in the course of conflict (as happened to one the nearest health centres to Maneno in 2004) or when health personnel fled an area where bambaragas remained.

For bambaragas , armed conflict and the privatization of health care both contributed to generating non-violent death. Further, their interaction exacerbated the effects of each. Conflict- driven economic losses were a barrier to medical care because medical care was privatized and cost money. In turn, economic losses due to the costs of privatized medical care (see Chapter 4) rendered bambaragas vulnerable to the economic shocks of armed conflict and of displacement.

Further, the high costs of medical care contributed to many women’s decision to undertake labour and mobility strategies to militarized environments that resulted in family separation.

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These intersecting risks were also mitigated by other factors. Notably, militarized economies could present income opportunities for bambaragas when they involved large groups of unaccompanied men in a given setting. Additionally, humanitarian, health and development aid not only improved access to health care and food aid, in some cases, it provided more free services and support than were available in privatized health systems in peaceful areas.

Overall however, life in South and North Kivu was marked by the threat of extremely high infant, child and maternal death. The mortality rates in both provinces contributed to the DR

Congo having among the highest rates in the world (UN IGME 2015) and ranking fourth globally in absolute numbers for infant deaths in the first 28 days after birth (after the far more populous India, Pakistan and Nigeria) (UN IGME 2015). In South Kivu one in 11 babies died in infancy and one in seven children died before their fifth birthday. In North Kivu, one in 15 babies died in infancy and one in 24 children died before their fifth birthday. However, infant and child death rates were much higher in poor and rural communities (EDS-RDC 2014,

Kandala 2014), such as Maneno. Unfortunately, maternal death statistics are only available nationally. What is known is that across the DR Congo, pregnancy-related deaths (primarily related to delivery, unsafe and criminalized abortion and miscarriage 38 ) accounted for 35% of all deaths for women between 15 and 49 (EDS-RDC 2014). As of 2014, women had a one in 18 chance of dying of pregnancy-related causes during their procreative years (EDS-RDC 2014).

The DR Congo has one of the highest rates of maternal death in the world and, in absolute

38 The specific proportions of different pregnancy-related causes are hard to discern, particularly given the criminalization of abortion. However, in Central and Western Africa, 20 to 30% of deaths are attributed to unsafe abortion and the remainder relate primarily to delivery and to a lesser extent to miscarriage (Goyaux et al. 2001).

102 numbers, the third highest number of maternal deaths (after India and Nigeria) (UN IGME

2015). 39

Bambaragas and their children bore disproportionate and distinct death burdens. Within the large body of epidemiological research, small glimpses of the toll of maternal, infant and child mortality on single women surface continually. This is particularly relevant because the social categories of bambaragas and adult single women of reproductive age, particularly with children, are generally understood as very close to equivalent, and with all but a few exceptions bambaragas were understood to be single women. All of the bambaragas at my field sites were single. In DR Congo, single women have higher risks of still births (Engmann et al. 2009) or perinatal death 40 (Engmann et al. 2009). These are not slight differences. Odds for perinatal death triple if the mother is single. In comparison, they “only” doubled for mothers with absolutely no prenatal care (Engmann et al. 2009). In the DR Congo, single women’s children are more likely than other children to die in the first seven days of life, 41 (Engmann et al. 2009), in the first year of life (Lindskog 2016) 42 and before they reach the age of five (Kandala 2014) .

Further, early infant deaths have been found to be associated with maternal deaths (Kabali,

39 In 2015, the rate was (846 per 100 000 live births). There were 22 000 maternal deaths in DR Congo in 2015 (UN IGME 2015). However, even these rates may underestimate the extent of pregnancy-related death in the country. Høj et al. found that: “Where living conditions are harsh, pregnancy and delivery affect the health of the woman for more than 42 days [the period considered in maternal death statistics]. Extending the definition of maternal death to include all deaths within three months of delivery may increase current estimates of maternal mortality by 10-15% (2003, 995).” 40 Perinatal death is defined as stillbirths combined with deaths of infants in the first seven days of life in this study (Engmann et al. 2009). 41 Early neo-natal death is defined as death of an infant in the first seven days of life in this study (Engmann et al. 2009) 42 Neo-natal death is defined as death of an infant in the first 30 days of life. The Lindskog study uses the category of “single at first birth” to distinguish between widows, divorced women and otherwise single women (2016). Other studies have found that the children of widows, and of married women living alone, perhaps due to the kin support related to their socially acceptable path to parenthood do not face the same risks as single women (See Clark and Hamplová 2013).

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Gourbin, de Brouwere 2011). For bambaragas , Si-elle-vit, If-she-lives, was an unabating question.

Naming, Sangha and Hôpitaux : Idioms of Infant, Child and Maternal Death and Their Relation The contours of pain, loss, fear and rage linked to maternal, infant and child death emerged persistently in Maneno and Mugunga. At times, it was in intimately coded references, such as

Angéline’s naming of “Sylvie,” and at others, in collectively understood terms. Furaha prided herself on being acutely attuned to armed conflict dynamics and prepared for most contingencies.

She had not, however, anticipated that as she gave birth alone in the bananeraies , the banana fields around Maneno, her baby would emerge with the umbilical cord tied around its neck. Her first glance of her daughter was the sight of her suffocating. With all her strength, she reached forward, and managed to sever the cord and free the baby. “This one almost died,” she recounted a couple weeks later as she rocked the newborn child, “it’s what you call a case of Mukamba .”

Mukamba , a Barega name, was given to boys to mark difficult births where life was a surprising outcome for mother or child. Furaha’s child was a girl, so she was given the equivalent female moniker, Wabiwa . Mukamba and Wabiwa were generally harmless names, but could conjure some lingering stigma as they connoted not only that the child almost died, but as Rho put it,

“possibly that they almost killed their mothers”.

Degorge and Douville have argued that there has been an abrupt change in these naming practices in the DR Congo that has arisen to avoid the reminder of the ungrieved and disordered deaths during war (2012) 43 . Traditionally, in the DR Congo, naming has been to “singularize a

43 Of note, the two such deaths they describe are of infants and there is no indication that they are violence-related. One infant died in its sleep, the other’s death is unexplained. (Degorge and Douville 2012) .

104 child but also to recall a desire that preceded [her], a fragment of history, the memory of a loved one” (Degorge and Douville 2012, 243) 44 . The names “Sylvie” and “Wabiwa,” however, carried on old traditions of naming. They were new (“Sylvie”) and old (“Wabiwa”) ways of acknowledging death and encounters with its terrifying proximity to birthing, to infants and to children with each hailing of a loved one.

The most common shared idiom through which fear of maternal, infant and early childhood death was expressed among bambaragas in Maneno was that of the “ sangha ” or “ le sang croisé ”

(“crossed blood”). It existed alongside other shared idioms, such as deaths caused by “ mauvaises personnes/sorcellerie ” (“bad people/sorcery”) and deaths related to “hôpitaux ” (“hospitals”).

These were, to borrow from Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “the ‘social illness[es]’ that ha[d] gathered around the primary experience” of babies, children and pregnant women dying of non-violent death (1992, 195). Both sangha and hôpitaux advanced a link between infant, child and maternal death that is missing in the western biomedical idioms of “maternal mortality”, “infant mortality” and “child mortality” in which these deaths are categorically separated. Pregnancy, delivery, early infancy and young childhood were distinct but connected periods of pervasive and terrifying vulnerability to death. Conflict exacerbated this fragile grasp on life since it often abruptly compromised available resources and support.

This was true for Wabiwa. She had narrowly survived her own birth. At two weeks old, she was markedly very small. She could have easily fit within the white purse that Furaha dropped with dramatic effect onto the low table at Mpenda’s upon her arrival following a proclamatory cry of “Gucci!” 45 . The entrance sent the six bambaragas and one young girl on the wooden

44 Translation mine. The original text reads: “Il singularise l’enfant et renvoie en même temps à un désir qui lui précède, un fragment d’histoire, le souvenir d’un être cher” (Degorge and Douville 2012, 243). 45 Purses are a very important gendered class marker in eastern DR Congo. So much so, that they were included in one study on the DR Congo as a class indicator (Rodney and Mulligan 2014). However, it is precisely because they

105 couches into peals of laughter and startled a goat that had wandered in, driving it bleating into the bedroom area.

“She’ll grow and be big,” she said, perhaps detecting concern as women took turns holding

and peeking at the tiny swaddled infant, “Don’t you think?”

She turned to me. I smiled.

“Just wait until the end of the month, you will see this child grow. First, I need to start going

out…”

Furaha had lost income prior to delivery due to a nearby outbreak of fighting and had not been able to work since the birth. Her resulting severely rationed food intake and the baby’s small size made her question the adequacy of her milk. 46 When the baby cried and cried, she concluded her milk was not enough and would slip her baby a little beer, which she felt quelled her hunger.

Mpenda had yet to organize the traditional birth procession of bambaragas to Furaha’s.

Such events could help tide bambaragas over after a birth because they involved small gifts of food. However, the bambaragas of Maneno had just done a birth procession for another bambaraga . As well, Bahati’s home had just been looted again by armed men. No one had

connoted status that very poor bambaraga s strove to have one, since they helped to distance them from the “bambaraga buchafu ” (“ dirty/poor bambaragas ”) stigma and were a strong investment in future income. 46 Even moderately malnourished women can breastfeed sufficiently enough for a baby. However, if women have vitamin deficiencies it can lead to vitamin deficiencies in solely breast-fed children rendering them more vulnerable to illness. A study found that women in DRC who had experienced weight loss or emotional distress had problems breastfeeding, principally because of perceived milk insufficiency (Emerson 2017).

106 enough money to pool again for milk or sugar and a small blanket. “Once we have a little more time we’ll go,” Mpenda offered. “So the women can find enough, enough to have a little left over. Then, we can put it together.”

Furaha’s hunger, meanwhile, had reached a tipping point. In order to be able to function, stay healthy and care for her baby, as well as feed her other child, she needed to work. She described her plan. She would walk through neighbouring communities in search of clients. If she didn’t come home, the neighbour would take care of the baby. While Furaha was out, the neighbour would wash her, and rub her all over with palm oil and cover her with a blanket. If the baby cried out for milk, the neighbor would take a little warm water gotten from a nearby water source, add some sugar and give it to the child. The problem in her view would be finding clients. Furaha pressed Bahati to “send her a man”. Bahati responded with great concern: “You are in the midst of giving birth, you cannot actually receive men.” If she did, sangha would kill her child.

Sangha was widely understood to be a ubiquitous affliction that led to miscarriages and sudden deaths of women who were pregnant or recently delivered, their infants or young toddlers. Bambaragas were particularly and specifically affected by it. The illness had a variety of causes. These included when:

• A married woman, while giving birth or in the weeks after, was seen by a bambaraga

who had had sex with her husband.

• Pregnant or nursing married women had sex with husbands who they knew had had sex

with bambaragas .

• A wife was seen by her husband within a week of giving birth.

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• A bambaraga had sex with a client when she was pregnant or when she was breast

feeding.

In some conversations, Rho also included: A bambaraga who, while pregnant, nursing or after delivery, was looked in the eye by a client’s wife. However, the latter was not a source of sangha that sex workers in Maneno identified or seemed to be concerned by. The sangha was believed to operate through two mechanisms. The first was through the lethal “crossing” of bodily fluids through sex, leading to the fatal exposure of an infant or nursing child. This could occur through a client’s sperm “crossing” into a bambaraga mother’s body and into her breast milk, thereby infecting her child. Alternately, it could occur through a bambaraga ’s vaginal fluids crossing into a man’s body and then, via his sperm, into his wife’s blood or breastmilk, thus imperilling a fetus or nursing child. The second form of transmission was through gendered spatial transgressions, such as when bambaragas and wives or wives and husbands were in each other’s presence. The sangha was not culturally specific, though it was far more prevalent in

Maneno (in South Kivu, where rates of infant and child mortality were extremely high) than in

Mugunga (in North Kivu, where they were considerably lower).

Sangha (or “ sanga ” or “ hanga ”) has previously been described in central and eastern DR

Congo, albeit with slightly different etiologies (Douglas 1963; Hunt 1999b). Hunt described the causes of “sanga ” among the BaMbole and BaLokele in Northern Congo as follows: without proper remedies, infants would die in childbirth if either their (married) father or mother had been adulterous. If ritual precautions were not taken, adultery caused infants to fatally encounter the “water” or “smell” of a man or woman who was not their mother or father. As well, women’s adultery in particular could kill a child that she breastfed, impede a child’s ability to walk, or

108 harm her husband (Hunt 1999b). Douglas describes hanga in the 1960s among the polygynous

Lele in the Kasai province of DR Congo, in which a married woman would die in childbirth or her infant would die if she or her co-wives had sex with a man who was not their husband.

Similarly, when a wife was pregnant or had a young child, if her husband had sex with a woman he was not married to, the latter would “kill” his pregnant wife in childbirth or his infant (1963,

135). Women who were not married in polygynous marriages but had multiple sexual relationships with men were termed “village-wives”. “Village-wives” would die in childbirth if they began a sexual relationship with a new man. However, they did not risk being killed by the wives of the married men they had longstanding sexual relationships with. Hanga also operated through gendered spatial transgressions: it killed pregnant women, women with infants and their young children if another woman had sexual intercourse in their hut (Douglas 1963).

Existing scholarly work on the illness has conceptualized the phenomenon as a “sex pollution” (Douglas 1963, 1966; Hunt 1999b, 470). For Douglas, such “pollutions” are both symbolically expressive of social structures and instrumental in reinforcing social norms

(Douglas 1966). In the case of the hanga , she wrote: “anxieties about adultery correspond to the fact that a man’s status was severely attainted by infringement of his sexual rights” over women

(1963, 123). Similarly, thirty years later, in a different region, Hunt refers to sanga as an

“adultery affliction” (Hunt 1999b, 470).

Yet, there also appears to be a correspondence between sangha (and its related idioms) as an illness that causes maternal, infant and young child death and the pervasive recurrent experience of such deaths where sangha appears. After all, such afflictions might not be threatening if their outcomes were rare. Douglas wrote that infant mortality was high in the Kasai and such deaths were “frequently attributed to [ hanga ],” resulting in recrimination amongst women (1963, 122).

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Douglas recounted that one woman attacked her mother with a hatchet for imperilling her baby by having sex in her hut (a cause of hanga ). The infant died not long after and the mother was blamed. Douglas wrote that in the region “no one would blame” a woman “for wounding [such] an intruder with an axe” (1963, 123). The social acceptability of axe attacks would appear to indicate a common fear of the likelihood, if not certainty, of infant deaths.

For women in Maneno , sangha expressed an agonizingly persistent fear of prevalent maternal, infant and child death and women’s distress at a lack of control over circumstances that affected their ability to get care, and to provide for and take care of their infants and young children during a key period of life-threatening bodily risk and economic strain. Sangha , however, both drew attention to a crisis and obscured its sources by socially and politically attributing the dangers of infant, child and maternal death most frequently to bambaragas . In so doing, it heightened the scission between the gendered social spheres of “married women” and bambaragas and rendered the stakes of this separation lethal during the period before and after births.

As it was, births were moments that often crystallized social distinctions between married women and bambaragas . Giving birth without a man was often what turned “ bambaragas soupçonnées ” (“suspected bambaragas ”) or “ bambaragas cachées ” (“hidden bambaragas ”) into

“bambaragas confirmées ” (“confirmed bambaragas ”) or even, unwittingly, into “ bambaragas affichées ” (“ ‘out’ bambaragas ” ). Many women described being ambivalently visible as bambaragas prior to having children, particularly when they were young or still living under a male relative’s roof. In these cases, they inhabited a stigmatized yet liminal gender identity, one in which social redemption was often possible if they were discrete and eventually settled down with a man. Becoming pregnant “ dans le kimbaraga” (through prostitution), particularly if no

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man was claimed or accepted the claim of fatherhood, could cement women’s social identities as

bambaragas , make them publicly known and difficult to deny. Similarly, single women who already had children could sometimes dissimulate to a degree that they were bambaragas in a new environment by remaining vague about their situation or letting people assume they were widows. They were treated as suspect, however, when they became pregnant while not living with a man; their identities were socially and publicly confirmed. 47

In Maneno and Mugunga, becoming a mother was frought with health, social and economic

risks that were compounded by the fact that women had very little control over reproduction. 48

These risks were markedly different for wives and bambaragas, yet perilous for both. For married women, pregnancy and the arrival of a child (or more children) increased their vulnerability to their husbands’ personal and economic choices. Only 10.7 % of married women reported having primary decision making power over their own health care in DR Congo, and only 8.4% of married men reported that their spouses had this power (EDS-RDC 2014). In

47 This dynamic was most apparent in churches and domestic arrangements with families of origin. Churches were not only important social institutions, they often provided a subsistence safety net in times of trouble. Rho, who was a beautiful singer, was known to be unmarried and living alone, but was allowed to sing in a nearby Evangelical congregation choir in Bukavu until she became pregnant for the first time and then was forbidden to return to the church. The priest apologized but said the congregation felt the pregnancy went just “too far”. Jeanne was also finally excommunicated from the Brahamist congregation near Maneno for being a bambaraga when she became visibly pregnant. (It was her fifth pregnancy and the third different church she was publicly ejected from.) The Catholic church was the only church bambaragas knew of that didn’t periodically expel bambaragas , even when pregnant. However, women reported that known bambaragas were forbidden from taking communion and would be hit with a stick if they tried. Pregnancies could also alter familial and domestic relationships. In the area around Maneno, many young women recounted to me that their fathers (or other male relatives) tolerated their discretely selling sex while living under the family roof until they were pregnant, at which point they were ejected from the family home (see also Wandimoyi 2012). At this point, as young women living without men, they became even more visible as bambaragas . A number of women explained that pregnancy was a visible stigma that would make their kimbaraga undeniable to the community and thus intolerable to their parents (or the relatives caring for them). Frequently, young women said their fathers (or uncles) rejected supporting one more dependent (although, as many women remarked, it was more often young bambaragas who supported their families not the reverse – in fact, it was often the reason why they started the kimbaraga at a young age). 48 Thirty percent of married women and 45% of unmarried women have an unmet need for contraception (EDS- RDC 2014). A study in North Kivu found that only one in five health centers could functionally provide contraception (Casey et al. 2015). Abortion is illegal and highly dangerous and women face high rates of physical and sexual violence (EDS-RDC 2014).

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Eastern DR Congo, it was generally husbands who decided whether or household funds would pay for their pregnant wives to get emergency medical care - if they could (Deboutte et al. 2016).

Furthermore, married women often had little say over channelling resources towards their children’s health (Clark and Hamplová 2013). Mothers’ lack of decision-making power is consistently associated with higher rates of child death (Rutherford, Mulholland and Hill 2010).

Poor wives’ concerns about bambaragas were rarely ever about husbands leaving, and were most often articulated around a fear that they would divert their husbands’ money, time, attention and affection away from the family home, leaving them in life-threatening poverty and unable to absorb the shocks of conflict.

For most bambaragas , the lack of means to pay for medical care made delivering a baby particularly risky for both mother and child. Births also ushered in a period of not only social marginalization, but also acute economic precarity as the primary care-givers and financial supporters of one or more children. They could represent a series of impossible choices. If women could not sell sex for a period of time after delivery, they could continue complementary forms of labour, but many of these were hard labour: working the fields, ferrying heavy loads of wood or charcoal up and down mountainous roads. They paid a bit more than petty trade, but were gruelling and could strain women’s health and depleted reserves. As a result, many women resorted to selling small amounts of produce by the side of the road. This allowed them to continue breastfeeding by tying their babies to their backs throughout the day (or on their fronts if they were carrying loads of wood), but provided meagre earnings. The two sex workers in

Maneno (Bahati and Angéline) who had a space where they could make and sell alcohol were at an advantage. They could make a better income, and, when they were physically able, could usually turn some alcohol customers into additional sex work earnings.

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Poor wives also worked in hard labour and petty trade, but they were generally supported with food, money and care by a husband or other adults in a family home (in laws, or sisters-in law). As well, men were far more likely to have access to land and property which allowed for an independent food supply for their families and removed the expense of rent. Indeed, high adult- to-child household ratios and rights over land have been found to be protective against chronic forms of child undernutrition in South Kivu (Kismul et al. 2018). Most bambaragas in Maneno, in contrast, had sole responsibility for feeding their children, no independent food supply and the added financial burden of finding housing and paying rent.

So, women would return to sex work while generally continuing to supplement their incomes through these other streams. One day of hard labour (sometimes two) was usually equivalent in pay to seeing one client. However, many women could only hope to get one or two clients a week. The common, sometimes daily, lament in Maneno was that local sex work earnings were never enough to feed their children. 49 Bambaragas in both South and North Kivu spoke openly and plaintively about how starving their children were. Francine had even turned

“kwashiorkor 50 ” -the form of severe malnutrition and protein deficiency, that gave many children in Maneno their thin hair and distended abdomens- into a transitive and self-reflexive verb

“kwashiorkoriser ”.

49 Having a baby posed another problem because whereas already by toddlerhood, children could be placed outside the house to play with and by supervised by other children (of which many weren’t in school) while their mothers saw a client, babies required an adult who could care for them in another space and thus another additional expense or complication. This care obligation was usually undertaken by other sex workers because most did not have family nearby. 50 The Ghanaian term from the Ga language means "the sickness the baby gets when the new baby comes" or "the disease of the deposed child" as was adopted by biomedical practitioners due to the work of Jamaican pediatrician Cicely Williams. (Stanton 2001)

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“I have five children. Every time after having given birth, we say here in Mashi [the

Bashi language], you’re going to get the kiziri [first sex after delivery, generally believed

to be luck-conferring and thus often well-compensated 51 ]. I go out and look for it so I can

just find something to feel better again, so that I won’t kwashiorkorize my children and

myself and bam! The other pregnancy enters! But what am I going to do? Not work and

let my kids get kwashiorkorized ?”

The lack of a sufficiently paying local clientele presented obstacles to feeding and caring for children. Bambaragas could leave young babies behind and stop breastfeeding in order to travel long distances seeking clients so they could return and ensure their older children were well fed for a while. This is what Angéline did. Even though she had a bar, the income it generated was not sufficient to provide for her dependents. Instead, while I was there, she would leave her infant with her elderly mother or an old widow for a few weeks at a time as she travelled up to the mining and rebel-controlled areas. Many bambaragas adopted this strategy, most often leaving their children with another bambaraga . Indeed, single women are statistically less likely to reside with their children than married women (Clark and Hamplová, 2013). Single women’s separation from their children may also be a factor in why single women are less likely to breastfeed (Dhakal, Lee and Nam 2017). When women couldn’t or didn’t breastfeed, infants were generally fed very watered down formula (the latter being too expensive to afford), supplemented with water (that could be contaminated) and sugar or primarily starch-based porridges. This heightened their risk of undernutrition, infection and susceptibility to death. As

51 “Manger le kiziri ” or “to eat the kiziri ” refers to having heterosexual intercourse with a woman for the first time after she has given birth and taken the necessary time to recover. It is for many people, in particular those who are Bashi, a true privilege, or as Rho put it “une grâce” that confers powerful luck.

114 well, bambaragas could not ensure their babies or children were adequately fed in their absence or tend to them in a health emergency.

Otherwise, women could take the risk of bringing their infants with them. Some women managed to find a place to stay with one or more sex workers near a lucrative sex work area so that they did not cease breastfeeding entirely but could still work. This was the case of the

Mugunga settlement, and reportedly some bambaragas shared housing spaces near mines or rebel camps. However, such arrangements weren’t necessarily easy to maintain for long periods.

Furthermore, sex work areas with high income potential were generally militarized areas or across militarized lines. These areas were highly dangerous due to risks of conflict. One bambaraga in the district around Maneno recounted how needing to travel for sex work to feed her older children, she took her baby with her tied to her back, hoping to arrange care upon arrival, but her baby was shot and killed on her back at an armed group’s check point. Another bambaraga in the district recounted how she and her best friend were travelling with the latter’s baby when they were forced to jump off a truck to avoid an attack by an armed group. The fall broke the baby’s neck.

The other alternative was for bambaragas to stay and try to subsist on what sex work money they could find locally for as long as they could, breastfeed (albeit with interruptions of water and sugar while they were at work) and everyone would be hungry, particularly “older” children (who were often only a year or two older). This is what Furaha did. The sangha idiom reproduced and amplified this terrible dilemma: by forcing sex workers to choose between earning money in sex work or breastfeeding – and risking a child’s death if they tried to do both.

Sangha was an idiom of fear of ubiquitous death in childbirth, infancy and in early childhood. Though it lent special weight to the moment of birth, its taxonomy spanned a period

115 prior to and after birth. Its diagnostic breadth drew into relation the precarious conditions of pregnancy, infancy and toddlerhood. Indeed, for most poor women, the risks of pregnancy, infancy and toddlerhood were related. The economic burden of curtailed earnings through pregnancy; the potentially high costs of delivery or of an infant or child’s medical treatment; lost income associated with recovery, detention in hospital or indentured labour for the hospital due to unpaid fees; and of course the costs of one (or one more) child strained the resources available. This jeopardized the chances of there being enough money for either medical care when necessary or enough to eat - for infants, young children or their mothers. Shared hunger was a powerful fuel for, and connection between, infant, child and maternal death. Maternal undernutrition is not only an important cause of neo-natal and infant death (Black et al. 2008,

Bhutta et al. 2013); it is also a contributor to at least a fifth of maternal deaths (Bhutta 2014) and perhaps more in DR Congo. 52 Maternal deficiencies in Vitamin A lead to deficiencies in solely breastfed infants, which, in turn, raises their risk of dying from other illnesses (Black et al.

2008). As well, according to UNICEF, approximately half (48%) of deaths of children under five in the DR Congo have severe or chronic malnutrition as their underlying cause (Mulongo 2017).

The rate of stunting (poor growth due to chronic malnutrition) for children is 43% for children in

DR Congo, 52% in conflict-affected South Kivu and 53% in conflict-affected North Kivu, placing both provinces well above the emergency threshold (EDS-RDC 2014). The highest rates of stunting nationally have been found in provinces affected by conflict or by the collapse of the diamond economy (Kismul et al. 2018). As well, rates are higher in rural areas within provinces

52 The relationship between hunger and maternal death may be even stronger in DR Congo. Anemia is a factor in hemorrhaging and calcium deficiencies are a factor in pre-eclampsia. In DR Congo, 38% of women are anemic (EDS-RDC). In one study of maternal deaths at Congolese hospital, hemorrhaging was the leading cause of maternal death (61.04%) followed by eclampsia (31.58%) see Kanyeba et al. 2017.

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(Kismul et al. 2018). 53 The epidemiology of stunting in DR Congo encompasses a timeframe resonant with that of sangha , but with a grim arc: infants’ nutritional status drops precipitously in the first six months after birth and worsens continually quite linearly until about 20 months, at which point it plateaus (Kismul et al. 2018). The same dynamic was found across the DR Congo a few years earlier by Kandala et al. and they hypothesized that:

Such an immediate deterioration in nutritional status is not as expected, as the literature

typically suggests that the worsening is associated with weaning at around 4-6 months.

One reason for this finding could be that, according to the surveys, most parents give

their children liquids other than breast milk shortly after birth, which might contribute to

infections at these early ages (2011, 261).

While early weaning was not restricted to conflict areas nor always conflict-driven, conflict exacerbated early weaning. Conflict-related economic losses precipitated women’s early return to work and separation from their infants. Further, the conflict-related dangers of the areas where bambaragas often travelled to work forced many women to leave their babies behind for lengthy periods.

When it came to feeding their children, poor rural bambaragas and married women, particularly those in conflict areas, were both struggling desperately - if differently. Some studies have found that the children of single women in the DR Congo are more likely to be stunted

(with the exception of widows 54 ) (Ntoimo and Odimegwu 2014), while others have found no

53 As well, 7.9% and 22.6% of children show signs of respectively wasting (severe acute recent undernutrition) and being underweight. (Kismul et al. 2018) 54 Widows may have greater kin and extended family support due to the social acceptability of their pathway to parenthood.

117 difference based on the marital status of children’s parents (Kandala 2011). What is clear is that single women in the DR Congo and their children are comparatively far poorer than the families of married women (Clark and Hamplová 2013; Ntoimo and Odimegwu 2014). As Ntoimo and

Odimegwu wrote: “economic deprivation in single mother households in (…) DRC poses more serious risk to child survival than may have been realised (…).” (2014, 1145). However, greater poverty alone does not explain the difference in child mortality between single and married women. Even when single women are compared to married women of the same socioeconomic background, single women’s children are more likely to die in early childhood (Clark and

Hamplová 2013).

Sangha settled women’s anxieties about their and their children’s survival, primarily by focusing blame on other women rather than on gendered relationships of dependency or political economies of (gendered) dispossession heightened by conflict. Sangha imbued bambaragas, not extreme and exploitative inequities, with danger. In sangha ’s modes of transmission, bambaragas were constituted as harmful to themselves and their own children, through the act of having sex with clients, one of the things that constituted them as bambaragas . Like many

(gendered) archetypes of women who transgress male control, they were both damaged and damaging (Doezema 2011, Bruckert 2013). In this way, sangha echoed other popular discourses and many epidemiological discourses of HIV that construe socially transgressive women as threats to socially conforming women and to themselves, and men’s behaviour as mostly absent

(or simply a bridge to dangerous women) 55 (Crago 2013). In Maneno, the pressing fear expressed most potently through the sangha , for poor bambaragas , as for poor wives, was the fear of not

55 In Rho’s rendition, sanga additionally construed socially conforming women as a threat to transgressive bambaragas , though this was not a generally agreed upon route of transmission. (Nor was it between polyandrous “village-wives” and monoandrous “private wives” to polygynous husbands in Douglas1963).

118 being able to sustain life. It was also the fear that gendered transgressions of male control created dangerous women, whose destructive force rose as their lives and life around them became more vulnerable.

Bambaragas also feared sangha and took steps to prevent it. If the threat of sangha was persistent, so were bambaragas ’ attempts to ward it off through various remedies. There was debate about these protective mechanisms. For instance, some women questioned whether condoms could protect from sang croisé . For her part, Furaha insisted, to most women’s disbelief, that you could continue to breastfeed and see clients if you turned clients into “fathers”

(and bambaragas into “wives”) for the purposes of preventing sangha: “You come like this, you take only one bill when you come back from the client and you put it in the baby’s fist and you say: ‘Your father gave you this.’ Then, it all goes unnoticed, so it depends.” Other women attributed protective power to the kiziri , when men had sexual intercourse with a woman for the first time after she had given birth.

“The kiziri is luck,” Rho told me, “It’s like having sex with someone that you have just discovered. It’s like taking someone’s virginity. Even married couples do the kiziri . It’s like they were meeting for the first time all over again. It’s a party. Wives can receive a pagne from their husbands.” Sex workers were expected to be well paid. In all cases, the man was expected to offer a chicken to eat together afterwards. “Usually, he gives the woman money to go to the market, buy it and prepare it for them.” Men not only benefitted through delighting in the special occasion (and in some instances, being selected for it); they also were expected to accrue some of the good fortune into their lives that a (surviving) newborn baby brought by “eating the kiziri .” Immediately after the kiziri , if a sex worker had sweat during sex, did not wash, and then breastfed her child, the “heat” in the mother’s milk from the kiziri would not only neutralize the

119 sangha by blocking its “crossing” from sperm to breastmilk, it would protect the child from kwashiorkor and starvation. This was particularly true if the client was a regular and favoured client, “father-like” in “providing for” the mother and child. Kiziri announced a mother’s return to sex work after a period of acute deprivation for herself and other children. The payment and meat that a bambaraga received were very concretely - if briefly - protective against starvation and protein-deprivation for herself and her infant’s older siblings. In tiding a bambaraga ’s family over for a while, the kiziri could postpone a woman’s resumption of sex work, and thus, briefly, prolong breastfeeding for an infant too. Furthermore, kiziri could be protective to bambaragas and their children during late pregnancy, delivery and recovery when they were able to use the lure of the kiziri to solicit funds or goods from interested parties. Rho, for instance, successfully used the promise of kiziri to extract payments for hospital care from a client in anticipation of a complicated delivery.

It was widely held among bambaragas that a plant named kashisha 56 could protect from sangha . (Some also identified a plant called mubandi that had the benefit of being sold in small bricks that you could keep on you and take a bite of in an emergency.) Kashisha was a very common plant that grew all over Maneno. Surprisingly, for an unassuming spindly bundle of stems with small leaves and yellow daisy-like flowers, if ingested it was as high in protein as yogurt and high in beta-carotene (the latter is associated with protection against kwashiorkor 57 )

(UNFAO 1997). It has even been found in controlled studies to have antimalarial, antibacterial and antiviral properties (Andrade Neto et al. 2004; Chiang et al. 2003; Shandukani et al. 2018;

56 Kashisha is the Mashi and Fuliro term for Bidens Pilosa (botanical term) . Also referred to as Nyasa (Lega), Ishisha (Kinyarwanda) or Black Jack , Spanish Needles (English). 57 See Kismul, Van den Broeck, and Lunde 2014

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Tobinaga et al. 2009). Depending on one’s beliefs, one could drink a tea, wash with the plant, rub it on one’s eyes or eat it and it would counteract any risk of sangha .

During one of my first trips to Maneno, Rho pointed out the kashisha plant. For several weeks thereafter she would spontaneously quiz my ability to identify it . She was forever frustrated by my inability to find the correct plant, suggesting at one point that maybe I should just keep some mubandi in my purse. With some anxiety, she repeatedly tried to teach me that these were necessary measures to protect myself from an illness called sangha . She was not alone. Bambaraga s in Maneno walked me around on more than one occasion identifying patches of kashisha so that I could locate it. Women in Maneno repeatedly and consistently raised the issue of the sangha and how to avoid it despite my initial resistance to be particularly concerned with the issue or to see how it related to life in war. “You need to know about this plant,” Rho would say with insistence, “Every bambaraga does.” She correctly assessed that for a long time

I did not grasp the high stakes of the affliction or the efforts to which bambaragas were going to try and protect me. One day, Rho explained that there was a time in the past when many bambaragas ’ young children were starving to death in Maneno. “When in the past?” I asked.

“Maybe up until last year, or maybe a bit before,” she responded. Rho recalled that even amongst those women who stayed in Maneno with their babies “There were many more starving infants.

Many women would stop breastfeeding if they started to see clients”. Then, bambaragas in

Maneno had begun to encourage each other to use kashisha to protect against sangha, and this allowed those who stayed to both breastfeed (albeit with some interruptions) and see clients

(albeit too few). The plant grew, she pointed out, all around where sex workers lived. “If you pay attention,” she once said, “the bambaragas there are always chewing that stuff.”

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Not all deaths could be explained by sangha , though, particularly if known remedies had been employed and failed. Instead, some deaths were attributed to “ mauvaises personnes ” (“bad people”), people who used their own mystical powers of “ sorcellerie ” (“sorcery”) or requested the use of those of a known “ sorcerer ” to harm others 58 . A few years prior, in Maneno, the community had accused a man named Frédéric of being a “bad person” and a sorcerer after two of his wives died successively in childbirth with their children, including a set of twins. In the telling of two local bambaragas , it was the culmination of so many deaths close to him and the common stigmatization of twins as associated with sorcery that confirmed the belief that he had caused the deaths. He was run out of the community and his house was burned in an act of collective rage.

Anguish over the threat of maternal, infant and child death could also be expressed explicitly and forcefully in relation to “ hôpitaux ”. In some instances, this was a general distrust of hospitals and characterization of them as places that either passively let or actively made women, infants and children die. In others, it was a far more specific grappling with the social and economic conditions of hospital delivery and care – or lack of care. Such was the case for Jeanne. When I met her in Maneno, she was visibly very pregnant. She had just fled an outbreak of conflict on foot with her three children. The client she and her children had been living with, who had agreed to pay for her upcoming delivery, was killed in the fighting. She was in shock, heartbroken, fearful for her children and terrorized at being in advanced pregnancy with no money.

“I am a lover, that is my only work here, but there are not enough clients here,” she explained as tears rolled down her face. “He was going to pay for everything. If I give birth

58 Hunt similarly found that deaths that were unresponsive to sangha remedies could be attributed to the influences of “bad people” (1999b, 303-304).

122 today, who will pay? Who will pay the hospital? Who will take care of all the needs [of my three children]? I don’t know what I am going to do. They burned the house. I have nothing.” She paused to catch her breath. “Every pregnancy I’ve had I’ve needed caesarians. All four of them.”

Caesarians were extremely expensive, often costing over $100 USD. Jeanne explained that the doctors warned her last time that she had dangerous complications and that if she ever gave birth out of hospital, she or her infant would die and very likely, both. Her body shook and with urgent emphasis, she insisted: “I need to go to the hospital.” The nearest hospital, though, required a down-payment to provide care, particularly for complex deliveries, and, furthermore, detained women long-term until the balance was paid.

The menace of maternal, infant and child death for bambaragas was perhaps most evident in the everyday in the sustained efforts bambaragas took, at great peril, to evade it. In the weeks following her arrival in Maneno, well into her eighth month of pregnancy, Jeanne departed on a long journey on foot through conflict zones in order to do mining and sex work to be able pay for her delivery or at least to pay the down payment required to receive care. There was a high risk she would go into labour and die along the way. However, if she didn’t find more money than the little she likely could in Maneno, she risked dying in childbirth anyway, and her young children would become further malnourished and in greater danger of dying themselves.

Sangha and hôpitaux were both common idioms used to express fear and pain at maternal, infant and child death. Furthermore, they expressed a connection between the three categories of deaths. Indeed, the overlapping spheres of vulnerability of pregnancy, infancy and early childhood were linked and underpinned by shared hunger and a political economy of medical care that did not value the lives of poor bambaragas and their children. Bambaragas

123 were left trying to balance and provide for the vital needs of infants, young children and themselves – a feat that was not always attainable.

“We Are Unable to Find Those Responsible for These Murders”: The Dangers of Speaking of

Maternal, Infant and Child Deaths

While bambaragas expressed fears of infant, child and maternal death, and their brief assuagement in a moment of unlikely survival, they rarely discussed actual deaths they had experienced or witnessed. Degorge and Douville similarly note, when recounting a woman’s story of a neighbour’s infant that died in its sleep, “the rarity of this story [in the DR Congo], given how euphemisms give way to mutism in speaking of death” (2012 248,) 59 . In contrast, bambaragas spoke openly and without solicitation about instances in which their children were killed in conflict-related deaths. Indeed, open discussion of violent conflict-related deaths of children was not uncommon in the region, even though these were relatively very rare compared to death due to untreated illness and hunger. 60 I never asked women directly about infants or young children of theirs that had perished. It had not been an intended focus of my research.

However, the first time I casually asked Mpenda and Bahati, to whom I was closest, about maternal, infant and young child death in general, they were visibly uncomfortable. One shrugged, the other was dismissive. It felt as though perhaps I had offended them.

Yet such deaths would continually surface unexpectedly in loaded elisions and impossible arithmetic: such as the number of deliveries recalled being higher than the number of women’s children. Sometime later, Bahati, in an explanation and defense of women’s birthing

59 Translation Mine. “la rareté du récit tant le mutisme succède aux euphémismes pour dire la mort. ” 60 See: Parents organizations in Eastern DRC even openly petitioned UN officials about (far rarer) violent deaths of children and youth in conflict (HRW) https://www.hrw.org/news/2009/04/22/letter-parents-eastern-democratic- republic-congo-un-security-council.

124 capabilities said: “I gave birth nine times. Eight of those were in the bush. There was never any problem. I had children who died, but not from the birth.” She had only ever mentioned four living children and two who died in adulthood 61 . It was the first time I learned of the other three.

Again, though, she signaled that she did not want to discuss it further. Even the mention of such deaths in passing was to enter into painful and risky vulnerability.

Drawing attention to infant and child deaths could expose what were widely perceived as individual and collective bambaraga “failures” of motherhood. In eastern DR Congo,

“motherhood” was an exalted status (in theory, at least), a necessary gendered stage of becoming for women, a form of “wealth in people” (Bledsoe and Cohen 1993) and, for many, the connection that created existence after death. For those who ascribed to the common belief that deceased ancestors were actively in contact with and involved in the lives of their descendants, generally in protective and nurturing roles (Defour 2001), biological progeny was not just the continuation of life, it was also what allowed one to transcend the finality of death. Women without children were generally seen as immature or incomplete and were commonly objects of derision or pity. In contrast, after becoming parents, women were often referred to using the honorific “ Maman ” prior to their name. In many cases, their given name was substituted for that of their child (i.e. “ Maman Honorine ” for the mother of Honorine). One bambaraga in Maneno was referred to simply as “ Maman Bébé ” (“Mother of the Baby”).

However, bambaragas transgressed social lines as they enacted motherhood. Dominant gender norms positioned mothers as responsible for tending to children’s health, feeding and care, while fathers were viewed as the appropriate primary financial providers for a wife and children (Lwambo 2013), including for the costs of maternal and infant care (Deboutte et al.

61 Her adult son had died of illness and her young adult daughter was tortured to death by armed group members.

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2016). Bambaragas were often seen as the necessary yet (by virtue of their gender), inherently deficient providers for themselves and their children. When bambaragas ’ infants or young children died, it was thus potentially an indictment of the circumstances in which they procreated and of their gendered inadequacies to both care and provide for their children. 62 Stigma against bambaragas was interwoven with class, and some of its most virulent social manifestations, such as the hatred reserved for “ bambaraga buchafu ” (“dirty bambaragas ”), related to failures to provide materially for their young children. When I asked how one distinguished a bambaraga from a “ bambaraga buchafu ” I often heard the following questions: Could she pay for her children’s schooling or were they mai-bobos (street kids) ? Were her children well clothed, healthy and fed or undernourished and sick? If a bambaraga ’s child died of hunger or illness, the culpability generally fell squarely on her shoulders and confirmed her social unworthiness. This overlapped in some ways with the causality of death laid out in the “ sangha ” in which bambaragas seeking to both nurture and provide for their infants, by breastfeeding and selling sex, were blamed when their infants died.

Perhaps more dangerous, though, was the fact that for bambaragas to recount maternal and infant deaths was potentially to implicate themselves or other bambaragas in serious social and legal transgressions for which they were already socially profiled and violently repressed.

Infant deaths in childbirth, particularly if premature, could be difficult to distinguish from highly stigmatized and illegal voluntary abortions or infanticide. Similarly, pregnancy-related deaths linked to miscarriages, illegal and underground abortions or complications in delivery were not easily differentiated, blurring many social, moral and legal distinctions. The penalty for an

62 Gendered blame for child deaths did not necessarily spare married women either. In the neighbouring country of Congo-Brazzaville, for instance, research found that 28.7% of respondents blamed the deaths of young children on mothers versus on 2% on fathers. Families (37.6%) and neglect by medical personnel (30.7%) were also commonly blamed. Of course, single mothers correspond both to “mothers” and “families” (Loutete-Dangui 2000).

126 abortion was up to 10 years in jail, and most people had heard if not personal reports, then media coverage of women being arrested on such charges. A UN Human Rights report enumerating the main reasons for imprisonment of children across the DR Congo listed just one for girls: abortion

(MONUSCO 2006). Even health professionals in hospitals trying to save young women and girls with obstetric complications were at times arrested for not reporting those suspected of abortion to police (Radio Okapi 2012c). In contrast to the relative silence around the deaths of infants, children and women, there was significant social outrage at abortion expressed in frequent media stories of fetuses found along roadways, in sewer channels or at the public dump (see Chaco

2009, Radio Okapi 2012a, Radio Okapi 2012b, Mulabalama 2012, Wandimoyi 2012).

Bambaragas were frequently socially profiled as women aborting or assisting with abortion and targeted for abortion-related repression. Following the finding of 23 fetuses over a period of six months in Mapendo-Nord, one of the poor communities of Goma, the local chief lamented difficulties in identifying the women to imprison: “ Without a survey, we are unable to find those responsible for these murders. We are unable to identify those delinquent young women among the femmes libres ” (Wandimoyi 2012). 63 Such suspicions and scapegoating were not just urban. A male traditional healer who was renowned and sought out for performing abortions was arrested along with two bambaragas when the rural community of Mulo noticed the two women were no longer pregnant. While the women awaited their trial in prison, local residents told media they were culpable and didn’t need a trial (Kombi 2006).

Women sometimes discretely shared personal stories of bambaragas they knew who had been threatened with arrest, beaten in hospital settings for being “baby killers”, refused

63 Translation mine. The original reads : “Faute d'un recensement, nous sommes dans l'impossibilité de retrouver les auteurs de ces meurtres, ” regrette Festine Kabuo, chef du quartier Mapendo-Nord en commune de Goma, “et on ne sait pas distinguer les jeunes filles délinquantes assimilées aux femmes libres. ”

127 emergency obstetric treatment, or forced to identify women who helped them when an abortion was suspected by police, local authorities or medical personnel. Even bambaragas’ involuntary miscarriages or infant deaths in delivery could be questioned. The very few wealthy bambaragas could at times evade repression and get assistance through money and upper class contacts, but this was rare. It was different for married women, particularly those of means, Rho recounted:

“Their husbands take them to the hospital. They pay a lot. The husbands tell the doctors it was an unexpected hemorrhage . Maybe a miscarriage that got complicated. The doctors know.

Everybody knows. Et ça passe …” From what she had seen, if married women did not have money, they might not get treatment, or at least not until their lives were seriously in danger, but even poor married women were not usually threatened with arrest. Bambaragas , though, did not have the “cover” of a husband to morally launder their acts through male entitlement. Good women hemorrhaged, bad women aborted.

The penalty for assisting with an abortion was 15 years in jail, and often, bambaragas reported, the first to be suspected were those who were present while a woman aborted or had an obstetric emergency and those who accompanied a bambaraga to the hospital in an obstetric emergency (and thus, might have been present for a suspected abortion). Given that bambaragas were one another’s main source of social and emergency support and often lived together, the people accompanying a bambaraga were almost always other bambaragas . Older bambaragas were often suspected of assisting abortions of younger bambaragas because they frequently were the ones younger bambaragas turned to for information or assistance and for sexual and reproductive health matters, including birthing. The lingering threat of arrest was so significant that many bambaragas resorted to the dangerous practice of self-aborting alone and in isolated locations rather than risking the incrimination of other bambaragas . As Rho explained, “That is

128 why so many single women abort alone at home if they live on their own - or in the fields or somewhere else if they don’t. Two of my friends died that way, when I was younger”. The threat of arrest, beyond its most consequential effect of heightening risk and blocking access to care for women aborting or suspected of aborting, also had the effect of rendering bambaragas' personal stories of infant death at delivery (or miscarriage) as potentially self-incriminating. Furthermore, knowledge of another bambaraga ’s death from abortion, miscarriage, or delivery or of another bambaraga ’s infant’s death at delivery were dangerous to share, both for the woman speaking and the woman spoken of.

Camionne, Bahati and Jibu: His Name Was Luck In Mugunga, there were a handful of occasions where bambaragas nonetheless spoke to me directly about infant and maternal death, and when they did it was more open and explicit than in Maneno, though usually privately and often circumspectly. One such conversation occurred after I fell entranced, watching Camionne delight in her five-year-old child Jibu. She would carry her on her shoulders as she weaved and bobbed, flying over the large lava rocks that surrounded the cluster of shacks that they and the other Bambuti bambaragas lived in. Their laugher was contagious. I had never seen anyone play with a child like that in DR Congo. It was striking because it defied a dominant cultural norm in eastern DR Congo, particularly for bourgeois families, that for adults to physically play with a child was to be child-like and not fully of adult reasoning or maturity. It was in that sense, in fact, un-parent like. It was also arresting, regardless of context, in its rarefied shared joy. Faida, who shared a best friend with

Camionne, noticed me smile at the two of them: “Camionne, she loves that child. Kabisa.

Vraiment. She loves that child. You know, that poor woman, she lost five babies.”

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“Oh god. Five? That were born?”

“Some after they were born, some not. For me it’s the same. Imagine. Eeesssh. It was so

hard for her. So painful. Then, Jibu. Oh, she loves that child. You will never see anyone

love their child like she loves Jibu.”

For Faida, Camionne’s love was as exceptional and great as the loss that preceded it. I later asked Faida if it could really be that many losses. It seemed like a lot if some were born, and, after all, Faida had not known Camionne at the time. Faida was insistent: “She might tell you. She might tell you it’s less. She lost five. Unh-unh. Five. That woman has been through too much.” Camionne spoke to me of two losses, one in which she almost lost her own life. She became pregnant for the first time at 20 and had given birth in the forest around Virunga where she had grown up. Her first child was a boy. “His name was Bahati (Luck),” Camionne offered before explaining that he lived three months and then died. In Camionne’s Bambuti community, there are traditionally two days of mourning for a child, and three for an adult. Camionne observed these then followed the Bambuti tradition of moving away from the site of loss to set up a new home. Not long after, she became pregnant again, although she wouldn’t know it for months. She trekked a very long way through the forest to the small town of Kanyabayonga, near the mines, a site of many attacks, where she sold sex to feed and provide for herself and her orphaned brothers back home. She stayed to work and then made it all the way back home through the forest to where her aunt was, and there, she began to bleed uncontrollably.

She had lost so much blood that she and others were certain she wouldn’t live. The pregnancy ended and seemed to pull her with it to the precipice of her own life: “It was so

130 strong. I had so many problems. I knew it was all over for me.” The surprise that she survived still seemed to take her aback. However, after that: “I knew something was damaged. I despaired because I would never have children.” Many years later, through her sex work, she became pregnant with Jibu. Her aunt, who was widowed and with whom she now lived, helped her deliver in the forest. Her daughter came into the world and lived- they both lived. After years of hopes and prayers with no response, she arrived: Answer. Jibu.

Bambaragas and their children bore a disproportionate toll of infant, child and maternal death. The resulting fear and pain was woven through bambaragas’ lives. In rare moments, it was shared explicitly in personal stories, though to speak of actual deaths was to risk not only condemnatory hatred, but also potentially self-incrimination. Most often, anguish and loss emerged through idioms, such as the sangha, hôpitaux and mauvaises personnes . The first two of these linked infant, child and maternal death to each other. Indeed, high vulnerability to non- violent death was connected and fanned by hunger and the impossibilities of medical care.

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Chapter Four The Politics of Births and Non-Violent Deaths in Armed Conflict

Conflict, Privatization and the Politics of Non-Violent Death In contrast to scholars of biopower who have emphasized the optimization and administration of human life at the centre of political rationalities, Mbembe challenges us to examine the place of death at the heart of the political with particular attention to “the wounded or slain body” (2003, 12). However, Threadcraft cautions that an examination of the politics of death that privileges violent death can limit whose deaths are figured as politicized along gendered lines (2017). This insight is particularly applicable to conflict areas. For the bambaragas in eastern DR Congo, both violent and non-violent death were “terror as usual”

(Taussig 1989), but it was non-violent maternal, infant and child death that was most terrifyingly common. How, then, do the workings of power intersect with the production of non-violent death? Following Galtung, what institutions give rise to “an avoidable deprivation of life” (1971,

73)? How is this gendered and classed? And how did poor women succumb, subvert or resist these?

Though conflict fuels and foments the risks of non-violent death, the large majority of infant, child and maternal death could nonetheless be averted through access to timely and appropriate medical intervention (Beaglehole et al. 2003; Black et al. 2003; Haines et al. 2007;

Rutherford, Mulholland and Hill 2010; Thaddeus and Maine 1994). Hospitals are thus key institutions in conflict areas with the potential to stop or mitigate mass non-violent death. Yet, despite an increase in hospital births, maternal and infant deaths have remained extremely high in DR Congo (EDS-RDC 2014). Furthermore, though the conflict-affected province of South

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Kivu had one of the highest rates of hospital births in the country (92.6%), the neo-natal death rate was the highest in the country (4.7 per % or about one in 21 infants) (EDS-RDC 2014). 64

The first part of this chapter examines how health care in DR Congo became privatized, moving from being governed as a public good to being governed according to profit motives. In bambaragas ’ experiences, non-state armed groups in the Kivus adopted a similar approach to health care as the state, when they renounced responsibility for funding or providing health services as a public good. Both the state and numerous non-stated armed groups relied on nominally public hospitals that were in fact operating like private enterprises, private charities, or humanitarian groups to provide emergency and/or complex medical care to populations.

Hospitals sat at the intersection of governance of health as a private commodity rather than a public entitlement, by both the state and armed groups. The chapter then turns to an analysis of how the resulting collapse of health infrastructure as well as policies and practices within hospitals contribute to mass gendered and classed non-violent death. As single and poor women, bambaragas (and their children) were disproportionately affected by such measures. Indeed, hospital policies and practices exacerbated almost all of the known factors associated with the high death burden among the children of single women in DR Congo. The second part of this

64 In North Kivu, hospital coverage is very high and infant and maternal mortality have fallen. Indeed, they are lower than most provinces in the DR Congo that are not in conflict (EDS-RDC 2014). This is very possibly due the large-scale humanitarian effort in place. Charities in some localities run no-cost medical services with outreach and ambulatory services on motorcycles reaching rural and remote areas such as the no-cost MSF hospital in Masisi. As well, large efforts have been put in place by UN agencies to offer free medical services to address infant and maternal health for the significant portion of the population living in IDP camps. However, humanitarian aid is often temporary and often does not challenge the basis of the extreme privatization of health. One NGO intending to close its free hospital services in DR Congo commissioned a study on the right amount to charge patients to condition them to re-enter a privatized health system (Gerstl et al. 2013). Another study occurred in anticipation of the withdrawal of an NGO in North-Eastern DRC providing free maternal and infant health services. Though conceding that the death of a wife was an “intangible loss,” the study calculated the monetary costs of funeral and bride wealth repayment that a husband might incur if a wife died in labour as a possible means of convincing men to agree to pay for their wives’ maternal health care in the future (Deboutte et al 2016).

133 chapter explores how bambaragas sought to evade the harms of the privatized health system and to mitigate some of the challenges and losses of life in conflict through the birthing of their own and each other’s babies. Though such practices carried high risks, they formed and solidified reciprocal relationships of gendered care, solidarity, and cultural connection.

If the DR Congo is now “unique in Sub-Saharan Africa in the extent to which [health care] is (…) privatized” (Mock et al., 2006, 38), it was not always so. In early post- independence, the government undertook an ambitious national health plan. Smallpox was eliminated, child vaccination coverage reached 95%, and the country became a model of primary and community healthcare (Persyn and Ladrière 2004). In 1972, under President Mobutu, no less than 17.5% of the budget was allocated to health and social services (Reno 1997). However, by the mid-1970s the country entered economic decline following Mobutu’s unsuccessful economic reforms, and Mobutu began to gut state health and social services in what Reno considers a strategic act of governance intended to consolidate his authoritarian power (1997). Bureaucracies could be fertile ground for resistance to dictatorships. Dismantling them neutralized potential opposition as well as allowing Mobutu to redirect state revenue towards his personal enrichment and patronage payments used to maintain power (Reno 1997).

By 1978, as government funding receded, a number of “public” hospitals and health centres began to extract payment or impose debt as a precondition to receiving care (de Béthune and Lahaye 1989). The commercialization of health services and delivery was ostensibly to cover operating costs, however, in the absence of systematic oversight, the costs imposed grew at rates that point to the increasing influence of private profit throughout the system. In one study, costs imposed by a regional hospital and health centres doubled between 1983 and 1986 65 . As a

65 This calculation is adjusted for inflation.

134 result of the price increases, the population’s access to health care dropped (de Béthune and

Lahaye 1989). By 1985, international financial institutions (IFIs) imposed structural adjustment programs that required payment as a pre-condition for medical services (Schoepf 1991) and reduced the salaries of workers in the health sector (Persyn and Ladrière 2004). This created further pressure on, and arguably cover for, the runaway commercialization of health services already underway. In 1984, 9% of the national budget was allocated to health and social services.

In 1986, 7% was (Reno 1997). By 1990, the state had been radically privatized: 0% of the national budget was allocated to health and social services while 95% was officially earmarked for “discretionary spending” by Mobutu (Reno 1997). In the following years, significant foreign aid was withdrawn from the government and “financial barriers to care (along with deteriorating quality) caused [health] service utilization to plunge, particularly by the poorest” (World Bank

2005, 9).

Following the toppling of Mobutu during the second Congo war in 2000, spending for health (exclusive of social services) increased slightly under President Laurent Kabila, reaching

2.5% of government expenditures, about eighty cents per capita in US dollars (WHO 2015).

Between 2001 and 2012, under President Joseph Kabila (the son of Laurent Kabila), health funding remained at around 2.5% (WHO 2015). One possible contributing factor to this low rate of health spending was that, between 2003 and 2010, the IMF required the DR Congo to render

20% of state revenues as payments on debt incurred under Mobutu, hobbling expenditures over all (Jubilee Debt Campaign 2017). Another contributing factor may have been the large expenditures Joseph Kabila made on arms purchases during this time to defeat rebels in the East

(see Doherty, Blum and Zihlmann 2017). Lastly, Joseph Kabila’s rule was authoritarian and reliant on patronage networks (Verweijen 2016), giving him similar incentives as Mobutu to

135 minimize state services. Even at such low rates of health spending, in some years in the 2000s as little as 30% of allocated funds (about forty cents per capita in US dollars) was actually delivered, making DR Congo’s health care system one of the least publicly financed worldwide

(World Bank 2005). Indeed, theft and diversion of public funds by the political elite was rampant

(Marriage 2018, UNECA 2015), as was theft by administrators and staff at mid and lower-levels of the public health sector, particularly those with the protection of military or political authorities (Persyn and Ladrière 2004). During the time of field work (2013-2015), the government was still under Joseph Kabila’s rule and health spending had risen modestly to between 3% and 4% of the budget (WHO 2015). In 2015, reported government domestic health expenditures were the fourth lowest in the world per capita when adjusted for purchasing power parity (WHO 2015). It remained unclear how much of that funding was actually making it to health services.

Stasse et al. describe the effects of the retreat from public funding as follows: “In some areas of the country, the public health system has virtually collapsed and health care delivery is largely left to informal private providers. The public health budget serves mainly to finance irregular and very low salary payments to government health workers” (2015, 3). As for the public facilities that remain, the World Bank has written that since the 1990s, “in the absence of external support, many facilities became de facto privatized,” imposing unregulated costs for medical services (2005, 7). Recent research confirms the “ de facto privatization” of public health facilities and centres (Bertone, Lurton and Mutombo 2016, 1149).

The IMF and World Bank language of “user fees” or “self-financing” has been widely adopted to refer to the commercialization of health services (see for example de Bethune and

Laye 1989; Hunt 1999a). Such terms obscure and rationalize both the overwhelming role of

136 private profit in structuring the provision of public health care and its most profound effects. The payments demanded not only undermined any conception of health as a social good and entitlement, they generally far outstripped the costs of care and rarely financed health infrastructure. This is supported by a number of data points. The first is the extraordinarily high salaries some health employees self-report making 66 (Bertone, Lurton and Mutombo 2016).

Administrators of rural health centres report making up to $1,396 USD monthly and nurses report making up to $2,908 USD monthly, in both cases, primarily funded through the imposition of costs for medical services (Bertone, Lurton and Mutombo 2016, 1146). By comparison, 87.7% of the population lives on less than $38 USD monthly (IMF 2015). Bertone,

Lurton, and Mutombo conclude that medical costs for patients in both the private and public sector in DR Congo are managed “in an ‘entrepreneurial’ way, by maximizing the fees they legally charge” (2016, 1147). Among the highest health sector salaries financed through the imposition of costs for medical care were found in South Kivu (Bertone, Lurton and Mutombo

2016). Second, the funding of a health institution’s infrastructure and salaries by external foreign aid had no effect on total income of health personnel (Bertone, Lurton and Mutombo 2016). For high salary earners, this is indicative of the management of health services for private enrichment not for cost recuperation. 67 Third, in some instances, health care personnel have resisted or obstructed efforts by foreign donors to create stable flat fees per service, a measure that could limit excessive profiteering (Stasse et al. 2015).

66 These are most likely under valuations of their actual earnings. Given that health staff are expected to “pay up” a portion of their earnings to higher health administrators and the Ministry of Health, they have a strong incentive to deflate their earnings when self-reporting. 67 In fact, some health workers reported being paid for their work by multiple foreign donors simultaneously and the authors infer that this was unbeknownst to the donors (Bertone, Lurton and Mutombo 2016).

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Furthermore, health care in the DR Congo is governed under a system known as

“financement ascendant ” (or “ascending financing”) wherein “a portion of collected fees [in the health system from medical service and deliveries] is paid to higher level health administration” at the government level (Bertone, Lurton and Mutombo 2016, 1147). According to the World

Bank: “In many cases, the oversight function of the Ministry of Health structures became only exercises in extraction of revenue from health facilities” (2005, 7). These systemic financial flows from the population’s wealth to the private enrichment of the political elite is a dynamic termed “governance by predation” by Ratley (2006). Given that the gendered extraction of payments and imposition of debts in health care primarily fall on women and the resulting profits flow to a predominantly male political elite, I believe it is even more apt to speak of “governance by gendered predation”.

Armed non-state groups in eastern DR Congo often provided various public goods and services (Raeymaekers 2010; Verweijen 2016). However, according to bambaragas , healthcare was not one of them. Bambaragas only brought up three kinds of medical interventions dispensed by armed groups in eastern DR Congo 68 : dawa (magico-medical) rites to protect from bullets; the distribution of condoms; and HIV-testing (of dubious validity) reportedly leading to expulsion or, according to two independent reports 69 , the killing of HIV-positive sex workers.

More commonly, women reported an absence of any services whatsoever. Women who were immobilized or enslaved in rebel-held territories were generally denied any access to medical care. However, when women in rebel-controlled areas were mobile and needed or desired

68 One woman abducted and enslaved long-term with the FDLR reported that the FDLR had a male “nurse”. The only type of care she reported the nurse performing was to advocate that FDLR soldiers stop torturing the women with the argument that they didn’t want to damage what “they would later eat” (a reference to sexual violence). With other armed groups, “nurses” were reportedly in charge of condom distribution and HIV-testing. 69 The reports concerned different armed groups.

138 hospital care, they relied on private hospitals. These hospitals were generally located in large towns or cities, and the latter were often areas under state control, particularly efforts by the

United Nations Stabilization Mission in the DR Congo (MONUSCO) to pacify large population centers as “stability islands.” Non-state armed groups reportedly facilitated this reliance on hospitals in the state system, particularly for women who had relationships with higher-up officers. When Clarisse told a higher-up M23 official and regular client that she was pregnant with his child, he gave her money and sent her away from the rebel camp to medical facilities in town. Similarly, one-time a local client of bambaragas pointed out a young very pregnant woman to me near Maneno. He reported that she was the lover of a Raia Mutomboki commander and had recently been sent home from Raia territory in the southern forest to deliver in a hospital in town. Lastly, the many bambaragas who worked in rebel territory - and often paid large sums to rebels in taxes/extortion to come and go - also relied on hospitals if they needed care.

Ultimately, non-state armed groups in the region appear to have governed health much like the state: by renouncing health as a public good and relying on institutions that provided it as a commodity for profit or as charity. De facto private hospitals were thus particular institutions that sat at the nexus of state and non-state armed groups’ governance of health.

The collapse and extreme privatization of the health system relied on both by the state and non-state armed groups particularly affected women as they were generally far more dependent on hospital care, due to frequent pregnancy and responsibility for their children’s care.

The birth rate in DR Congo is an average of 6.2 births per woman (World Bank 2014). As well, by the age of 45, low estimates are that one in five women in the DR Congo has had an (unsafe and illegal) abortion during their reproductive years (EDS-RDC 2014), and that one in five of those unsafe abortions produced a complication so dangerous it required emergency medical

139 intervention to avert death (Chae et al. 2017). Privatization is directly associated with pregnancy-related deaths (due to delivery, unsafe abortion or miscarriage) (Knight, Self and

Kennedy 2013). It is also associated with children’s mortality under five (Rutherford,

Mullholland and Hill 2010). The commercialization of health services disproportionately imposed the costs of reproduction and reproductive healthcare– ostensibly a national responsibility – onto women and systemically extracted wealth from women for the private enrichment of male political elites overseeing the health sector. Whether it was governance by the state or of armed groups, the privatization of health generated costs, harm, and death that were disproportionately borne by poor women and their children.

Hôpitaux : The Gendered and Classed Politics of Death in the Space Between a

Complication and its Outcome

Thaddeus and Maine posited that by eliminating three types of delay in the provision of care in the key window between the advent of a health complication and its outcome, the large majority (73%) of maternal death could be averted. These were: (1) delay in seeking care; (2) delay in reaching the health facility; (3) and delay in receiving quality care at the heath facility

(Thaddeus and Maine 1994). The authors further add that the perception of delays in travelling to care and in getting care ( 2 and 3) can lead to a sense of futility about seeking care, resulting in further delays in doing so (1). This model has been adapted to infant death (Waiswa et al. 2010), and elements of it have been applied to child death under five (Rutherford, Mulholland and Hill

2010). Further research has since put into question whether distance to a health facility (2) is conclusively associated with infant and child death (Rutherford, Mulholland and Hill 2010),

140 although lack of emergency transport does appear to be a factor in maternal death (Knight, Self,

Kennedy 2013).

For bambaragas and their families, non-violent death was fueled by infrastructure collapse and systemic and widespread gendered and classed policies and practices within hospitals. These included: refusals (non-provision and delay in treatment and care related to non-payment), repression (threats, arrest, violence for abortion-related suspicions), detention

(detention and indentured labour related to non-payment), enforced risk of pregnancy/unsafe abortion (refusals of contraception, sterilization and safe/legal abortion), and economic seizures

(imposition of the social cost of reproduction and child heath disproportionately on women through debt and payment).

These policies and practices within privatized health care governance contributed to avoidable death through (1) life-threatening delays in or exclusion from the provision of care at the moment of a complication, (2) longer-term increased risks of malnutrition, illness and pregnancy-related complications to women and their children, and (3) life-threatening delays or avoidance in seeking care at the moment of a complication related to (1) and (2) above (See

Graph). The following section details the ways in which the political economy of health care within hospitals produced non-violent death for poor women and their children, and most particularly for poor bambaragas and their children.

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The Effects of Gendered Policies and Practices within Privatized Health Care on Infant, Child and Maternal Death for Bambaragas (Cis Women Sex Workers)

In the Time Between a Complication and its Outcome

Infrastructure Failures

Abortion-Related Repression Delay in provision Refusal/Withholding of of care Care for Non-Payment, Unpaid Debt or Hospital Refusal of provision Escape of care

Risk of pregnancy/ illness/ Detention/Indentured Death malnutrition Labour (including for Payment/Debt Delay in seeking Risk of Death other children) care

Enforced risk of Avoidance of care pregnancy (refusal of contraception/ sterilization, safer abortion without payment or male consent)

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Infrastructure Collapse

One answer to the paradox of high hospital coverage and high death due to preventable and treatable causes was that even for those who made it to hospital and could pay, medical care was often inadequate due to lacking equipment, supplies or trained health personnel. Such failures of medical infrastructure have been found to contribute directly to high levels of preventable maternal, infant and child death (Kalisya et al. 2015; Knight, Self, Kennedy 2013;

Zaracosta 2009). They also contributed to bambaragas’ sense of fear or futility about getting medical assistance, which led to delays or avoidance in seeking care, posing another risk of death.

Most hospitals do not have adequate equipment or operating rooms to perform caesarian deliveries, resulting in having to transfer pregnant women needing emergency caesarians or other complex care to facilities in large cities (WHO 2007). Even large urban hospitals lack the adequate equipment and trained staff to provide emergency care (Kalisya et al. 2015). There are no estimates of the impact of this in South Kivu, but in Gemena, in northern DR Congo, the director of a hospital lamented that five out of nine women who had recently undergone caesarian sections died in her hospital due to a lack of adequate equipment (Radio Okapi 2014).

In Masisi, in North Kivu, where infant and child death rates are far lower , a survey of medical capacity in 24 health centers and one hospital found that not a single health centre was able to provide Basic Emergency Obstetric and Newborn Care (BEmONC), and the hospital surveyed was unable to provide Comprehensive Emergency Obstetric and Newborn Care (CEmONC). In the majority of cases, this was due to a lack of equipment. In the DR Congo 66% of health centers did not have a resuscitation bag or infant face mask, and survey participants reported

143 frequent stock-outs of medicine supplies. Health personnel in North Kivu scored an average

33.9% on identifying what to do when a woman was hemorrhaging after delivery; 32.8% on key interventions for low birth weight babies and 44.9% on how to identify sepsis or infection in a newborn (Vargas, Chynoweth and Wazir 2013). In the capital city of Kinshasa, a number of maternal and infant deaths were found to have occurred at the best-equipped hospitals in the country due to staff negligence and lack of competence, as well as deadly delays when hospitals ran out of blood for transfusions or necessary medications for emergency procedures, and thus dispatched family members to find and purchase them themselves (Kabali et al. 2013).

Even in hospitals in Bukavu, the large provincial capital of South Kivu, care and surgeries are compromised by daily and nightly power outages (implemented by the state electrical company, the SNEL). Outages over multiple days result in premature or ailing babies being removed from incubators and mothers attempting to warm them with blankets and water by candle light (Abdoul 2016). A nurse working at the hospital in the middle-upper class commune of Ibanda in the large city of Bukavu, recounted four babies dying when power outages turned off incubators. In 2016, in Bukavu, a medical tool was accidentally left inside a woman’s uterus during a caesarian section due to the procedure taking place in the dark because of a power outage; the operation to remove it was delayed due to the lack of power (Abdoul

2016). In rural areas, health centres are often the first point of care (Kalisya et al. 2015). In

Masisi, in North Kivu, 44% of health centres had no functional water supply; 60% had no functional electricity; and 74% had no infection prevention supplies (Vargas, Chynoweth and

Wazir 2013). The dearth of funding for health care by both state and non-state sovereign groups resulted in infrastructure that was so collapsed that health centers and hospitals were not only unable to avert many of the risks of non-violent death, they often generated more.

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Pasqualine: Withholding Care, Refusing Care

For bambaragas and their children, the most direct and dangerous effects of the political economy of medical care arose through the withholding or refusal of care and treatment in the moments between a complication and its outcome. Most often care was refused due to an inability to pay upfront for services, a lack of coverage by health insurance ( mutuelles de santé ) or the lack of a man to vouch for payment – all of which affected bambaragas more than other women. Furthermore, when abortion was suspected, care was at times refused or withheld until the suspected abortionist, often a fellow bambaraga , was arrested.

Rho, as founder of UMANDE , the newly independently-run sex worker association, had recently organized bambaraga solidarity committees in her rural home town in the mountains of

South Kivu, when one of the local bambaragas contacted her for help. She feared that

Pasqualine, age 20, was dying. Pasqualine had been living on her own since her father had thrown her out when he found out she was selling sex. When Pasqualine arrived at the hospital to deliver, she had little money and was in labour. After more than 24 hours of labour and no sign of delivery, it was clear there were complications. She had no money for an operation and no husband or parents to pay a deposit or bring an object of value as a “deposit” or “guarantee” and to vouch for the rest. The hospital staff had no reason to believe any money would come. “They knew she lived alone. They knew she had no one to vouch for the money,” said Rho, “and even though there is supposed to be some money on the district level available for emergencies, when you ask for it, often you hear ‘I haven’t seen that money. Have you?’” The doctor did not operate, he went home. That night, it became clear that she and the baby were in grave distress.

A medical student resident performed an emergency caesarian section, but it was too late. The

145 baby was dead. In the process, the inexperienced resident accidentally cut Pasqualine’s intestines. By the time, Rho arrived at the hospital, rather than perform another operation for which she could not pay, they had stopped treating her. “They were just waiting for her to die,”

Rho said. It cost hundreds of dollars for Rho to get her transferred to a Bukavu hospital, where she barely survived her injuries. If the beginning of her story was common, the ending was exceptional.

Virtually all private, public and faith-based hospitals for general admittance in South

Kivu and North Kivu require payment 70 . (Some sex workers were able to avail themselves of free services for residents of IDP camps or humanitarian NGOs). As Stasse et al. (2015) write of medical care in the DR Congo:

Unregulated fee-for- service payment by patients is widespread and renders the cost of

care completely unpredictable for the patient. Direct payment is requested for every

single intervention, be it the administration of an injection or the demand for a laboratory

examination.

It was futile for poor sex workers to attempt to access services in private hospitals that required payment, in full or in substantial part, up-front. However, even in public hospitals, it was increasingly common to require a down payment or “ caution ” before performing services, even for emergency services (Radio Okapi 2010). The cost of down-payments could run from $10

USD to as high as $150 USD depending on the complexity (and assigned cost) of the procedure

70 Notable exceptions are services for those in IDP camps and the MSF hospital in Masisi that is free and open to all. As well, the famous Panzi hospital in Bukavu, South Kivu and the HEAL Africa Hospital in Goma North-Kivu operate free of charge – but only for survivors of rape receiving rape-related treatment.

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(Radio Okapi 2010). (Even $10 USD was a full two to three weeks’ earnings for many women in

Maneno and meets the criteria for a “catastrophic health expenditure” (Ilunga-Ilunga et al.

2015) 71 . The nearest public hospital to Maneno required a caution or down payment before treatment. 72

Withholding and refusing care could be lethal, as it was for Pasqualine’s child, and yet the practice was routine. A survey of major hospitals in eastern and central DR Congo found that the lack of payment of the “cost of service to the patient” was one of three major barriers to providing emergency care (Kalisya et al. 2015). This echoes the findings from a study in

Kinshasa that sought to untangle the issue of persistently staggering maternal and perinatal death rates despite widespread hospital attendance in the capital city of Kinshasa. They found that hospitals withholding care until payment or purchase of medical necessities was a major contributor to deaths of mothers and infants. A review of cases found that “85% of surviving versus 44% of deceased women got the appropriate intervention within 24 hours, 40% versus

19% within two hours” (Kabali et al. 2013, 29). The delay in getting care also affected the chances of survival for babies born to mothers with serious obstetric complications: “33% of newborns born to women who survived were stillborn or died before discharge, while 55% of the infants of mothers that died, died too” (Kabali et al. 2013, 29). The study concluded that

“Women with serious obstetric complications have a greater chance of survival in Kinshasa if they have cash, go directly to a functioning referral hospital and have some leverage when dealing with health care staff” (Kabali et al. 2013, 29). Another study in eastern DR Congo also reported staff privileging people they knew for emergency infant and maternal care (Vargas,

71 Catastrophic health expenditures are defined as more than 40% of household income after food costs. (Ilunga- Ilunga et al. 2015). 72 In 2015, the hospital discussed changing this to a $10 USD first installment payment after three days (Cuma 2015).

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Chynoweth and Wazir 2013). The corollary, of course, is that without cash and without the privileged personal connections for leverage 73 , one’s chances for survival diminished precipitously. Most bambaragas had neither.

Health insurance cooperatives, known as mutuelles , could have protected women from some of the sudden costs of a health crisis 74 . However, most bambaragas were not covered by mutuelles and none of the bambaraga s in the core groups in my research were. Even the relatively modest costs of enrollment could be prohibitive 75 . As well, the mutuelles only covered health costs incurred in the districts in which one paid to enroll. Given bambaragas ’ high mobility, there was no guarantee they would benefit from coverage when and where they needed it. Moreover, many mutuelles systemically excluded bambaragas . Mutuelles often required individuals to join as a family and each family had to register under a male “ tuteur ” or male

“head of family/guardian” . The male tuteur is the only person who can physically obtain the mutuelle voucher to cover fees at the hospital and who vouches for the payment of the remaining

20%. One cannot be a tuteur to two families. When Rho sought to get mutuelle coverage, this presented an obstacle. She had no husband, her father was deceased and her older brother, who by necessity was listed as both her children’s père juridique (“legal father” 76 ), was registered with his own family. She was finally able to enlist a friend and lover who fathered one of her

73 Access through personal connections was classed, gendered and morally coded. For instance, married women or men might be helped out by an acquaintance but helping a bambaraga was generally socially stigmatized. As well, doing so could be dangerous for a health professional given that bambaragas were socially profiled for abortion and they might be implicated by extension. 74 “Mutuelles ” or health insurance co-operatives in South and North Kivu pay 80% of all medical fees and medications. For those lucky enough to have coverage, policies nonetheless present their own delays because they generally require you to present first at a health center and be referred and transferred to a hospital before covering hospital fees. 75 Adherence cost approximately $7 USD a year per adult and $7 USD per child at the time of my research. A fee that was not exorbitant but still out of reach for many women. One needed to pay yearly, usually in November to be covered beginning a few months later. As a result, even women who knew they had high-risk births often did not know they were pregnant in time to opt-in. 76 Children are legally obliged to have a male guardian or “ père juridique ” declared on their birth certificates. In lieu of a father, many bambaragas named an older brother or grandfather.

148 children and was not already listed with his own wife and children. Even for those femmes libres who could afford it, it was very difficult to find a willing man who met those criteria. And if they did, women were then placed in a situation of structural dependency upon that man in order to access their and their children’s health coverage.

As well, even when hospitals offered services without requiring immediate payment upfront, bambaragas were frequently refused services due to being socially profiled as unable to repay costs. Married women could sometimes secure treatment if a father or husband vouched for later payment, due to the perception that they could secure money or objects of value.

However, bambaragas were generally perceived as poor and without resources that could be accrued through kin. Furthermore, bambaragas didn’t live with men, and thus their housing was generally unstable, and this made them potentially difficult to track down and extract payment from if they escaped the hospital without paying. I once participated in a meeting of about two dozen sex workers from around the area beyond Maneno to talk about my research. It took place in a brothel where many women worked in the town of Miti. Plastic chairs were spread over the dirt floor of the empty bar area. The walls were insulated with old UN tarps. An older well-off bambaraga pressed me to investigate the fact that “ Bambaragas are refused at the hospitals.”

There was wide agreement. Another younger woman confirmed: “[At the hospitals], they say

‘Les bambaragas n’ont pas d’addresse ’ (‘ bambaragas don’t have a [stable man’s] address’) and turn us away.”

The risk of refusals of care were even higher for Bambuti bambaragas . Bambuti were poorer overall (IRIN 2010, Jackson 2004). In a media interview, a Bambuti woman living in

Virunga decried the lack of access to the most basic health care for Bambutis: “‘The nurses throw us out,’ said Ms. Nyiramajambere, ‘They don’t give us medication, because we have no

149 money. Our children and babies die.’” (IRIN 2010). According to the director of Minority Rights

Group, “One of the biggest problems is that [Bambuti people] have a lot of difficulty accessing any kind of public or social services, partly because they don’t have the means. They are systematically refused services. The management or authorities just say ‘You’re a pygmy, go away.’” (IRIN 2010). As well, many Bambuti women were assumed to be bambaragas . Bambuti bambaragas’ lack of access sat at the nexus of both gendered and racialized economic exclusion, profiling for poverty and discrimination.

Hospital staff faced seemingly few repercussions for such refusals of bambaragas and their children . There were greater risks of negative consequences for deadly refusals of treatment, if there was a male guardian, such as a father or husband, particularly one who was not Bambuti, who might pursue the matter with authorities. Bambaragas were often (rightfully) perceived as lacking levers of social protection through kin or classed connection, heightening impunity for refusals to save their lives and those of their children.

Julie: Detention, Debt and Indentured Labour

The extreme privatization of the health care system disproportionately extracted the

(social) costs of reproduction and child health from women and children and left them to shoulder ongoing risks which often led to later emergency health complications. This was particularly true for unmarried women and their children. Systemic seizures of bambaragas ’ wealth in the form of enforced payment or debt for health services were often economically catastrophic for women and produced further risks of hunger, illness and inability to get treatment for them and their children. As a result, payment or debt were also major reasons that bambaragas delayed or avoided seeking emergency care. Detention for non-payment of health

150 services (of mother and/or child) also created severe risks of hunger and illness, and it too was a significant reason that bambaragas delayed or avoided seeking emergency care.

Bambaragas generally experienced a combination of detention, imposition of debt, extraction of payment and indentured labour. Only wealth and classed social connections, at times, allowed bambaragas to escape some of their harmful effects. Rho, for instance, was far more privileged than the women of Maneno or Mugunga. She wanted to avoid the risks of an inadequately resourced public hospital, so when she went into labour she presented at a private hospital hoping for a straightforward delivery which would be in the $60 to $80 USD range. Just in case of any minor complications, she brought along $150 USD. However, the doctors assessed that she had serious cervix problems and needed a caesarian that would cost $500 USD. She did not have the full amount, so she was put in a taxi to take the long bumpy congested and unpaved road to the public hospital, which was the least expensive of all hospitals. This caused a delay.

When she arrived at the public hospital, they knew she required a caesarian – and for precisely that reason, they would not operate. Not until she paid. They assessed the cost of the operation at

$375 USD – almost a year’s salary for almost all Congolese (IMF 2015) 77 . This caused yet another delay. She was middle class and able to convincingly argue that if they allowed her to pay a down payment of all she had on her, $150 USD, she was good for the full tab. They proceeded with the surgery, knowing they could detain her and her child indefinitely until her bill was paid. Rho was far wealthier than most bambaragas , and so were her clients and social circle. Her lover and friend brought her money, as did her client who worked for MONUSCO

(the UN peacekeeping mission) client (upon inferred promise of the kiziri ), and her colleagues

77 Eighty-seven point seven (87.7%) percent of the population live on less than $1.25 USD a day (IMF 2015).

151 from the NGO she worked for part time. She was able to leave the hospital, pay the remainder of her bill, and have some money set aside for her baby.

Most bambaragas’ experiences though are closer to Julie’s. When Rho woke after surgery in the public hospital she was in a shared maternity room with Julie. Julie and her child could not leave the hospital, not because they needed care but because they were detained for non-payment. “They had been imprisoned for six months. But other women and children had been locked in longer,” Rho recalled, “there were babies who could walk .” Julie was a bambaraga who sold sex at a market down the hill from the hospital. Her clientele was often the porters who worked nearby at “ le beach ” loading ships that went back and forth to Goma, the capital of North Kivu. She had arrived with what seemed like a simple delivery, and so the hospital had not required her to pay upfront. However, part way through, there were complications. The delivery was already under way and her life was in imminent danger and so, it being a relatively progressive public hospital, emergency surgery was performed before negotiating payment. She was left with a bill that it would take her years to pay off if she were allowed to work. However, she couldn’t work because she was locked in the hospital until the bill was paid. Her mother had no money. She had no one to come help her pay.

When there were empty beds, Julie and her child would camp out on one. However, when the wing became overcrowded, they were demoted to a sheet on the floor. They survived on the one meal a day (usually rice or beans) brought by Apostolic volunteers. While stuck in the hospital, Julie got another infection. Rho maintained that the hospital would not have treated her again if it weren’t for the fact that she was going to die if they didn’t, and having a woman die while in detention could be poor optics, not to mention the problem of her leaving behind a child.

The procedure was added to her bill, which now stood at $700 USD. Julie became desperate that

152 she would never get out. She negotiated with a guard to provide him sex at night in exchange for letting her out at dawn to work a few hours moving heavy bags of sand on and off trucks near the market. The guard agreed, but required as a guarantee that her mother come to stay with the infant so he could be sure that she would not escape and abandon the child.

Rho had befriended Julie, and when she was able to leave the hospital, she felt pained at leaving her behind. She worried that the hard labour was dangerous for her precarious health.

Through her NGO work, Rho approached a woman politician for help and convinced her to give

$150 USD. With the $150 USD, Julie was able to negotiate her exit from the hospital contingent on her returning every morning to clean hospital rooms. She would not be given any health or safety protections to guard against more infections. The labour would not be paid, it would go towards reducing her debt over time. For an indeterminate future, she would provide indentured labour. During that time, she would have to arrange and possibly pay for childcare. She would see a cut in the time during which she could labour to earn, as she simultaneously faced the added costs of a child to feed and care for.

Such policies and practices in hospital were not rare. It was standard practice for women, infants and children to be forcibly detained in hospitals until the costs of delivery or of care were paid. Complicated deliveries (due to blood transfusions, caesarians or premature infants) could cost upwards of $200 USD even in “low-cost” hospitals (Tshibamba 2013). Although there are no official figures, one report estimated that at least 20% of women who delivered in hospitals in

DR Congo were detained for non-payment (Bongos 2010). L’Association des femmes juristes congolaises , Afejuco /Sud Kivu (the Association of Congolese Women Jurists of South Kivu), similarly estimated that one in five women in South Kivu were detained in hospital maternity wards for lack of payment (Fazila 2012). Media reports document women being locked in

153 hospitals for many months, even years, at a time. One woman, for instance, had been detained for four months for a $37 USD debt (Bongo 2010, Tshibamba 2013). Women are detained to pay for caesarian sections even if their child is stillborn (Tshibamba 2013) - deaths that are themselves often a product of delayed treatment due to non-payment. As well, the costs of emergency health care for infants and children were also disastrous. The median costs of treating severe malaria for a child were $79 USD (religious hospitals), $150 USD (state hospitals), $357

USD for private hospitals (Ilunga-Ilunga et al. 2015). Infants and children were also detained

(usually with their mothers) when no one was able to pay for their treatment or care (Kasinof

2017, Radio Okapi 2014).

In some instances, detained women are chained to their cots (Kasinof 2017). More commonly, the resulting overcrowding leads to women who have recently given birth (and in many cases endured surgical procedures) and their infants sleeping on hospital floors (Bongos

2010, Radio Okapi 2014). This was what bambaragas reported to be the case in the two hospitals closest to Maneno. One religious hospital detained indebted mothers and newborns in the wing for acutely starving children (some of whom are suffering from diarrhea and contagious diseases that are highly dangerous for young infants) (Tshibamba 2013). The conditions of debt- detention often create the possibility of exposure to infections for women, infants and children.

In some instances, hospitals recruited detained women they saw as having no chance of paying for indentured labour, cleaning the hospital and its grounds either while they were detained or after they were released. The widespread lack of infection prevention materials further put women and their children at risk for the duration of the indentured labour - until the debt was considered repaid.

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Occasionally, politicians wishing to curry popular favour make one-time grand gesture payments to liberate mothers and their infants. To mark Christmas in 2010, the Governor of

South Kivu publicly payed to liberate 29 women and their children from hospital, while a charitable foundation, in honour of a deceased politician, paid to liberate 89 women and children from hospital in Kinshasa (Radio Okapi 2010) . Similarly, religious hospitals sometimes released women at Christmas (Tshibamba 2013). Given overcrowding due to high numbers of detained women and children, such events could be a release valve for women whom they deemed had no chance of paying (Tshibamba 2013).

Detention (and, by extension, indentured labour for release) for non-payment in hospital disproportionately affected women and children for two reasons. Firstly, women had a high likelihood of needing delivery services or of suffering complications related to birth, miscarriage or (unsafe and illegal) abortion (see fertility and abortion rates above). In some cases, infants or older children were detained in lieu of mothers being unable to pay for delivery or post-abortion care (Kasinof 2017), though this was not the case in Maneno or Bukavu. Such arrangements were a means of trying to get some money out of women receiving no assistance from outside husbands or relatives by allowing them to exit to work while guaranteeing their daily return by confining their infants or children.

Secondly, when infants or children were detained due to non-payment for their care or treatment, women were most likely to be detained with them. (Radio Okapi 2014). Caregivers were either detained by the hospital or stayed with their detained children, fearing that they would be dangerously neglected if left alone. Even when men were legally identified as a child’s père juridique, I could find no documentation or report of men ever being detained in

155 relationship to a child’s birth or illness. It was always women. And of women, it was most often bambaragas .

Even when bambaragas managed to pay or endeavored to repay the costs of delivery or care, it produced severe economic hardship for their families. One study in DR Congo found that for 92.7% of female-headed households the payments for medical treatment for a child with severe malaria met the threshold of economically “catastrophic” (Ilunga-Ilunga et al. 2015).

Unsurprisingly, the costs of care were more likely to be “catastrophic” for female-headed households than others. Payment, repayment and non-payment all resulted in seized resources from bambaragas that left them more vulnerable to conflict shocks and difficultly able to provide and care for, or ensure the survival of themselves or their children.

Jeanne: The Other Children

Siblings bore an overlooked cost of many of the gendered policies and practices surrounding births and medical treatment of infants and children. Bambaragas’ children were frequently chronically malnourished. This made them vulnerable to even short compromises in their access to food and ability to get medical care. Yet, they often faced prolonged disruptions to these due to their sole parent’s detention or need to pay for another child’s care or upcoming delivery. The costs of detention for detained bambaragas extended to older siblings (often only toddlers themselves) differently than for most married women. Married women could count on the earnings of husbands, and potentially kin resources, to support children while they were in detention. Bambaragas ’ other children were often with another bambaraga/femme libre female relative or close friend, who usually had children of her own. Such care exchanges were not unusual and could often be protective ways of allocating food or care if they augmented the ratio

156 of adults providing care and earning money to children. However, unlike for labour absences

(discussed in Chapter 5), bambaragas returned from detention with no money (and, more often, debts), and while they were in detention, those assuming care on the outside often had the burden of feeding and caring for two groups of children – all of whom then faced deeper life-threatening impoverishment. (All of these dynamics could be repeated and aggravated if a released bambaraga , in turn, later became the caregiver for the children of a detained one, along with her own). Furthermore, the effects of debt and detention on children continued after their mother was released. Once a bambaraga was released, lost income and debts often hastened resorting to mobility strategies which further interrupted care of older children, and often breastfeeding of younger children, or rendered women more likely to enter relationships of dependency on individual men that could become violent and controlling. Lastly, refusals in hospitals and health centres to provide safe legal abortion, or to provide contraception or sterilization procedures without payment or a male guardian’s consent, enforced a risk of pregnancy, and thus of pregnancy-related mortality or higher ratio of dependents, again creating additional risks to bambaragas and their children.

Detention, economic seizures and enforced pregnancy heightened almost all of the known risk factors 78 associated with a higher rate of mortality in children under five in DR Congo for single women. Indeed, single women’s young children die more often than other children due to their mother’s poverty (Clark and Hamplovà 2013, Ntoimo and Odimegwu 2014), their mother’s constrained time to care for them (Clark and Hamplovà 2013); their mother’s residence away

78 The one exception of a clear increase in risk is breastfeeding cessation. Detention may support breastfeeding in the short-term as the only available source of food for an infant, however it may contribute to cessation upon release if a mother needs to engage in mobile labour strategies to compensate for lost income and to maximize the chances of feeding other children.

157 from them (Clark and Hamplovà 2013); a high ratio of children to adult caregivers (Clark and

Hamplovà 2013); and out of hospital births (Ntoimo and Odimegwu 2014, Kakudji et al. 2017).

Jeanne, for one, was very lucid about the risks that hôpitaux , and their policies, posed to her and her family. Her malnourished young children had had so little food as she attempted to save up for her delivery that neighbours took pity on them, occasionally bringing them small bits of starches or corn. She would have avoided the hospital if she could have, but the doctors told her that with her condition, to do so would be to die. Luckily, she was in Maneno when the labour pains began, and she was able to get to the nearest hospital. She gave birth to a healthy child. Her caesarian cost over $100 USD.

“I begged then for a tubal ligation. Please, please. I have complicated pregnancies. This

was my fifth. I have four children now. I cannot feed them. Please .”

The doctors refused; they said they needed her parents’ authorization. She told them her parents were long dead. They said they needed authorization from the fathers of her children. She told them they had no fathers; they were conceived in the kimbaraga . They refused, but after she pleaded, finally agreed to give her shorter term contraception. It cost five dollars and was added to her bill.

She was detained in hospital for non-payment for 14 days. She was lucky compared to the woman with whom she was detained, who had been there for eight months since giving birth.

For Jeanne, though, it felt impossibly long. It was two weeks away from her starving kids, unable to work to feed them. Her kids didn’t have enough before, but in detention she couldn’t even try to find them food or do something if one of them fell ill or caught malaria. Her friend and fellow

158 sex worker was trying to take care of their combined children, but unlike when she was away travelling for work, she would not return with anything and would not be able to work much for a while. They would all be eating less.

Two people interceded in her situation. Frédéric, the man from Maneno who had previously been accused of sorcery when his two previous wives and infants died in childbirth, had returned and become a client. He gave her $10 USD for the delivery and agreed to help secure her release by naming himself as the father and signing that he agreed to repay the debt over time. She agreed to the scheme out of desperation to take care of her older children. The hospital staff were skeptical since he wasn’t her husband, but conceded when a nurse, who knew

Jeanne’s uncle, took pity on her and lent her $45 USD more. Most convincing to the hospital administrators was probably the fact that there had been a rash of escapes from the nearest hospital and that the nurse agreed that the remaining debt would be docked from her salary if not paid on time.

When Jeanne returned from the hospital, Mpenda organized the bambaragas in Maneno to pool their money for milk and a blanket and they came and sang and welcomed Joseph, the baby, home. A few days later, he was nestled in a blanket resting on a bench next to Jeanne, in a ray of sunlight that poured through a gap in the shack’s slats. She moved corn on the fire that

Isidor had given her out of concern, to feed her children a meal for that day. Jeanne gently wiped the baby’s face.

“I have a debt now,” she sighed, “but if it wasn’t for that…”

Over time, Frédéric became abusive, using his assertion of paternity and reputation as a sorcerer to threaten and control Jeanne. Jeanne’s distress at his abuse resulted in a community

159 meeting where local authorities decided that given that Frédéric was the (self-claimed) father,

Jeanne should follow his wishes and live with him “as a wife” and he should provide for the youngest child. Jeanne refused to live with him, but felt little choice but to acquiesce to his demands for sex. Frédéric did not provide for Joseph, nor did he help with the hospital debt.

However, he threatened to kill Jeanne if she had sex with other men. Jeanne, however, needed to feed her kids and she needed to pay the debt so the nurse’s salary wouldn't be seized. She also needed to do so in order for her and her children to be able to use the hospital again if there was an emergency. So, fearfully, she continued to sell sex as best she could in hiding.

Two years later, she became pregnant from a client, inciting the wrath of Frédéric. This time, she became very weak and in desperate pain. During the last two months of her pregnancy, she was unable to stand and could barely move her limbs and had what might have been seizures.

Michel, a client Jeanne believed had fathered the child, who loved her and felt responsible for her desperate state, would come and wash her and toilet her and bring preachers to try and cure her. Jeanne couldn’t work and her children were starving to death before her eyes. People in the community sent word to relatives of the man who had fathered her three older children that they would die soon if something wasn’t done. They came and took them away. Joseph, the youngest, remained with her.

The community blamed Frédéric, the suspected sorcerer, for her children’s brush with death and her tenuous health. Jeanne’s uncle, also a sorcerer, was summoned from Bunyakiri.

Jeanne was one of three surviving members of a family of 14. All but one had perished during the wars from starvation and illness. Her uncle had faced similar devastation. In Jeanne’s telling, it was the magnitude of his rage at such loss that gave him power over Frédéric. If, as Rosaldo has written, the force of anger borne of grief could be expiated through the infliction of death

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(1993), the threat of such vengeance could also thwart further grief. “He refused to lose what family he had left,” she said. “He told Frédéric that if I died, he would exterminate everyone in

Frédéric’s family.” Frédéric became scared, his threats ceased.

When it came time for Jeanne to deliver, her client Michel, fearful that she would be refused care and die, sold land he owned to pay for her caesarian section. She was able to deliver in hospital even though she had never fully repaid the debt from her previous delivery because the hospital had long ago seized the nurse’s salary in repayment and Jeanne was now in debt to her personally. After giving birth, Jeanne slowly started to regain some strength. In the first few weeks, she still felt dizzy and fainted sometimes when she crossed the precipice of her house, and so she took Joseph and her new baby and rented a new shack up near Maman Bahati. The community did not expel Frédéric again this time. Perhaps, they fear him too much now, Rho had wondered. However, they burned Jeanne’s old place down.

Joseph never fully recovered, other women said. At three, he was small with a bloated abdomen and moved very little. Jeanne, for her part, missed her older children but felt it was worse to see them suffer and fear they would die. She was still struggling to feed Joseph and her youngest while slowly scraping together money to repay the nurse who took on her hospital debt from Joseph’s delivery. Three years later, she was still paying it off and believed it would take a long time. As of late April 2018, she still owed $13 USD.

The conditions of Joseph’s birth still reverberated through her life. The hospital’s refusal of a tubal ligation without a male guardian’s permission or upfront payment led her to have another high-risk pregnancy during which she could not work and feed her children. She had many symptoms that are often associated with eclampsia, a potentially life-threatening illness for her and the new baby that went untreated. The need to repay her debt continually took resources

161 away from feeding her children. Her dependency on Frédéric to leave hospital detention had been used by him to increase his power to control her and limit her economic independence and thus again, her ability to feed her children. All of these factors contributed to the collapse of her health and her children’s starvation, and thus to her loss of the custody and care of her older children and for her children, the loss of the care of their mother. For Jeanne, as for many bambaragas , the effects of the political economy of medical care in hospitals spanned beyond her and her new infant to affect all of her children. The harms of payment and debt, detention and enforced risk of pregnancy not only preceded a health complication and outlasted its outcome, they were compounded over time and through multiple pregnancies.

Camionne and Jibu: Delay

The risks of refusal of care, detention, payment, debt and in some cases, abortion-related repression, all led women to avoid hospital care or to put off seeking hospital care as long as possible, often until it was unavoidable or too late. This often overlapped with relying on traditional healing methods, turning to spiritual or religious healing, seeking the services of less equipped yet less expensive health centres over hospitals, or simply waiting and hoping things would improve.

One day, Camionne came walking around the shacks with Jibu, her only surviving child, on her back. Jibu’s head rested weakly on Camionne’s shoulders. Her daughter had been ill, and she had a deep pustulent hole the size of a dime on the side of her very swollen four-inch foot.

Jibu had lost one of her plastic sandals a few weeks ago and burrowing parasites or scrapes on the volcanic rock that littered the ground were a risk without shoes. Nyota had been treating Jibu with traditional treatments and methods, but she was not recovering. Camionne let out a sigh. “I

162 don’t know what to do. The hospitals charge so much money, sometimes for nothing. It could go away. Nyota is treating her too.”

The next day, it hadn’t improved, and Jibu still had a high fever. Concerned, I described the wound and symptoms to a doctor friend who informed me that Jibu’s infection showed signs of being dangerous and could have spread to her blood and caused sepsis. Rho, very concerned, gave Camionne money and we pressed her to go to the doctor’s office to get Jibu treated. 79

Camionne said she was going right away. She later recounted that in fact she delayed going for hours precisely because she feared it could be very serious. If the situation were very complicated and expensive, she might need a large sum of money upfront, and they could be refused and lose precious time, or they could end up detained indefinitely. She went to try and collect the maximum possible amount of money she could from the other bambaragas . In so doing, she walked the difficult line women walked all the time between waiting too long or getting to the hospital without enough money to pay for the whole treatment and being detained or refused. When Jibu started to look like she was getting worse, Camionne took her to the hospital. Jibu was immediately put on intravenous anti-biotics (treatment for suspected sepsis).

The medical personnel told Camionne it was a good thing she brought her in when she did; waiting any longer would have been very dangerous. Camionne was able to pay and so they were released. A few days later, Jibu was back to playing on the rocks and Camionne began to save up to try and get another pair of plastic sandals to protect Jibu’s feet.

79 Rho and I attempted to tread a careful ethical line. It was ethically impossible, for I and for her, to do nothing when someone was in serious danger. However, we were mindful that ethics prohibited the dispensing of benefits to study participants to avoid inducement to participate. Rho operated an “emergency fund” out of the sex worker association that largely came out of her pocket and was used to help sex workers (whether affiliated with the association or not) who were in emergency situations. I donated to it and continue to. We were clear on an ongoing basis that research participation had no bearing on assistance and vice versa.

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It was not only bambaragas who delayed seeking hospital treatment to avoid harmful policies and practices. Women who feared, or whose husbands feared, the costs of hospital care put off getting treatment for obstetric complications or first sought out less expensive health centres, causing sometimes fatal delays for them and their infants (Kibali et al. 2013). Families for whom treatment incurred catastrophic costs were less likely to go directly to hospital when they had a child with severe malaria (Ilunga-Ilunga et al. 2015). However, treatment costs were catastrophic for almost all female-headed families (Ilunga-Ilunga et al. 2015). Furthermore, the risks of refusal, detention and repression disproportionately affected bambaragas contributing to potentially fatal delays in seeking care between a complication and its outcome.

Escapes and their Aftermath

A series of remarkable events in 2014 and 2015, at the time of my fieldwork, gives insight into the extent to which detention disproportionately targets women and children, and of the particularly heightened desperation (not to mention courage and resourcefulness) that bambaragas experience in detention. It is extremely difficult – or not without significant risk- to escape detention in many hospitals. The general hospital in Bukavu, for example, is surrounded by tall walls and barbed wire to avert such occurrences. In some places, women are handcuffed to cots (Kasinof 2017). Perhaps most dangerous, escaping a hospital without payment generally means that you and your children are barred from any medical care there in the future.

It was thus quite astounding that, in 2014, one of Kavumu’s two public hospitals nearest to Maneno reported 129 cases of escape from detention. Of these, 107 were cases in pediatry: sick children and infants cared for in almost entirety by women (usually their mothers). The remaining 22 cases were women, two from the maternity ward. The hospital deplored the $4000

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USD in fees they had “lost” with the evasions and planned to address the situation through a new system of down-payments (Cuma 2015).

In January and February of 2015, during my fieldwork, the number of escapes was spiraling upwards precipitously. The hospital administrators attributed this to an epidemic of bacterial wilt that had killed banana crops that many women, both married and single, counted on as an added source of income to pay for their children’s care. At the time, many sex workers in the region were already facing economic hardship linked to the severe decline of mining economies they participated in linked to transnational intervention into “conflict economies” (see

Chapter 5). As well, in the previous months, active conflict nearby in Bunyakiri had disrupted many women’s sex work leading to lost income. Already 53 escapes had occurred in two months: 48 cases involving infants or children and their caregivers (almost always women, usually their mothers), four women and one man (Cuma 2015). The nurse responsible for hospitalization identified the majority of escapees as women with no financial resources who were young single mothers or women in “broken” households (Cuma 2015): common local codes for bambaragas and their children.

Jeanne was close friends with two of the bambaragas who escaped the Kavumu hospital.

Months later, they were located by hospital staff and detained again, away from their children.

Following the mass escapes in 2014 and 2015, Jeanne reported that the nearby hospitals had increased security measures. “Instead of one guard, they have two or three. So, that means there are two to three men that you have to ‘convince’ to let you out, not just one.” As of 2018, these extra guards were still in place and the hospitals now required detailed contact information of people close to bambaragas or who claimed to know them before treating them. These contacts

165 were used to trace and re-detain women who escaped. Otherwise, without significant down- payment, bambaragas and their children were refused care.

Shortly thereafter, a local campaign was launched to dissuade women from giving birth outside of health facilities. Bintu became involved as a community-relay. The campaign instructed women about the dangers of giving birth outside of hospital and about new penalties the hospital was charging to women with emergency complications if they assessed they had first attempted to birth at home or in the bush. Women reported that these penalties were between five and $15 USD, charged as a prerequisite to treatment. Given that a first vaccination was often given to infants at birth in hospital, women who gave birth out of hospital sometimes presented a few days later to get their children vaccinated. Therefore, as a further enforcement measure, women reported that hospitals charged a penalty fee to any woman bringing in an infant for vaccination who was “behind” the dates for doing so.

When I shared that I was looking into hospital policies in 2018, women responded far more explicitly than ever before with stories of what was occurring to them. And yet, Maman

Bahati’s response forcefully illuminated the newly increased dangers for bambaragas in sharing knowledge about infant, child and maternal deaths.

“ I knew a woman here who died recently with her baby (…) When women give birth at

home and there are complications, this causes them problems when they get to the

hospital…and then it’s too late. Now the public awareness campaigns are multiplying.

The hospital put in fines and women who birth in the bush or at home have to pay the

fine before they’ll touch them. (…)

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There is another risk for women giving birth at home. The women who help them are

considered to be mid-wives who encourage abortion. When cases [where women have to

go to hospital after a complication birthing at home or in the bush], they arrest the self-

taught midwives who assisted. That is why we don’t like to help women birth at home.

There is a woman right now in jail for helping a bambaraga here in Maneno abort. She is

a nurse from a neighbouring town. There were complications, the woman almost died,

she was bleeding a lot and the hospital said they wouldn’t touch her if she didn’t

denounce the woman who helped her.”

Prior to the policies , bambaragas’ were already often suspected of having aborted when they had miscarriages or gave birth out of hospital and either they or the infant had complications or died.

The crackdown placed infant and maternal complications and deaths out of hospital even further under the suspicion of being criminalized abortion. This heightened repression was particularly dangerous for bambaragas and even more so for Bambuti bambaragas like Maman Bahati given that they were both socially-profiled as abortionists and frequently delivered (or assisted each other with deliveries and other reproductive health care) outside of hospital. For the first time, when Maman Bahati spoke, she distanced herself from “self-taught midwives,” referring to them in the third person and no longer boasting that she and other bambaragas were the masters of midwifery.

Mpenda, the faithful historian of bambaragas in Maneno, spoke openly for the first time and summed up the past half year in a list for me:

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• In late 2017, a bambaraga in Maneno was rushed to a hospital operating under the new

policy following complications from a home birth. She and her baby died.

• A bambaraga from Maneno was refused treatment for complications due to an abortion

until she denounced the woman who helped her. She remained hospitalized in a tenuous

condition many months after the fact.

• In the first four months of 2018, one child of a bambaraga had starved to death and the

child of another bambaraga was on the cusp. He had regressed to the point that he could

no longer walk. In both cases, they starved because their bambaraga mothers remained

detained in hospital after giving birth.

“These are things that can happen more when they don’t accept to let bambaragas leave the hospital,” Mpenda said, “To lock up them up is to expose the others.”

The intention of the policy shift may have been to reduce infant, child and maternal mortality by increasing hospital births or it may simply have been to extract more of women’s wealth to subsidize the health system and pay for the social costs of reproduction. Either way, the new policy exacerbated factors that put bambaragas and their children at risk: refusals and withholding of care, repression, payment and debt, and detention. In so doing, it continued to rob bambaragas of their wealth, their freedom, and sometimes their lives.

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Birthing Each Other

Safari (South)

Francine was always popping in whenever a group of ladies were chatting. You could often hear her coming by the sound of staticky baritone voices reading the news on a small radio.

She had gotten it in the kimbaraga and always carried it with her (It was repaired and maintained by Isidor, the radio repairman who rented his shack to bambaragas ). Once teased about it by a friend, she shot back: “Every woman needs a radio. You need to know if insécurité is coming.

We could be attacked again tomorrow.”

In one fluid movement, she popped through the doorway and folded her body into the living space in Mama Bahati’s hut, sitting her purse on her knees. Rho, Mpenda, Mama Bahati and I made space on the small wooden bench where we were peeling greens, our feet occasionally knocking the large yellow jerrycans of home-brewed booze stored beneath . “He’s so helpful, always so helpful. I regret I could not afford to keep him in school,” Bahati sighed.

Through the lacy doorway, I could see Bahati’s 9-year-old boy Safari up on the roof of the cooking shack in fleece pants weaving new banana leaves into the roof and tossing charred ones onto to the wooden bench that served as her makeshift bar.

Past a couple houses and across the road, Jeanne’s three children played. Their thin limbs and swollen bellies, like those of so many children in town, bore the tell-tale marks of hunger.

Jeanne was gone at the time, eight months pregnant, walking 14 hours through the forest and across rebel and military roadblocks to glean dust in the mines and, with some luck, sell sex too.

“Did you ever travel that pregnant?” I asked, “I mean, what if you have to give birth and you’re not arrived somewhere?”

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“You give birth en marche.” Mpenda chimed in .

“But what if you’re in the forest?” I insisted.

“You give birth in the forest!”

“In the forest?” I asked “What??? How?”

Francine, in a gentle mocking of my shock, proclaimed “What self-respecting woman doesn’t carry a razor blade in her pagne 80 or her purse to be ready for this! We all do! When you find a woman birthing, or if it happens to you, you take the razor blade and cut the umbilical cord.”

She slashed the air with a quick and controlled flick of her wrist.

“What???”

There were shrieks of laughter at my incredulity. Bahati, quietly chuckled. Mpenda, tapped my knee laughing “Anna-Louiiiizz-euh!” and then nodded at Francine. Francine, stood up, held up her purse and with no lack of dramatic flair pulled out a razor blade.

“Tu vois, tu vois ” said Rho, “You see, you see. ”

80 A pagne is traditional west and central African wrapped skirt made of one long rectangle of cotton usually printed in bright coloured patterns.

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“Mais voyons, vous vous moquez de moi ,” I insisted, “Come on, you’re making fun of me.”

Then separate more serious echoes of “Non, non, non” arose. Bahati untied her pagne and showed me how she tied up her razor blade on trips.

She gestured towards Safari and said his name with slow emphasis as her eyes lit up. He was named, as most children were, for the circumstances of his birth: a voyage. I would later find out that she had given birth to him in the forest where she had lived with a rebel group trading sex, fish and cannabis. Eight of the nine times she had given birth were en marche in the forest or in a small thatched hut built in the forest when she was living near or at the rebel camp. She had never had any problems with any of her births. Other bambaragas helped her and she helped others. They taught each other how.

“What if you are all alone?”

“You are usually with other women. But if you are alone, you wait for the other bambaragas to come along the trail,” said Mpenda, who was Barega and had given birth six times in the forest.

“The forest belongs to bambaragas ,” Bahati, who was Bambuti (Batwa) put forth a claim she often made. Then, she added: “We find each other. We take care of the mother for a day or two.

Then she keeps on going or goes back. There are small markets not too far away, usually. If you find a woman, you can sometimes go get water or cloth to wrap the child, some sugar.”

“Do you do the singing in the forest?”

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Births were regular happenings around Maneno, and birth songs frequently echoed through the town. Women wove through the paths that snaked on either side of the main road, their acapella harmonies punctuated by the occasional sound of a motorcycle whizzing down the hill with their motors turned off and children scattering to get out of the way. When a new mother returned from the hospital, they accompanied her and the infant in small processions to her home with some gifts of oil or flour or sugar or blankets. Or if she couldn’t afford the hospital, they made a loop, from her house back to her house.

Those rituals seemed orchestrated around drawing a child into a community, into food and soft fabrics, into an orbit of song that carried it home. Generally, there was a division: the married women visiting one another; bambaragas with one another, with perhaps the occasional permissible overlap of a sister. The melodies and rhythms were the same for both groups of women, but as Mpenda put it, “the words adapted.” Bambaragas ’ children got drawn in too and wrapped up in the same joyful music. Did these children of bambaragas birthed in the forest get communally drawn in? Were they welcomed home away from a home? Were they enfolded in the same poetics of belonging?

“Oh, yes, we sing. We sing.”

The light has arrived. The light has arrived.

Bahati’s home filled with melody and mirth.

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Births are possibly unique amongst moments in maternal, infant or childcare. They marked, after all, an entry into the world and were weighted with decisions about which world that was to be. During my fieldwork in Maneno, two bambaragas gave birth, and both had high- risk deliveries: Jeanne in hospital and Furaha in the bananeraies , the banana tree fields. Mpenda had recently given birth in the forest for the sixth time with no complications. In Mugunga, no one gave birth while I was there, but Bintu and Divine had given birth (twice and once respectively) in the past two years, without complications, each time in the squatted shack with the help of other Bambuti sex workers. Jolie was in advanced pregnancy and intended to do the same. Between field work trips, Rho gave birth in hospital in a high-risk delivery in Bukavu where she had shared a hospital room with Julie, another bambaraga . Later, she assisted

Pasqualine, a young bambaraga from her home village who had given birth in hospital.

Although no women gave birth in the forest during my fieldwork (at least that returned to

Maneno or Mugunga during the period while I was there), births in the forest were a common reference point. They were the departure for women’s stories of giving birth on their own and with each other. The fierce pride and self-narrated heroism or light-hearted gaiety of many of these stories of giving birth in the forest, the fields, or at home stood out against the multiple elided losses and harrowing risks. This dissonance subsided when the stories of all the births were taken together. Women’s terrifying experiences of childbirth outside of hospital illuminated why some women were desperate to access hospital care. In turn, Jeanne, Rho and Pasqualine’s experiences of giving birth in hospital – its constraints, coercion, refusals, costs and still, its risks

– helped illuminate the reverse: why the bambaragas I encountered frequently couldn’t or didn't.

In some instances, it was simply impossible for women to get to appropriate medical care or to get it in time due to a lack of transport or paved roads or the latter in combination with sex

173 workers’ working conditions (discussed in Chapter 5). However, in some cases, even when medical services were nearby, bambaragas couldn’t or didn't access them. It is difficult to parse what role the exclusions from hospital care or its coercions and economic predations played in women’s decision to avoid hospitals and rely on each other and traditional care and knowledge for not only delivery but maternal, infant and child health. In one conversation, Camionne framed the two as very directly linked:

There are so many things we help each other out with. For example, Jolie is pregnant and

has no one to help her and we don’t have the means to help her. But we tell ourselves,

maybe she will give birth tomorrow and we won’t have money to pay for her to go to the

hospital. So, if someone among us knows the dawa (traditional healing), she can use it

[now] so that (…) she can deliver without problems. So, we will do that. We treat

everyone until they’ve delivered.

Bambuti bambaragas like Jolie and Camionne were the most likely to face refusals of care. However, there were also other factors that contributed to Bambuti bambaragas’ decisions to birth out of hospital. In the neighbouring country of Republic of Congo, NGOs reported that

“pygmées ” women were more likely to deliver in the forest due to cost and discrimination, but also to women’s preference for traditional methods. An elderly Bambuti woman interviewed said: “We still trust in our traditions. When a woman is at term, she ceases to walk alone in the forest. Once the delivery pains begin, she knows what to do: sit at the foot of a tree” (Séverin

2011). The dichotomy between health services and culturally supportive practices is not

174 inevitable or “natural” though. Rather, they reflect a lack of what Indigenous Maori nurses have theorized as “culturally safe” health services:

An environment that is spiritually, socially and emotionally safe, as well as physically

safe for people; where there is no assault challenge or denial of their identity, of who they

are and what they need. It is about shared respect, shared meaning, shared knowledge and

experience of learning together (Williams 1999, 213).

None of the health services women mentioned in Mugunga provided culturally safe frames of care. These only existed when Bambuti bambaragas cared for each other and for each other’s babies and children.

In both the South and the North, the bambaragas who eschewed health centers and hospitals for delivery entered into situations of profound life-threatening vulnerability.

Simultaneously, however, they evaded predations and controls that could have lasting impacts on them and their children, including their ability to keep other children alive. Furthermore, they often also enacted forms of cultural belonging and gendered solidarity. It was in this sense that birthing on their own could be not only self-determining but, in important senses, also protective.

This is how it could be, in the face of such risk, a source of individual and collective strength, of merriment, and at times, a means of caring for each other. When all survived, it was both a moment of grace and a triumph.

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Births in the Settlement (North)

Divine nursed her baby on one of the low benches in the dark purple light of one of the adjoining shacks where the Bambuti (Batwa) 81 sex workers squatted. I was trying to better understand what role the Bambuti bambaragas who lived together played in each other’s lives.

“Do you ever help each other out?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“How?”

“Well, we deliver each other’s babies,” Divine said, matter-of-factly.

Nyota, the eldest Bambuti sex worker who had recruited the other Bambuti bambaragas to squat the grounds was, as Bintu put it, “ l’accoucheuse des bambaragas ,” “the bambaragas ’ birther.” Nyota was a traditional healer, the daughter of a Bambuti sex worker who had been raised in a nomadic forest community until all were forcefully displaced. In the settlement, she was the main imparter of knowledge to the other bambaragas concerning traditional dawa or medicine for all ailments, but with a special focus on sexual power, birth control, successful pregnancy and healthy infancy. She frequently travelled back and forth to the forest to trap small animals and collect plants necessary for her dawa . As proof of her skills, she vaunted that in all her years of sex work, she had only three children which she herself birthed.

14 The term Bambuti, particularly among anthropologists, generally refers to a people whose traditional land is in the Ituri province in north eastern Congo while the term Batwa is used to designate a people whose traditional land is farther south in North and South Kivu. All of the bambaragas in this research who self-identified as Bambuti would be identified in most traditional anthropological or cultural classifications as Batwa not as Bambuti. However, “Batwa” commonly refer to themselves as “Bambuti” in the region particularly since “Batwa” can have stigmatizing associations (Akilimali 2012; Lewis 2000). All the bambaragas I interviewed used “Bambuti” as a self- identifying term that grouped all peoples racialized as “ pygmées ”. Out of respect for their self-definition, I use the terms Bambuti or Bambuti (Batwa) to refer to them and in the sense that they use it unless otherwise specified. In an attempt at clarity, I sometimes use the term Bambuti (Batwa) to indicate that others might use the term Batwa in a given context.

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Nyota’s dawa , her healing/spiritual/medical abilities, drew its power from and was practiced in ongoing relationship with the overlapping sacred spheres of the forest and the spirit of Kimbirigiti 82 . Kimbirigiti is known as a “great spirit of all forest dwellers” (Akilimali 2012,

29) or as the “forest divinity” (Kyangaluka Lumpempe 2012). For Nyota, he was “ le dieu de la forêt ” or the “the god of the forest,” or, perhaps more accurately, “god of the Forest”. Nyota adhered to the dominant conception of the forest and Bambuti (Batwa) people as “intimately connected and indivisible” and of Bambuti (Batwa) not as “ ‘owning’ the forest, but as belonging to it and being its guardians. The whole forest is sacred; the spirits of the ancestors and the forest are one and the same being” (Jackson 2004, 14). Kimbirigiti presided over Batwa forest initiation ceremonies of young men known as the “ yando ”. Variants on these ceremonies along with the recognition of Kimbirigiti’s special relationship to the forest and to the transformation of boys into men have since been adopted by many other cultural groups with forest ties, most notably the Balega (Akilimali 2012, Verhaegen 1966) 83 . The Batembo-dominated Raia Mutomboki rebel group reclaimed a shortened version of the ceremony as a precondition of adherence in the armed group in order for Kimbirigiti to bestow dawa on their soldiers to protect them from enemy attack (Stearns 2013).

Nyota maintained that Kimbirigiti had a special relationship and obligation of protection to the bambaragas, in particular the Bambuti bambaragas, linked to the dawa they inherently possessed. Nyota explained: “ Kimbirigiti loves bambaragas but it’s especially the Bambuti bambaragas that he protects because there is a lot of dawa in our vaginas.” If Bambuti bambaragas were killed, Kimbirigiti and the Forest lost the dawa . “That’s why he protects us.”

This overlapped with common beliefs among non-Bambuti about the magical healing properties

82 Alternate terms include Kimbilikiti and Kimbiligeti. 83 Alternate terms include Barega.

177 of sex with a Bambuti bambaraga 84 . For Nyota, practicing her dawa and birthing skills was a moral imperative: it reconnected her and other bambaragas to their special cosmological place in relation to Kimbirigiti, to the Forest (and its sacredness) and to the inherent gendered power and shared knowledge that was rightfully theirs.

Nyota was dismissive of “ hôpitaux ” and their ability to heal. Men pretended to know things they didn’t. They stole your money and tried to control you. Men in hospitals were no different. Worse, if you were very ill and went to a hospital, you would die because they didn’t admit they couldn’t treat the underlying condition, which, in Nyota’s view, only the dawa could address. It seemed all too familiar to Nyota. She expressed similar frustrations when I brought up the statues I had seen at the arts market. A vendor told me they were traditional Bambuti sculptures of babies. Their large bald heads were shaped out of ebony-colored beeswax etched with traditional facial scarring atop thick rectangular bodies from which short legs and arms were outstretched. The vendor had explained that men made these and they were placed near a baby to keep it safe from sickness and death.

“They are storytellers, those men!” Nyota uttered in disgust when I asked her about this.

She aimed her ire both at the vendors and sculptors who were all, in her view, in the same basket.

These were men fraudulently claiming to have dawa knowledge about pregnancy, childbirth or infancy for profit: “Men invent all that to try and get your money.” Worse yet, what they were claiming to be protective medicine, wasn’t. It was not dawa at all. “They can tell you lots of things, and yet, it is not that .” Exasperated, she listed different categories of related dawa . There was dawa for not having children when you didn’t want them, dawa for a healthy pregnancy, dawa to protect a mother at delivery, dawa to protect a child at delivery, and dawa for a healthy

84 These beliefs have sometimes been the basis for violent attacks on Bambuti (Batwa) people and in particular women (Jackson 2003).

178 infant. Once she had finished, she summarized her anger: “Men invent things to give themselves value.”

Later, concerned that I might fall victim to the charismatic predations of such men, she gave me a piece of pelt the size of a fingernail. The fur was greasy and akin to beaver. She said it came from a small furry animal that lived near the water and that she had trapped it. “You will take this home and place this in water while you are pregnant and when you give birth. When he is born, you will tie it around your son’s stomach to protect him. Do not deal with those men.”

Nyota saw both the hospital and false dawa purveyors as laying claim to gendered knowledge/power that was not theirs. This was not only useless but predatory. Unlike healing connected to the sacredness of the Forest, their practice enacted the inverse of an imperative of protection towards bambaragas .

When Nyota’s married adult daughter had given birth a few months prior, Nyota had been on one of her many trips to sell sex, get dawa from the forest, or visit relatives. Her daughter’s friends had gotten so scared at the first contractions, they convinced her that it was necessary to go to the hospital for a first birth, for safety reasons. However, her daughter had already received the birthing dawa from Nyota, and this is what she credited with calming the contractions and helping her deliver easily at the hospital. The incident reaffirmed for her both the need to share her dawa and to impart her birthing skills to bambaragas in the settlement.

Although women in the settlement trusted Nyota’s care and dawa , and treated her as the respected elder practitioner, she was not the only woman with birthing skills. Camionne and

Neema had been raised in the forest and had learned skills there, including, in Camionne’s case, from her own deliveries. Camionne once offered: “We share information with each other. Like how to deliver a baby. Like, how you need to keep your nails trimmed and clean. Once the baby

179 is born, you reach up like this, and gently pull out the placenta.” In fact, Camionne and Neema had each birthed one of Bintu’s children in the settlement when Nyota was away.

The maternal, child and infant health practice Bintu described the Bambuti bambaragas providing for each other was woven into a communal safety net of shared food, care and recovery. Birth support extended out both prior and after birth, recognizing the immediate food vulnerability bambaragas and their older children faced following a delivery and its necessary recovery time. Bintu once said:

If I am sick the others take care of me. If I’m not ok, [the Bambuti bambaragas in the

settlement] put together their money to bring me to the hospital. If I give birth, it’s no

longer just me taking care of giving birth, but the others. And after too. They make sure I

have enough to eat during the days afterwards when I can’t yet work, when I am

mumbichi . Mumbichi is when you have just given birth and you can’t lift things; we say

you are mumbichi .

In group discussions everyone seemed to agree on the special protections Kimbirigiti, and thus the Forest, had for bambaragas - or at least didn’t contest it. However, when Camionne and

Bintu invoked the sharing of gendered power/knowledge around maternal, infant and child health, they did not connect it to Kimbirigiti’s protection of them or the protections of the Forest more broadly, but rather to Bambuti bambaragas ’ commitment to reciprocal care: their obligations of protection to each other.

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Births in the Forest (North)

If sharing knowledge and practice around maternal and infant health was a form of shared power amongst women and of “taking care” of each other, it was partly through its preservation, transmission, reclamation and adaptation of living cultural knowledge. Importantly, this was occurring in a context where many young Bambuti (Batwa) had been and were continuing to dispossessed through displacement and repression. State actors and militarized-non state groups were (and are) violently expelling Bambuti people from their traditional lands and punishing attempts at trapping, hunting or living on them, including in the nearby Virunga forest

(Jackson 2004; Lewis 2000; Strochlic 2017).

I was sitting in Camionne and Jolie’s shack along with Neema and Bintu. We were talking about the differences in their childhoods. Neema was raised in the forest of Bufamando, which she fled during armed conflict. Camionne started her life in the forests of Virunga. Most of the forest was enclosed as the Virunga Park while much of the contiguous land that had traditionally been used to access the lake was settled, including with the IDP camps and houses in which we sat. Camionne was both born in the Virunga forest and gave birth there. Although members of both those Bambuti communities most likely participated in exchanges and links with neighbouring agricultural communities, both Camionne and Neema identified their origins very strongly with the forest. Bintu and Jolie - like all the younger women in the shack and most of their friends in the IDP camp - had never lived in the forest. Their families had already been evicted or displaced by the time they were born.

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As Bintu and Jolie listened attentively, Camionne began talking about her ancestors, how young women came to leave the forest in her community, how clothes were made traditionally from bark, how these were adapted for pregnant women and then, how one gave birth.

“Now, when the woman wants to give birth, it’s not on the ground. It’s in the air .”

There was a pause.

“I was born in the air. Up in the air. Up in the air .”

There were giggles at Camionne’s enthusiasm and swooping motions imitating an airplane.

In the forest, there are so many trees and the trees have trunks that cross over each other

in different places, and it makes like a bed and then, men will climb up and make like a

mattress on it, up there where women will give birth. And once it is ready, you are given

traditional medicines to provoke the birth because, now we are supposing that you are

due. Now, you climb up . There are other women who circle around the space. You climb

up and they stay on the ground. Now, you half lie down and you hold one hand to one

trunk and the other hand on another one and you push…and if you have luck, a child

emerges.

When the child comes out, there is a woman who will climb up fast, fast, with a razor

blade, and once she gets to the top, she cuts the cord. But before, there were no razors, so

they used bamboo. When you cut bamboo, there is a part that is very sharp. And then that

descends with the child and throws away the cord. Once she goes down, the woman who

has just given birth will try to force herself to go down too.

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In the bush, children didn’t wear clothing, even newborns. So, there in the bush, usually

there is a stream. There are no basins so often, for giving birth, you identify the place

where there is a stream and that’s where you will give birth, that’s where they will build

the nest there for you…So, when the woman brings the baby down, there are women who

will take care of, wash and dress the baby. To wrap the baby, they sometimes take very

soft bark or animal pelts that have been worked to be very soft, and the cache-sexe is put

on the baby and will start to be used as a diaper.

The woman who has given birth will show her child. Then, she will wash in the stream

and she will climb back up onto that nest and she will lay down and rest there with the

baby.”

“Are there bambaragas who still deliver in the forest?” I asked.

There are those who deliver when they are going into the forest now and if they are going

up (to Kitimba) and someone feels the contractions, we don’t stay on the path or on the

road or go to the health center. We go into the forest where we can help the other woman.

If you are alone in the bush, you need to find a secure spot that most people can’t access,

and then you take a squatting position like a frog jumping and then you will force

yourself to push.

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Neema interrupted to demonstrate the position. She then showed two other possible positions: one which was semi-laying down but pulling on trees, and a third which was laying down.

Camionne continued:

When you feel the child coming out, you back up a little and put the child to the side.

You rub the umbilical cord with your hand, you take the child’s foot as a measure, and

you cut one-foot length [with a razor blade]. You take string –and if you have none, you

rip a piece off of your pagne - and you tie up the cord . You rip off another piece and

wrap the child. You take what is left of the pagne , or if you have another you use that,

and you tie it around your waist, otherwise your waist will not go back to its normal size.

Then you take a small stick to help you walk and you take the child in one hand and you

start to walk. And then maybe, some ways away, you can find another woman. We are

always solidaires [we always have each other’s backs] and once you find a woman, she

will give you a pagne and she will help you to carry the child and she will take you home.

Then, later the Bambuti bambaragas will sing and dance.

But in the forest, it’s something else! We sing, we dance, there is a lot of meat. People

will hunt and grill the meat and they will collect wild yams and prepare them and then

you will drink honey. You eat meat and yams! You drink honey!”

When I listened to Camionne speaking, I was confused by how she spoke of both types of forest births in the present tense, as though they were contemporaneous but in different places.

But in terms of the births Camionne was specifically referring to, mostly they were neither.

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Earlier that day, at the very beginning, once everyone had settled into a seat and before she began her stories, Camionne had taken a deep breath and begun with a recitation. Each affirmation met with a murmur of ascent by Neema:

“I was born in the forest.”

“I grew up in the forest.”

“My family and ancestors were all born in the forest.”

“They lived in the forest, died in the forest and are buried in the forest.”

“This same forest.”

“The Virunga forest.”

The Mugunga IDP camps and squatter settlement sat at the southern edge of the parts of the Virunga forest that were enclosed as the park. Camionne’s intimate geography unsettled a clear distinction between forest and settlement. Settler, state and colonial geographies limited the

Virunga Forest to that which was enclosed in the park. However, the land we sat on was an extension of the land Camionne’s ancestors lived on. Although it was covered with volcanic rock, thousands of IDP tents and wooden shacks, and was no longer forested in an ecological sense, she referred to it as part of Virunga, drawing it back into connection to the larger forest and to Bambuti.

When the women in the settlement along with Bambuti bambaraga friends living next door in the IDP camps went into forested areas, it was usually to cross Virunga for many long hours by foot to trade sex with rebels, soldiers or miners 85 . Other women went through the forest

85 The exception to this was Nyota, who found it too dangerous, at least at the time of my fieldwork when there was active combat, and preferred to go on circuits to and through other forests in North and South Kivu.

185 to visit family. Given that most of the young women were frequently pregnant, knowledge of how to birth in the forest and without medical support was a key skill to live through the working conditions that allowed Bambuti (and other) sex workers to, in their view, better protect themselves and their children from starvation and to be mobile in ways that allowed them to keep ties to family and community of origin, as well as to traditional land despite ongoing armed conflict.

The reclamation and sharing of birthing skills and related cultural knowledge and critiques of masculinist power helped enable relationships among different generations of

Bambuti (Batwa) women and to forest (or Forest/Kimbirigiti). They were both central to and inextricably enmeshed with gendered networks of care that included shared traditional knowledge, food, post-natal care, childcare, sickness care and shared money for hospital fees in emergencies. Together, these authored individual, familial and communal possibilities of survival in the midst of violent attacks on such connections, illness and hunger.

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Chapter Five Sexual Labour in Armed Conflict

Chercher La Vie : Sexual Labour Strategies and Non-Violent Death

The dominant response amongst bambaragas in Maneno and Mugunga to frequent hunger and to the fragility of life in a context of armed conflict and extreme poverty was one of plaintive and pained, yet open and active resistance through sexual labour and mobility strategies, often in militarized environments and across militarized lines. This was frequently expressed as “ Il faut chercher la vie ” (“One must search for life”). In both South-Kivu and

North-Kivu, the recounting of a return from a perilously long journey or the planning of a departure to dangerous militarized environments to sell or trade sex frequently ended with: “ Il faut chercher la vie .” In its most reductive sense, “ chercher la vie ” alluded to the quest for livelihood. Bambaragas sometimes used it this way, such as Nyota explaining that some women went into the camps not as “refugees,” but as “ quelqu’un qui cherche la vie ” (someone searching for life). Ayimpam, in her study of women involved in cross-border trade between Kinshasa and

Brazzaville, describes “ chercher la vie ” as the “objective” of various “professional strategies and amorous strategies” and frequently adds “ ailleurs ” (“elsewhere”) to underscore it as an idiom of mobility in contrast to “ faire la vie ” (“to make one’s life”), a Kinshasa idiom for prostitution

(2014, 79). For bambaragas in eastern DR Congo, “ chercher la vie ” frequently referred to mobility, though not always. It implicitly included and centered sex work strategies amongst and entwined with other labour and entrepreneurial strategies. These were most commonly petty trade and mining work, but at times, included agricultural day labour and hard labour. Chercher la vie rarely referred to amorous strategies. Bambaragas often used the expression, particularly when preceded with “one must”, to allude to the precarity of life: its guarantee never settled,

187 never evident, never resting. In this sense it was different than the idiom of “ système D ” for

“Débrouillez-vous ”, the ultimate neo-liberal maxim under Mobutu to “use every means necessary for daily survival” (Jourdan 2004, 170). “Débrouillez-vous ” is sometimes translated as

“Fend for yourself!” (see Jackson 2002) but it could also mean “Do it yourself!” or “Figure it out!” implying a solution was at hand 86 . Implicit in “ Il faut chercher la vie ” was its grim corollary: if you didn’t search, you wouldn’t find life. As well, the life to which it referred for bambaragas was not simply their own. It was most frequently used in reference to their children: to the efforts, sacrifices and risks required in attempting to sustain and support their children’s lives.

In this chapter, I explicate the deliberate, complex and often coordinated sexual and complementary labour strategies that bambaragas employed and interwove with care and shelter arrangements to “search for life”. Notably, their work was not only important to them and their children. State and rebel groups were centrally reliant on bambaragas ’ various forms of labour and trade, and yet, they were simultaneously threatened by bambaragas ’ gendered autonomy.

These tensions were reflected in the variable and changing ways their labour was regulated. In contrast, transnational/national human rights interventions into local economies overlooked their labour entirely. Bambaragas thus had to navigate unpredictable shifts in their labour conditions in the course of changing alliances, outbreaks of active conflict and transnational/national human rights interventions into the regional economy. If searching for life was an unstable and often perilous quest, for most bambaragas , it was also an unrelenting necessity.

86 “Débrouillez-vous!” was also different in that it came to connote, normalize and legitimize predatory and violent economic behaviour such as soldiers extracting money from civilians at gunpoint when the state ceased paying them (see Jourdan 2004).

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Nancy Scheper-Hughes argues that “a high expectancy of child death is a powerful shaper of maternal thinking and practice” (1993, 340). In north-eastern Brazil, she described how impoverished mothers withheld care from undernourished infants until a child showed a “knack for life”. They perceived their child’s possible death from a “metaphysical stance of calm and reasonable resignation to events that cannot be easily changed or overcome” (1993, 363). There were some women in Maneno who expressed defeat at the unrelenting gap between their children’s basic subsistence needs and what they could provide, though it was rarely placid or accepting. “My six burdens,” one woman called her children. Another woman, overwhelmed with her inability to feed her children, said plainly, in front of her young toddler: “I wish I’d never had them.” It seemed less detached and resigned, though, than freighted with sorrow and apology, conveying that she’d never wished to bring her children into such suffering- a suffering, that pained her too.

In Maneno and Mugunga, children’s hunger was a constant and persistent presence and concern in conversation, in song and even in public arguments, and one which was continually countered with a stubborn commitment to the necessity to go “ find life ”. In contrast to the openness about child hunger, child death was not candidly discussed. “ Chercher la vie ” sheds light on this contrast. As much as the paradigm marshalled opposition to hunger, it could also potentially individualize blame and present a child’s death as the result of a mother’s unfulfilled mission, as life not sufficiently searched for.

Paradoxically, women in Maneno who subscribed to the need to actively and agentively

“chercher ” simultaneously adhered to a fatalism expressed in Christian terms about their own deaths. The latter did not quell the perceived necessity of labour and mobility strategies. Rather, it facilitated women’s engagement with physical risk and danger through a sense of invincibility

189 up and until God chose differently. “ You weren’t scared to go? ” or “ You aren’t scared to go? ” I asked, many times, of some plan to go through unstable territory or of previous experience near the front lines of a conflict, only to hear a variation of “ My life is in God’s hands .” This may also have reflected the perceived inevitability of physical danger. Indeed, if going to engage with militias members, rebels or soldiers was dangerous, staying could be dangerous too and offered no guarantee of avoiding armed actors or attacks. Both Maneno and Mugunga had been attacked by armed groups and armed actors in the preceding years, even if they were calm for now . In

Maneno and Mugunga, most bambaragas ’ resignation was to the imperative to go and to search in order to have the material basis to sustain life. Their implicit calculation that the greatest risk to them and their children was hunger and illness, not violent death, is, one might add, fully borne out by the evidence (Coughlan et al. 2009; Lacina and Gleditsch 2005).

Despite the survival stakes of their labour, women commonly and casually referred to their sexual labour as “ kazi ” (“work”) or the “ kazi de kimbaraga ” (“the work of prostitution”), apiece with and generally a preferred and better paid alternative to the other “ kazi ” they did to survive, from selling bananas to collecting gold dust to laboring in fields to hauling rocks. This is also notable in as much as even the kimbaraga services they offered differed from what is often the most recognized or frequently presumed form of sexual labour in academic literature (i.e. quick, relatively anonymous specifically sexual interactions for set cash amounts, often under the management of a third party 87 ). Rather, much as Luise White (1990) wrote of the “ malaya ” form of sex work in Kenya, kimbaraga often included emotional care work, food preparation work, bodily care work and cleaning work. Furthermore, it could be remunerated in money but also in minerals, foodstuff or other goods. Perhaps key to women’s perception of kimbaraga as work

87 See for example Bryceson, Jonsson and Verbrugge’s (2013) interpretation of features that define a sexual exchange as sexual labour including a set fee, a brothel environment, under the direction of a “pimp” or “madam”.

190 was that they negotiated payment, albeit in a spectrum of ways, from explicitly and upfront settling on price and terms (as was required by authorities in certain rebel settings) to a more subtle conveying of expectations.

Within this subsistence strategy, a small number of bambaragas in Maneno and other nearby communities in the south had managed at different junctures to find opportunities that came to be economically and socially transformative. With the money they made selling sex at rebel camps, both Mpenda and Bahati managed to buy small plots of land between 2006 and

2009 at a time when the cost of land was quite low because the town was “mostly bush”, in

Mpenda’s telling, and a dangerous area plagued by frequent armed attacks 88 . According to

Mpenda and Bahati, by 2014, at least six women owned land in town, all of whom were bambaragas and at least four of whom were known to have made significant portions of their money working in areas controlled by armed groups. Mpenda and Bahati were the first women in the town’s history to build on their land and to own their own small clapboard earthen-floor homes.

Mpenda saw women’s home ownership as having socially altered women’s status in town. It demonstrated single women’s potential ability to shield themselves and their children from eviction and from being repeatedly “chased out,” as Mpenda put it. In Maneno, to be a woman without a man was no longer to be automatically consigned with one’s children to a life

“sans adresse ” (without an address). Though homes did not eliminate the risks of hunger and illness to bambaragas ’ children, they mitigated them. Furthermore, by providing a stable base to which the women could return from trips for work, they facilitated Mpenda and Bahati keeping

88 They were not the first women to own property. According to the village chief, two bambaragas purchased small parcels between 1988 and 1990. However, they had resold the land before building any structures. Mpenda reported that one of the women, a friend of hers, had sold her parcel after surviving a massacre of sex workers in the course of an FDLR attack on the town in 2006.

191 their children. For Mpenda, her home represented all that she had poured into her quest to chercher la vie through sex work during two wars and a decade of recurrent conflict: “I put my soul, my time, my heart into my work.(…) [My home and land] are a trace I’ve left behind of all my work. Otherwise, there would be none.” In the remainder of this chapter, I search for the tangible and intangible traces of bambaragas ’ labour in an area of armed conflict.

I Won’t Starve, I Refuse to Starve: The Economics and Poetics of Sexual Labour Strategies Across Militarized Lines (North)

Maoua sat on a piece of volcanic rock and hoisted the jerry can she had brought from her tent in the camp onto her lap. Two other bambaragas with babies on their backs adjusted cans between their legs. The large five-litre canary yellow plastic containers were ubiquitous. They and their 20-litre variants were the means of transporting palm oil for trade, and often hung off the top of towering over-packed and over-peopled FUSO trucks. Maoua and the other Bambuti bambaragas used them to haul water into the forest to exchange for passage at the Hutu rebel check point. Filled with water, they also made a large weight, similar to that of a man’s body, that bambaragas in the Mugunga squat privately placed on their pelvises to strengthen and perfect their hip undulations and gyrations (“ le canyonga ”), a key sexual technique for attracting, keeping or overpowering men. Empty, they served another purpose. Maoua lifted a stick and started beating the can. Pac! Pac! Pac! Then her hand began tapping a quick beat and the two others joined in. Over the layers of percussion and rhythmic singing, Camionne sang out:

“I cannot.”

Camionne and Neema danced over the rocks in rapid movements with babies tied to their backs.

“I won’t starve. I refuse to starve.”

“I cannot” multiple voices echoed back as others joined in.

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“I won’t starve. I refuse to starve.”

It was one of the songs they sang with other Bambuti bambaragas as part of their informal band that sometimes jammed together at the settlement. They usually sang as they walked in the forest to the rebel camps, or even sometimes on the dirt “dance floor” at the rebel camp. When they went to other mines or armed group camps, they traded songs with other Bambuti bambaragas , but this one, they had written themselves:

Siwezi (*2) kulala buyo,

Na niko (*2) na kyangu kya mbele,

Kya mbele (*2) kya leta mutoto,

Kya nyuma (*2) kya leta mifuzi.

Literally, translated the words are:

I cannot, I cannot pass this night with an empty stomach

I have something, I have something of value, my vagina.

The vagina brings a child.

But the butt only farts.

Maoua, Camionne and the other women who wrote the song translated the meaning for me as follows:

I won’t starve. I refuse to starve.

I can get a client and I can eat. Because of my vagina.

Because of my vagina, I can also have a child.

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But my butt only farts.

Sexual labour and mobility strategies, particularly to militarized areas or mines, offered the greatest financial rewards and the possibility of complementary labour and entrepreneurial strategies. This was represented in song and in frequent evocations of the need to go off and

“chercher la vie ” or “search for life”. Indeed, there was little that sex workers could do to fill their stomachs near Mugunga, much less those of their children. Even with the two bar-motels

(ngandas ) at the intersection that ran through the area, at best women could hope for one or two clients a week at usually about $1 USD to $2 USD each. One day, as I walked to find a taxi on the road with Faida, who lived and worked in Goma but was good friends with a neighbour of the settlement, we passed Junia who exclaimed in frustration:

“I cannot even find a client for 500F (about 45 cents USD)!”

“Fuaga!!! Close those [legs]!!! Aaaah!!! 500F? ” Faida retorted. Then, sizing up her faded

USAID t-shirt: “Dressed like you are, you should get at least 1000F (about $1). Maybe even $5.”

Five dollars was unheard of as payment around Mugunga. No one had ever reported local sums above a dollar or two. Junia took a moment to look down at the T-shirt and dusty pagne, nodding in assessment, then threw back with a puckish grin:

“Ok. Buy then!”

“Toka! Get out of here!” Faida laughed.

In Mugunga, extortion, repression and detention from police and authorities in the IDP camps, as well as from government soldiers along the road at night, further heightened their food insecurity. If bambaragas wanted hunger to abate, they had to offset these risks and go farther afield to where the terms of trade were better and where the means to earn money were multiple.

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Women followed multiple different trade circuits but the most common was the closest: to the

FLDR base in the Virunga forest known as Kitimba.

So it was, that at about four in the morning, in the cool darkness, bambaragas in the settlement and in the camps would take the filled jerry cans and large empty woven plastic sacks and depart through the Virunga forest to the rainforest base of FDLR Hutu rebels. There, the rebels had built an empire cutting and burning old-growth trees to make ndobo , a special slow- burning charcoal. Almost all households depended on charcoal to cook, and 92% of households in North Kivu sourced theirs from Virunga (Dranginis 2016:1). The rebels had carved out a substantial share of the 35 million-dollar market for it (Yee: 2017). The trade route back and forth to the FDLR camp was governed through the distinct competing gendered modes of rule of the rebels and military. These included extortion, violence and unlawful detention/confinement which the women sought to navigate.

In the settlement, women would go in alternating groups every few days, leaving their children with other bambaragas . Neema sometimes went alone when she just needed space. This is what they recounted when they came and went from the settlement and camps. Along the paths, they would often encounter others taking the same route. About half were men, and of the women, almost all were bambaragas . Neema explained that there was such a high proportion of bambaragas because it was seen as shameful for married men to “let” their wives go to the rebels where it was assumed they were having sex with rebel members or could be raped by rebels or soldiers. Occasionally some married women did go to trade food for charcoal, but the women in the settlement reported that it was not common. Everyone would pay 500F (about 45 cents in USD) to government soldiers at the first barrier; the second barrier was occasionally overtaken by armed locals, but before long usually reverted to government soldiers again. Either

195 way, it required another 500F or 1000F (45 cents to one USD). When they got to the plastic bag attached to a stick like a flag and the sign that said: “Order reigns here”, they were at the FDLR

Hutu rebel barrier. They would hand over the water and, if there was enough, sometimes they wouldn’t have to pay 500F.

One could try and circumvent the barriers by walking through the forest, but the risks of being attacked were high. One time, the FDLR had shot at a group of people approaching through the woods and two bambaraga friends of Camionne were killed. Moreover, despite the organized militarized presence – or perhaps due to all the militarized presence – even the paths that were “approved” by military and rebels and ran to and from the checkpoints weren’t safe.

One morning at Julienne’s house, the returning bambaragas brought over Jeanne, a young woman who lived across the road. They had found her before dawn, lying with her baby on her bag of charcoal in the forest, on the path coming from the FDLR camp. She was unable to move after having been attacked – it was not clear by whom. They helped carry her, her baby and her charcoal back. They were trying to convince her to go to the hospital. “Poor girl, she will be too scared to go back. Who knows how long she won’t be able to walk for? How is she going to work and feed her baby and her mother?,” I heard two of the women lament. Nyota shook her head. There had been an FDLR commander who bambaragas from the area could go to in the past to report any violent incidents along the permitted path. He promised to dole out punishment if any opportunistic assailants were FDLR, but he hadn’t been around lately. It was the only recourse mentioned.

If women walked fast and didn’t avoid the check points, nine hours later they would arrive at mid-day in FDLR territory. Those bambaragas who brought sodas or beer or dried fish could start bartering for charcoal. Others would move directly to the makeshift dance floor by the

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“nganda ” or bar made of woven grass where they would try and catch the eye of a man, hoping to trade sex for a large full bag of charcoal, a few feet tall. This is where they would sometimes sing another song they had written that started with a rap:

Lalalaisha Unanumalipa lalaisha. Apana mulipa. Apana mulipa.

There are no taxes today. Come touch. There are no taxes today.

From the front, from the back. There are no taxes today. Come hold on.

Alternately, if women could not find a client or if they weren’t bambaragas , they could buy charcoal for 2000F (about $1.80 USD). The men, however, never paid for sex with money – the currency of payment was always charcoal and there was a very significant market for women’s sexual labour remunerated in charcoal. Women explained this as due to the fact that if the FDLR men had wives, they did not live at the camp. Some bambaragas reported that the

FLDR respected negotiation and consent in sexual transactions. Faida, though, who lived in

Goma at the time and was financially better off, refused to ever go to the FDLR camp because she had heard that: “If a man wants you and you say “no”, they put you in the “ cra-cras”

(handcuffs) and tighten them until you move your hips.”

By the late afternoon or early evening, women started their long descent back from the

FDLR camp. The sun always set around six in the evening and it wasn’t safe to stay overnight unless a woman had a longer-term arrangement and the “protection” of a man. Otherwise,

“anyone will do anything to you,” said Camionne. And so, as the day closed, there could be a scramble as bambaragas who hadn’t found a client lowered the terms of trade before they had to leave. Some bambaragas were desperate enough, Neema said in exasperation, to trade sex for “a

197 plate-full of charcoal, like not even 200F worth” (not even 18 cents USD worth). All the other women had eight hours ahead of them, hauling bags of charcoal that were almost their height in the dark, through the roads and paths of the forest. They sometimes hadn’t eaten since the day before. Exhausted, sometimes a little drunk, they often sang on the way home. They sang not only songs they had written but ones they’d grown up singing too. There was a song in honor of

Kimbirigiti, the God of the Forest, close to Bambuti and Barega bambaragas and with a duty to protect them, in which they replicated the sounds of bird songs resonating through the rainforest.

There was “ Zazingi ,” a lullaby of layered voices calling out gently: “Sleep, sleep now”.

When they arrived home, if they were lucky, they would rest a few hours before waking up early and walking a few kilometers to the market, lugging the charcoal on their backs. It was worth it though. If they had stayed home, they would have made perhaps $1 or $2, assuming they were lucky enough to hook a client. Or they might have made about $1 if they managed to get a day’s hard labour in fields or transporting heavy goods. With charcoal gained from selling sex, however, they could make 12 000F (about $11), and with that, they would clear almost $10 and could bring home food to the bambaragas who had taken a turn staying behind with everyone’s children. That day, they and their children would have a good meal. Their stomachs would be full.

If There is War: Shifts in Labour Conditions, Hunger and Violence During Episodes of Open Conflict (North)

Active conflict often ushered in changes in modes of rule, the gendered practices of domination and regulation of both state and non-state armed groups. These could produce perilous shifts in how bambaragas’ lives and labour were governed by militarized sides and

198 severely strain their attempts to “search for life”. During my fieldwork, fighting erupted between government (FARDC) and rebel (FDLR) forces. Trade with the FDLR was interrupted as the military sought to halt traders from accessing the rebels’ camp. The military then detained and tortured a number of bambaragas as their border-crossing became construed as treacherous and a security threat. The FDLR, for their part, sought to protect border-crossing in order to bring the natural resources they extracted to market; to obtain food, water and other goods; and to access gendered care, food and sexual services. Nevertheless, although the rebels tried to protect border-crossing for trade, border-crossers themselves, along with others who inhabited near-by communities, became potential casualties of violent attacks sometimes used by rebels in attempts to force the military to keep trade routes open. The suspension of trade contributed to individual and collective economic collapse for bambaragas at the settlement. It led to a pervasive hunger, la famine , that engulfed them and imperiled their children. Simultaneously, the risk became elevated that, driven by la famine themselves, the FDLR would unleash terror and rampage on near-by communities such as the settlement. The combination of persistent hunger due to the ban on their trade and the decline in their relative safety due to military violence, along with the possibility of a rebel attack, threatened to unravel the collective labour and care strategies that sustained bambaragas and their children at the settlement.

The episode of active fighting itself was not unexpected. The government had been announcing an upcoming strike against the rebels for a month (Radio Okapi 2015a). One day, we heard what sounded like heavy shelling in the distance from outside the shacks at the settlement.

Then, the sound of a large explosion made the ground shake. Camionne was close to the explosion when it happened and ducked for cover from flying debris. She arrived at the

199 settlement a few hours later, having fled with others from the Rusayo area. 89 Many, though not all, of the Bambuti bambaragas stopped going to the FDLR camp. Nyota said it was too dangerous to go and tried to stop other women in the settlement from going. A number of women reported that the FDLR had sent word to the community to keep on coming up. Too many traders had stopped and the rebels complained that they were starving without the money from selling or exchanging charcoal and without the foodstuffs men and women brought to sell or exchange.

Initially, the FARDC’s treatment of bambaragas who went back and forth across rebel and military lines was quite variable. Sometimes they viewed them as civilians in need of protection; other times they seemed to see them as akin to militarized adversaries. And at other moments, they interacted with them simply as neutral parties crossing for trade (and sources of private income extraction). Some bambaragas were blocked from crossing military check points and told by government soldiers to stay back from the areas close to military or rebel control for their own safety. Other women were warned by soldiers that they would shoot them or anyone else who tried to go through the forest to rebel territory. Nevertheless, some women reported that they could pass the military checkpoints if they paid the normal pay-offs and arrived before seven in the morning.

Then, a significant shift took place. When violent fighting broke out between the FARDC and FDLR, the FARDC began targeting bambaragas for violence and unlawful detention, specifically in relation to their crossing of militarized borders for the purpose of selling sex.

Yolande, Louise, Rose and Madeleine returned from Virunga forest where they had been at or en route to the FDLR camp, prior to Neema going. Louise was on her way back from the FLDR camps with a group of men and women traders when they were intercepted by government

89 See also Radio Okapi 2015b

200 soldiers who began assaulting them. She and other women were beaten and whipped as soldiers accused them of “feeding the enemy”. Three women were handcuffed, undressed, and brought with the others to the nearest military défense at Rusayo. Yolande had been stopped on her way up to Virunga and brought to the same défense where she was detained. She denied being a bambaraga . As a warning, a soldier had pointed to the handcuffed women, some of whom, she recalled, could barely walk because they had been whipped so badly, indicating that they were

“femmes de FDLR ” (FDLR women or wives). Rose was descending from the camp when she saw the soldiers beating women and turned back with a group, running towards the FDLR. The

FLDR, she recounted, began to shoot at them in the forest before they could get to the camp, confusing them for an attack. Madeleine was at the FDLR camp where she reported that at the sound of gun shots, the armed group asked all women and all men from the community to leave and sent them through the woods on a path that went around the military checkpoints and let them out of the forest farther north-west. She and the other women dropped their charcoal and ran.

Outside of conflict periods, both the FDLR rebels and the government soldiers not only tolerated, but generally encouraged, bambaragas’ mobility across militarized borders to the

FLDR camp. The FARDC soldiers relied on the extortion of mobile traders, including the large proportion of these who were bambaragas , to supplement their incomes. This was not an anomaly. As an institution, the military relied on systemic extortion to supplement soldiers’ pay

(Baaz and Olsson 2011; Verweijen 2013) 90 . During the brief period of fighting, however, the

FARDC violently targeted bambaragas , framing them as a treacherous danger to be addressed

90 Baaz and Olsson (2011) argued that this dynamic had been particularly relied upon to finance the integration of “rehabilitated” armed groups into the military’s ranks. Verweijen (2013), for her part, encourages an examination of the civilian-military dynamics in legitimizing military revenue extraction.

201 through what was in effect gendered state torture (i.e. beating or whipping women tied up in unlawful military detention). In doing so, the FARDC notably apprehended bambaragas neither as civilians in need of protection, nor as military enemies, but specifically as gendered traitors.

If bambaragas embodied gendered treachery to the military and were thus legitimate targets for violent punishment, it was due to their intimate labour and trade across militarized lines, not due to any indication of militaristic complicity or engagement. The accusation of “feeding the enemy” leveled at bambaragas as they were attacked notably deployed a trope of domestic gendered nurturance (feeding) rendered dangerous in its dual transgression of both domestic limits and gendered sovereign boundaries. It conjured both the offense of providing intimate care and sustenance to men who were not their relatives/spouses and to whom they did not “belong” and of providing their labour to a group making competing sovereign claims. Due to their autonomy, bambaragas were always a security threat to armed forces that risked being acted upon. However, the economic benefits that the government soldiers stationed around the rebel camp could extract from their labour and mobility appeared to generally outweigh this concern until open conflict, if briefly, unsettled the calculus.

The FDLR were positioned differently with regards to women’s border crossing and therefore reacted differently when fighting occurred. The FDLR were dependent on all traders for access to goods, but they particularly depended on women for bringing foodstuffs and for sexual and care services. Additionally, in some settings, it was reported that the FDLR used bambaragas for particularly sensitive services, such as ferrying phones back and forth from rebel camps for recharging. The FDLR’s evacuation of all traders for their safety back to neighbouring communities at the sound of gunfire suggests that at the beginning of the conflict, the FDLR

202 viewed both women and men traders either as civilians or distinctly as border-crossers whose border-crossing was necessary to the armed group and thus worthy of protection.

Later, as trade was suspended, the FDLR communicated to authorities what many bambaragas interpreted as a threat to pillage and attack neighbouring civilian communities if the military did not allow border-crossers to resume their trade circuit. The threat drew its power in part from the FDLR’s reputation for violently plundering and attacking communities to get food, wealth or to abduct and enslave people, women in particular. Bambaragas and other traders across militarized lines lived in the civilian locales ostensibly being threatened. In fact, bambaragas living without men, like the women border-crossers in the settlement, were particularly vulnerable to such attacks, at times being specifically targeted for looting, enslavement or killing. 91 It appears that as conflict interrupted trade, the FDLR had no interest in protecting either civilians or border-crossers themselves, only a desperate desire to protect trade and their access to gendered service labour. Later, as fighting subsided, the FDLR reportedly specifically interpellated single women as border-crossers, reaching out to single women in and around the settlement to offer them inducements to return to crossing borders for trade. The shift in the FDLR’s modes of rule during the conflict highlight just how essential bambaragas’ and other border-crossers’ trade was to the armed group. Indeed, it was important enough to become a stake in the conflict itself. It also illustrates how simultaneously, when conflict compromised trade for long enough, bambaragas or border-crossers themselves became potentially disposable in pursuit of regaining it. This echoes what Enloe has written about women “camp followers”

91 Single women being disproportionately targeted for abduction and enslavement by armed groups is supported by hospital intake statistics (see Bartels et al. 2010). The targeting of bambaragas by the FDLR in particular was a pattern reported in South Kivu. One reason reported by bambaragas and others was that community members would attempt to divert FLDR to attack and abduct bambaragas instead of “their” women. Another possible reason was that if rebels wanted to abduct and enslave a large number of women, attacking spaces where bambaragas lived or worked together meant they could find many women in one place and a lower risk of armed defense or retaliation than in homes with men.

203 who historically accompanied military encampments doing an array of gendered service work.

Though their labour was indispensable to large military forces, the women who performed it were collectively treated as “dispensable , disreputable” and ultimately, replaceable (2000, 40).

The combination of the cessation of trade, violent attacks by the military and the possibility of FDLR violence destabilized bambaragas’ strategies to “search for life”. Episodes of conflict are known to usher in changes to women’s labour burdens and possibilities. Men’s absence in periods of combat can increase women’s work responsibilities while also opening up the possibilities of more non-traditional labour (El-Bushra 2003; Theidon 2012). . Combat can also increase women’s reproductive labour due to (at times coercive) spousal and communal pressure on women to replace those “lost” to wartime mortality (Jok 1999). Bambaragas , in contrast, suffered from a loss of ability to labour. Given that their work was across militarized lines, active fighting constricted their ability to earn a livelihood and, in the process, it also compromised their ability to provide the reproductive labour necessary to their children’s survival.

The day after the explosion, Neema went through the military checkpoints up to the rebel camp in an attempt to at least find enough charcoal for the bambaragas at the settlement to cook with. There was nothing by the time she got there. The FDLR market place was deserted.

She came back with the news that one of their favourite government soldiers at a checkpoint was dead with others, including a young boy from the neighborhood named Cédric. The soldiers had forced him to be the “ éclaireur ” or guide to the rebel camp, she reported. The UN News later reported he and another boy had been made to transport artillery for the government soldiers and were killed by the FDLR (Radio Okapi 2015b).

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When trade ceased, the price of charcoal soared. A small basket of charcoal at the market sold for $5, at least 10 times the price before conflict had erupted. This would have benefitted the women, had they had any to sell – but they didn’t. Their access to trading sex with the armed group (and the complementary side strategies of trading food and other goods or services) in exchange for charcoal for resale were cut off. The local sexual labour market, already overwhelmed with too much offer and too little demand, provided paltry economic compensatory strategies. For sex workers without a partner with an alternative income, there was little to cushion the blow. Bambaragas in the settlement generally provided each other with an economic security net that palliated the economic strain any individual bambaraga faced, but they were all hit at once. What’s more, in the settlement, they were in the difficult position of needing to buy charcoal in order to cook their own food. All the bambaragas in the settlement lost their incomes at the same time as the cost of one of their necessary staples sky-rocketed.

After a few days, women began to feel the effects of hunger. Camionne walked through the grasses to where we sat, looking dejected. Normally boisterous, she responded to Faida’s greetings with: “I have malaria.” Malaria was particularly dangerous if you were already weakened from hunger. Faida responded immediately in a serious tone: “If you have malaria, you need to go get the medication.” Camionne responded exhausted: “It must be the famine giving me the malaria. It’s the famine, it’s making me think of malaria and giving me malaria.”

Faida laughed loudly: “The famine is giving you malaria?” Camionne laughed along but insisted:

“It’s the famine doing this to me.” Assessing Camionne’s weakness and demeanor, Nyota enjoined: “It’s the famine”.

Even though the conflict had only just begun, the question of whether and how the bambaragas could wait it out became pressing. Some women in the settlement turned to

205 considering other mobile labour tactics: going farther away to other armed group camps or to mines under rebel or military control. Camionne began preparations to return to the mines around Pinga, deep in the interior of the province, a zone that was both notoriously unsafe and potentially lucrative. However, longer labour mobility circuits were now difficult to actualize too. In order to ensure children received adequate care and food, the latter strategies depended on work rotations that were a few weeks long, during which some sex workers stayed behind in the settlement to care for children; occupy the bambaraga housing in the settlement to maintain their right to it against persistent external threats; and reinvest sex work earnings sent back by those away in petty market trade. The system also generally depended on those who were travelling leaving the bambaragas who remained with an initial amount of money to cover the costs of food until more funds were sent. The pressure of hunger made it unclear how long anyone could wait at the settlement with children for income to arrive from far away. Worse, it was unclear anyone should. The conflict’s potential to spill-over into the settlement and camps created safety risks to anyone left behind.

Prolonged hunger or “ la famine ,” Nyota explained, was exhausting, disorienting, and fuelled, in her telling, a particular kind of male violence. When it affected militarized men, she explained, it could cause a more fearsomely unbridled and chaotic aggression than the tactical combat between militarized adversaries that happened when it was “just war.” “We’re scared,”

Nyota said, “because the FDLR wrote a letter to authorities to say: ‘We depend on there, [on trade with the nearby communities]. We can’t die of hunger.’” To Nyota, the threat of the message was clear: “If [the FLDR members] come down [to the camps and settlement] looking for food, they will all come down…” In other words, the FDLR would pillage and, in famine-

206 fuelled madness, they would attack - like the many times they had done so before they began getting sufficient income from trade.

If women hadn’t personally experienced the FDLR’s prior attacks, they had heard how branches of the FDLR in the south, which had far less developed trade, were said to be distinctly dangerous due to their repeated plunder and assault on local communities (Morvan 2005). Other women shared Nyota’s fear. Their assessment was further supported by evidence: whereas trade is associated with more conciliatory relationships between armed groups and communities, an absence of trade is linked to a dynamic of “parasitic” pillaging to sustain their existence (Zahar

2000). Others worried too about the government soldiers stationed nearby. Retreating FARDC soldiers had pillaged and attacked near-by a few years before (Hogg and Stoddard 2012).

The window of time in which Nyota would risk staying was closing, she reported. She had tried to get day labour as a farmworker, but hunger left her without sufficient strength to do the work. She had already bundled up her belongings.

“ I don’t care about shots fired in war because wherever I go, those people become like

my family. My problem is famine. The FDLR depend on us and we depend on them.”

“Where will you flee, Nyota?” I asked: “To Ziralo? There is war around there now.”

“Minova, Ziralo, Bufamando…I am like a butterfly. I go to my place. If there is war, then

I go to another place. If war doesn’t come here [to the settlement], the way this is going,

we will die of famine because we depend on [the FDLR base in the Virunga forest]. (…)

Now, I’m like someone who’s gone bankrupt .”

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If the FDLR were dependent on bambaragas for their economic pursuits, so too were the bambaragas on the FDLR. (The specific FARDC units stationed nearby, by contrast, were not as significant a source of income for most women). The FDLR were nonetheless also, to a degree, replaceable to women who could move and seek out other groups and encampments of men. As they became hungrier and more afraid, some bambaragas contemplated the need to leave the settlement for an undetermined length of time. However, in recent years, they had faced down persistent attempts to force them out of their housing by military soldiers and other locals.

Leaving the shacks in the settlement unoccupied was almost certainly to relinquish them, and crucially, the settlement was more than just shared housing. It provided a social and cultural safety net for the Bambuti bambaraga families who lived there. In peace time, it enabled collective labour and care strategies which made it possible for bambaragas , in some cases, for the first time in their lives, to keep their children in their care rather than placing them long-term with others for their survival. So, even as some bambaragas made preparations to flee, they actually held out. The hope, and at times the barbed criticism, was that the conflict was all for show and that each side would soon be invested in resuming trade. The latter, at least, proved accurate.

The FDLR continued to send messages to the community, and to the bambaragas in particular, that mobile traders should return to the rebel camp. They sent word that women who had dropped their charcoal on the path fleeing the sound of gun shots should come reclaim it.

Almost a week after the active fighting began, a bambaraga reported that the FARDC at Rusayo announced in public that border-crossers could and should return. At the same time, the military were publicly telling media they had captured rebel territory and killed 182 rebels (Radio Okapi

2015d). In the following days and weeks, the conflict subsided. Women reported that trade had

208 resumed. The FARDC soldiers went back to letting the bambaragas pass through the checkpoints and taking their financial cut. Nyota unpacked her bundle. Camionne regained some strength. Neema was ready to return. They prepared to get moving again. Back to the FDLR.

And they would try their luck farther too. Camionne prepared to go the mines and armed group camps around Pinga. However, they would leave their belongings and children behind in the settlement and the other bambaragas would wait with the children for the merchandise for resale, the money, the food and, for their turn to go.

The Movement of Money: Sex Work and Other Work in Mining Environments (North and South)

Jeanne: Combining Work at the Mines (2014)

Working in and around mines was an important labour strategy for bambaraga and means of chercher la vie , especially when sex work closer to home became insufficient to ward off hunger, more hazardous or simply impossible. The wealth concentrated in mines also gave rise to perceptions of them as particularly alluring, economically transformative and dangerous.

This reflected the fact that mining environments in a militarized context had their own specific risks, opportunities and competing regulations of gender that bambaragas had to weigh and contend with.

Women could make substantial earnings by selling or trading sexual services alone or in combination with other care and food services to male miners in mines under either civilian, military or rebel control. Sex work could vary between shorter- and longer-term engagements with clients depending on the terms and conditions of the offer, the range of possible working arrangements permitted by given authorities or militarized groups, and women’s personal circumstances and obligations. Bambaragas also supplemented their incomes with more directly

209 mining-related work or by selling alcohol, cannabis, food, clothes or sundry items to men and to other bambaragas at the mines, at mining camps or in near-by communities. The latter provided complementary income streams, a means to interact with men and attract clients and, at times, a necessary cover for women’s sex work. Indeed, masking one’s sex work was an important strategy in contexts where bambaragas or femmes libres were banned from mines, where there was acute local discrimination against bambaragas or “ prostituées ” (prostitutes) or where bambaragas were at risk of violent targeting by militarized groups as suspected “spies” or

“traitors”.

At times, bambaragas traded services and goods with miners directly in exchange for gold or other minerals, which they could then profit from re-selling. Some women reported using the services of near-by middle-men who purchased minerals for resale to weigh and verify the value of a mineral being offered in payment. While most bambaragas engaged in “petty trade” at the mines, a select few women became larger scale traders and middle-women involved in mineral re-sale. Some bambaragas were also directly involved in mining work through panning, dust-collecting, transporting and stocking of minerals.

Jeanne was one of a number of women in and around Maneno who travelled regularly to the mines. As she prepared for one such trip, she explained how she and other bambaragas worked and the ways in which they combined labour and entrepreneurial streams.

There are mines and cassiterite (tin oxide) [in Walikale]. Back in the day, I went so often

because there were so many [sex work] clients. The miners had so much money and so

you could easily make money. You sacrifice yourself to walk the whole day because

easily, you will have money.

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The mines are all different. Some are a hill, others are flat, but they have detected something underground. (…) The entrance to the mine can be here, next to a centre

(town), but they can go on underground. So, someone goes in here and come out on the other side of town. You just thought he was in the mine, but he was going under the houses!

If you are known at the mine or you have a good relationship with people who live by the mines or you have clients who don’t mind, then, when all the miners are gone: they’ve come out from underground or there’s nothing left [to mine in that mine], you [women] can go underground into the mines to collect whatever dust may have fallen.

I go into the mines often. Even next to where Viviane [Jeanne’s sex worker friend who she lived with]’s family lives up in Itebero, there is a mine. When it rains and there are channels of water, you can enter the mine from there and try and find dust in the water.

You can also go to where people sieve the water for minerals and search for the dust

[they leave behind].

I go down underground into the mines when all the others have left, when all the miners are gone. When they hit the rocks, there is dust that falls. He takes the rock and I go search for the dust. He is aiming for a rock this big [about the size of a pencil eraser], but it might leave small traces that I and other women will pick up. [Down, in the dark,] you will see something so light, so very light and shiny and you try and try and gather it.

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There is one mine where when it rains, the water runs off from inside with the rain. Other mines have water that runs through the bottom of the mines and you can find where that water pours out and search it for any dust that fell into it. Or you can go to where they have finished sieving the minerals and search for dust that fell.

If you collect a coffee spoon [of dust], you can get 500F or 1000F (at the time, about 45 to 90 cents USD, far less as of 2018). It depends on the quality of what you found.

Lots of women enter the mines [to collect dust], if you have good relationships with the owners or the guards or the chiefs, then you can enter without any problems.

All the women are bambaragas , even those who pretend they are not because they come with merchandise to sell. They are coming to sell sex and seize the occasion to unload merchandise and to draw in lots of new clientele [with their merchandise]…and then to look for dust at the end.

All the men there are clients. When there’s mouvement d’argent ( “the movement of money” or money flowing), then you don’t even have the courage to go look for dust because you know [men] are there and they don’t have wives there [and selling sex to them is a better and safer source of money]. Then, everything they mine there is for us, for us women who are there because they won’t bring anything to their families. Or, when they get money, they take half and send half to their families and the rest they share with us.

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When there’s no longer mouvement d’argent (money flowing) [from mining into sex

work], that’s when each women goes to search for dust and you combine it all. When you

buy your merchandise, you can come and spend a week selling it and while you are

selling it, you are also receiving [sex work] clients. You can have so and so many clients

a day, or you can have a client by the week. It depends, but you mix it all up. When there

isn’t enough money flowing [into sex work], you combine it all: you can sell sex, sell

your merchandise and go collect dust in the mines.

Jeanne wanted to go back up to the mines in Walikale in North Kivu. It was between 13 and 18 hours of walking steadily, through the forest, and up into the hills of Walikale to get up to the edge of the area where she hoped to go. It was ten hours on a motorcycle if the roads were passable and if the motorbike encountered no mechanical problems. That was a rare feat. Then, it would be farther still to get to the gold mines. Jeanne was eight months into a pregnancy that had complications. She assured me the journey was worth it.

Bambaragas at the Mines The central place of mines in many bambaragas ’ labour trajectories was not new. For many older women, it predated the years of war and conflict. Maman Bahati spoke of how in the decades prior to the wars, she and other bambaragas traded sex at the mines for small pieces of gold which, once weighed and inspected, they wrapped in hidden knots in their pagnes . Labour at the mines changed significantly with the conflict, however. The Congolese wars coincided with a surge in global demand for coltan, a key material in modern digital electronic devices, such as cellphones and computers (Jackson 2002). During this boom, the Congolese, Rwandan

213 and Ugandan armies and proxy militias took over many mines in the east of the country and illegally smuggled minerals out, both financing the war and filling Rwandan and Ugandan national coffers in the process (Nest, 2011; United Nations 2002). In some parts of eastern DR

Congo, the increase in money from the mines during the outbreak of armed conflict led to women being forced out of mining work through various means, including bans on their participation in certain mining activities as men sought to seize the revenue (Buss et al. 2017).

However, the increased profits of men working at or around the mines could also translate into higher profits for women selling sex, including to militarized actors.

Fino was the local client of many bambaragas , a husband and father to many children, a humanitarian and development volunteer/worker and, “ en soubassement ”92 , a middle-man specializing in artisanal mines run by armed groups. He had witnessed many bambaragas ’ trajectories over the years at the mines, in the community and in the intimacy of their own homes. He had been an occasional and regular client of Violette’s for over 30 years, during which time she amassed enough money to purchase a house Fino claimed was worth $10,000

USD. Violette had encouraged me to interview Fino since “some of our long-time clients know our stories better than we know them ourselves”. Fino reported that the most successful and wealthy bambaragas in Miti made their fortunes during the wars by combining sex work and mining economies. They did this in a few intersecting ways, according to him. They went to the mines where they traded sex for gold and coltan, which they later sold directly to “ comptoirs”

(purchasing companies) , becoming “ négociantes” or middle-women in the process. Secondly,

Miti was strategically located on a transport axis that connected mines to the city. Bambaragas

92 Soubassement literally means the unseen basement foundation of a building. It was also used to refer to activity that crucially sustained individuals or groups, but that was not fully legal or socially acceptable and thus kept hidden from view.

214 hosted returning miners and managers at their homes and provided sexual, care and food services for which they were compensated in gold or coltan. Thirdly, they sometimes offered “protection” services, protecting clients’ business by transporting or safely stocking minerals for them. Armed actors ranging from local Mai-Mais, to Hutu rebels, to the Rwandan army were attempting to seize and/or tax coltan profits at the time. Women may have been particularly effective at smuggling and hiding minerals for civilians and competing armed actors given gendered stereotypes that did not associate them with mining. According to Fino, bambaragas became the first women to own land in Miti, and beginning in 2007, the first women to build houses. The first four bambaragas to do so had all afforded this feat through sexual labour in militarized mining economies during the wars and the years after.

The significance of the mining industry in the region outlasted the wars. In 2008, artisanal mining accounted for 90% of the mining sector in DR Congo (World Bank 2008). In the 2000s, researchers estimated between 710 000 and 860 000 artisanal miners operated in the five most eastern provinces (D’Souza 2007). Civil society groups placed the number in the millions (Drajem, Hamilton and Kavanaugh 2011). A significant segment of mines continued to operate under militarized control as conflict persisted post-war in the Kivu provinces. In 2009,

43% of mines surveyed by the International Peace Information Service (IPIS) research institute had an armed actor (rebel or military) present (2018). In spite or because of this, the draw of the mines remained present for many bambaragas . As Fino recounted:

Now many of our sex workers in the area go down often to the mines. It’s not for

nothing, that they go to the mines! Those [wealthy bambaragas ] women are a model.

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[Other bambaragas ] say to themselves: “I too would like to buy land so I can build a

house and manage my clientele.”

Marie-Ève was a bambaraga of a younger generation than the first property owners in

Miti, whose personal trajectory was inspirational to many of her peers. She lived near Maneno and was in her mid-30s, and she too had amassed relative wealth and multiple properties through selling sex and combined trade at the mines. As a child, she had been “placed” by her ndumba 93 mother with relatives to raise her. As frequently occurred to the children of ndumba , she had been neglected and deprived in their care. This became acute in the years her mother had ceased sending money from selling sex after being abducted and enslaved by rebels. As a young adolescent yearning for self-sufficiency, Marie-Ève began selling sex and bananas. Once she was able to, she began travelling to the mines in the southern part of the province to sell sex and sundry goods and reinvesting her profits in minerals for resale. She was able to expand the scale of her trade through access to credit through a micro-credit project for women that had allowed her to participate even though she was a bambaraga . By 2014, she flew to the mines every few months to spend a few weeks working. On her trips, she would simultaneously send bales of used clothing from Uganda and cannabis through a delivery service to resell at her destination.

She made the most money selling sex at the mines because, as a well-off businesswoman, she attracted a managerial level clientele, and complemented her earnings with her other sales. She then invested her combined profits from the various streams in minerals. At the end of her trips, given her relative wealth, she could pay for the minerals to be sent to Bukavu via a shipping

93 See Femmes Libres chapter “ ndumba ” was a term Marie-Ève’s mother and many other umarried women an older generation who sold sex used to self-identify. “ Bambaraga ” was seen by them as a moral insult. Marie-Ève referred to her mother as a bambaraga in casual conversation, though out of respect, she called her a ndumba in her presence.

216 service. This allowed her to avoid the risk of her profits being pillaged by rebels or the military as she left, as she had previously experienced. The shipping service, she explained, “deals with all that”. Once she had cashed in her minerals by selling them to a purchasing comptoir in

Bukavu, she took her profits to Uganda to invest in more women’s clothing and shoes, most of which she would sell again back at the mines. However, between trips, she had access to a market of bambaragas wanting to buy clothes because she had invested her profits in a small nganda (bar/sex work venue) close to home where she made money off of beer and bambaragas’ rent. She had also made longer-term investments by buying land, including one property she bought for her now elderly ndumba mother so that she could take care of her.

The mines and bambaragas of Walikale in North Kivu were another point of reference and held a special place in cultural lore in Maneno. The money was reputed to be so good that bambaragas would get “stuck” there, forget their children and never come home. This representation was at times fanciful, but the concern could also be very concrete. Mpenda had been caring for her sister’s children while her sister recuperated in a near-by town from a lengthy period of slavery, torture and confinement with the FDLR armed group in the South. When

Mpenda heard word that her sister was getting ready to go to Walikale to make money selling sex, she dropped everything to go find and stop her. I mistakenly assumed this was because she was either concerned about her sister starting to sell sex or concerned about her sister going to an unsafe area with many frequently fighting armed groups. She quickly corrected me. The money in Walikale was so good her sister would have gotten stuck there and forgotten her children, leaving Mpenda to care for them. Mpenda had no choice but to bring her sister back to live with her. Representations of Walikale undoubtedly drew on the fact that mines were such a key labour destination that many bambaragas did relocate long-term to live around them.

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There were rumours that men going off to the mines got “stuck” in Walikale too, drawn in by unmatched prowess of older bambaragas in the region. The latter were reputed to tend to men’s bodies with great attention and care. They had revolutionized the market by repurposing the hollowed-out tanks from tanker trucks known as karaï and filled them with water heated over a fire to bathe and seduce weary men returning from the mines or front-line armed group duties.

The effect was so profound, Fino and Angéline asserted, that men often forgot about their wives and children and not only didn’t return to them, they ceased sending money back. “Those women are made of money!” Fino recounted, as Jeanne laughed and nodded approvingly.

“They choose themselves a man off the back of a FUSO truck. Take his bag, carry it. If

you don’t escape, you will stay indefinitely! Oh boy! No more phone calls to the wife and

kids! You’ll be saying ‘ The road isn’t passable! Just send me up some merchandise.’ If

you do go home, it’s empty handed: ‘ Oh, I was pillaged on the way [by soldiers or

rebels]! ’ Those [older bambaraga ] women don’t negotiate first. They treat you like a

precious little baby. They bathe you, they feed you, they have sex with you. Then, maybe

you go into the forest [to mine or for armed work] for three days, and… straight back to

them!”

Even if most bambaragas didn’t become wealthy or even escape poverty, there is evidence to support the idea held by many that going to the mines improved their lots and that of their children. In sub-Saharan Africa, children have better health outcomes within a short distance of active mining communities, seemingly due to the increased economic options present for women (Tolonen 2015). There is also evidence of better infant health around active artisanal

218 mines in eastern DR Congo (Parker, Foltz and Elsea 2016). As well, women in South Kivu and

Ituri who derived an income from mining, selling services or a combination thereof at mines reported greater leverage in negotiating the terms and conditions of their relationships with men

(Buss et al. 2017).

Mines in the on-going conflict environment presented specific risks, however. Many of the mines that bambaragas accessed were located in forested areas in proximity to the areas of operation of armed groups, some of whom were renowned for attacking and abducting women.

In some cases, women coming from the mines were specifically targeted for theft and violent attack. Maman Bahati had been attacked, tortured and abducted by FDLR rebels twice on the forest paths that led to and from mines in South Kivu. As she recounted her experiences, she insisted that bambaragas were more frequently attacked in armed conflict because they were more present at the mines and in forested areas near the mines.

The majority [of women attacked by the rebels] were bambaragas because it’s all

bambaragas over there [at the mines and in the forest leading to them]. The majority of

those who go to the carrés (mines or quarries) are bambaragas . At [the mine of the first

attack], it was only bambaragas that go there, other women don’t. (…) Bambaragas

cherchent la vie (“search for life”) and nous cherchons partout (“we search

everywhere”). So, we are at the carrés. (…) Women and children from the community are

also affected, but it is different for us. You need to put an accent on that. We are

particularly touched [by violent attacks in armed conflict] .

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Due to their lucrative potential, mines - even civilian ones - were sometimes military targets. By virtue of their presence, bambaragas could be caught up in the resulting violence.

Nathalie in Maneno worked regularly over a number of years at a mine that was directly run by the military (for private wealth extraction) but that was routinely raided, attacked and occasionally occupied by Mai-Mai rebels encamped on a near-by hill. Nathalie and other sex workers lived out of temporary huts constructed along the periphery of the quarry alongside the huts of middle-men who came to trade for gold.

There was a papa (an old man) [from the near-by community] who apparently had

madawa [spiritual powers] because every time before an attack, he would come warn the

bambaragas : ‘Get out of here. The Mai-Mai are going to come today’ or ‘I had a dream

they’re coming’. I would leave with others, but there were some bambaragas who

resisted. Whichever [armed] group would recuperate the mine would pillage and all the

minerals there would be theirs. Then, they would trade them with the bambaragas left

behind. And since most bambaragas fled, those left behind would really gagne [both

“win” and “earn”]. Even if it’s the FARDC [military] who won, there weren’t enough

bambaraga left and you would gagne . That’s how it happens that some bambaragas

would stay when the fighting happened.

I remember one day that same papa came and asked everyone to leave the area. I and

others left and went into the community. The same day, the Mai-Mais attacked and they

threw a bomb into the carré (quarry). It exterminated almost the majority of those who

stayed behind, even the creuseurs (diggers) and the bambaragas .

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Mines also presented specific occupational risks that were not directly conflict-related.

Whether under civilian, military or rebel control, they were often governed in deeply gendered ways that shaped the labour conditions of women selling sex, trading goods, involved in mining work - or all three. Some authorities prohibited the presence of unmarried women/ femmes libres near mines - or women in general - as a measure to reduce sex work or due to concerns that femmes libres were the cause of men’s immoral behaviour (York 2017). Many mines barred women in general from positions of authority in the mines whereas others prohibited women from doing mining work or even being near the mines at all (Buss et al. 2017). Women were also banned at times when suspected of pregnancy, immorality, menstruating, breastfeeding, bringing bad luck or “for their own protection” (Buss et al. 2017; York 2017). As a result, some women resorted to doing mining work “clandestinely” (York 2012). Other women, like Jeanne, managed to circumvent interdictions on their presence by relying on personal contacts among armed groups, mine authorities, miners or in civilian-controlled mines, by acting “with the complicity of the police” to provide them cover or permission (Kelly, King-Close, Perks 2014; York 2012).

However, these gendered patronage dynamics created by bans on women’s labour or presence provided leverage to men in positions of power to extort or sexually coerce women as a

“condition” of working in the mining areas, and the latter was a commonly reported occurrence

(Kelly, King-Close and Perks 2014).

The exclusion of women imposed additional occupational hazards. Women who were

“allowed” to do mining labour were often relegated to the most dangerous and lowest paying jobs (Buss et al. 2017). These included transporting large sacks of rocks and grinding rocks or, as

Jeanne reported she and other bambaragas doing, collecting dust and mining in “mined out”

221 holes or tunnels (Buss et al. 2017). Artisanal mines frequently have dangerous working conditions. Describing one mine in DR Congo, Geoffrey York writes: “The rudimentary tunnels can extend for up to 40 meters underground, running the risk of collapsed walls and oxygen shortages. To ventilate the shafts, the miners use improvised generators and plastic tubes, sometimes connected to bicycle wheels” (2012). In 2012, 60 people were killed when a gold mine collapsed in north-eastern DR Congo trapping them 100 metres below the surface (Smith

2012). An older bambaraga and (literally card-carrying) ex-Mai-Mai soldier in Mugunga recounted narrowly escaping a collapsing mine that killed others, days before. Being excluded from better jobs heightened these risks for those women able to mine. For example, when women accessed already mined “holes,” mine structures were potentially weakened. What safety measures were normally in place, such as jerry-rigged ventilation systems, were not necessarily operative once a hole was “finished” and miners had left.

Jeanne, Maman Bahati, X, Mwezi and other bambaragas were insistent that all, or very nearly all, women working at the mines with them were bambaragas . A number of miners and community leaders in North Kivu shared similar assessments (Kelly, King-Close, Perks 2014).

In North Kivu, one miner gave this explanation:

It is the prostitutes’ territory there in the mines. That is the main work, there, actually.

Once the movement in the mining area starts again, for example, you will see women

climbing up towards the mines with their mattresses, and while you may think they are

soldiers’ wives, they are really prostitutes (quoted in Kelly, King-Close, Perks 2014,

100).

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A community leader stated that:

“Yes, there are “loose women” [original authors’ mistranslation of femmes libres ] here

with their children. There are no women in the mines that belong to a particular person -

so every woman belongs to the whole world. These women [in the mines] don’t work.

They just wait until the miners find money and then come sleep with them, that’s their

work. (…)” (Kelly, King-Close, Perks 2014, 101)

In contrast, much of the literature on women at the mines in eastern DR Congo explicitly cautions against the generalization that all women in a mining site are “prostitutes”. In some cases, this is seen as obscuring varied forms of gendered labour performed in artisanal mining environments (Bashwira et al. 2014; Buss et al. 2017). In other cases, it is seen as echoing local sexist narratives that seek to stigmatize women’s mining labour as immoral, and thus impermissible (Buss et al. 2017).

In some (non-militarized mines) in South Kivu, only 43.6% of women were married, suggesting a high-proportion of femmes libres , and thus possibly of bambaragas , given what bambaragas reported as the frequent social blurring between the two categories (Buss et al.

2017). There are many methodological issues with available estimates or evaluations of the proportion of women at mines selling sex. The first common problem is that studies often have difficulty conceiving that women may alternate between, or simultaneously do, sexual and other forms of labour and thus separate out “prostitutes” from women selling other services or merchandise or performing other labour 94 . Secondly, there has been an overall trend to not

94 See for example Buss et al. 2017.

223 recognize women selling sex in mining environments if it is not for short durations, a set fee, in a brothel or under the direction of a managerial third party 95 . Thirdly, in an attempt to acknowledge women’s constrained economic options, a number of studies conflate sexual exchanges for subsistence needs (food, shelter, clothing) and separate the latter from “sex workers,” making it difficult to assess how many women actually sell sex 96 . Fourthly, for safety and access reasons, many bambaragas reported hiding their status as sex workers while in the mining areas. A possible consequence of these methodological issues is the underestimation of the proportion of women selling sex. Another possible explanation for this discrepancy is that the bambaragas I spoke with often worked in environments controlled by militarized actors whereas most research takes place in civilian controlled mining environments for safety and access reasons 97 . There may be significant overall differences in how militarized groups regulate gendered access to their mines. In some instances, bambaragas reported that at given armed group-controlled mines or camps, only women involved in sexual labour were allowed access near the mines and that this was why they were the only women present or the only women present other than, in some cases, a small number of abducted women and adolescents in situations of slavery for higher up authorities (only some of whom were bambaragas prior to their enslavement). The divergence in what is reported in research with women at (non-military or rebel-controlled) mines or in mining areas and what bambaragas coming to and from mining sites reported to me is striking and suggests that these varied approaches can produce complementary findings and new perspectives. Despite some differences in estimating the

95 See for example Bryceson, Jonsson and Verbrugge’s oft-cited analysis of why women being paid for sex in mining environments should not be considered sex workers (2013). 96 See for example Kelly, King-Close and Perks 2014. 97 The methodological limitations of dangerous environments are discussed with regards to household surveys in Stearns 2010. Such methodological limitations apply even to researchers specialized in conflict areas. Notably, the International Peace Information Service’s research mapping the presence armed actors at mines in eastern DR Congo relied on second hand reports for some locations due to conflict hazards (IPIS 2018).

224 proportion of bambaragas, it is worth noting that many authors nonetheless concede that women selling sex have a large and important presence at or around mines (Bashwira et al. 2014; Buss et al. 2017; Kelly, King-Close and Perks 2014).

When bambaragas emphasized the centrality of their presence in mining environments , they were also insisting that the varied forms of sexual, care and food labour and petty trade they provided were necessary to sustain mining economies. Counter to common social representations of bambaragas as a parasitic presence around mines, it positioned them and their work as making possible the social and economic worlds of mining environments. In counterpart, mines, too, remained central to bambaragas . They were a key labour strategy. So key, in fact, that some bambaragas moved to live around the mines for years at a time. They were also, though, for many bambaragas , a constellation of imagined spaces “out there” that were full of immeasurable wealth and unpredictable dangers where one could “ chercher la vie ” and perhaps, find a client, a spoonful of gold dust and enough to come home.

Transnational/National Human Rights Interventions into “Conflict Minerals” and Gendered Labour (North and South)

Bambaragas ’ labour conditions were often shaped most immediately by the various gendered forms of rule imposed by competing and colluding rebels and military groups and the intermittent and shifting armed conflict between them. However, one of the most drastic impacts on many bambaragas’ ability to “ chercher la vie ” occurred through a transnational

American/national Congolese human rights law and policy intervention into the artisanal mining economies where so many bambaragas worked. In the 2000s, the fact that armed groups were profiting from mineral extraction captured international attention. Advocacy efforts of NGOs such as the American ENOUGH project, argued that “conflict minerals” were the driving force

225 of conflict in Congo and causing rape “as a weapon of war used against Congolese women and girls” (Enough Project 2008). In so doing, western activists drew on tropes of Congo as “the rape capital of the world” that cast Congolese (Black) women as abject victims and Congolese

(Black) men as sub-human emblems of sexual violation (Baaz and Stern 2013; Mertens 2017) 98 .

A number of scholars argued that these assertions were flawed because they overestimated mineral extraction’s role as a factor in financing armed groups and misunderstood role of mining economies in relation to conflict (Seay 2012). Indeed, when mineral prices are high in eastern DR Congo, violence diminishes as armed groups reorient their time to rent- seeking through control of mines rather than fighting (Dagnelie, De Luca and Maystadt 2018;

Parker and Vadheim 2016; Sanchez de la Sierra 2013)99 . Despite these critiques, western advocacy efforts succeeded in casting American laws requiring the formalization of the

Congolese artisanal mining sector as a necessary human rights intervention. The foregrounding of a sensationalized racialized and gendered narrative predicated on African women as passive victims of both conflict and mining in need of “protection”, set the stage for interventions with profoundly gendered consequences (Bashwira et al. 2014).

In 2010, the United States passed the Dodd-Frank Law, which included provisions requiring strict mineral tracing to individually certified mines to ensure minerals were “conflict free” in a “target zone” that broadly encompassed North Kivu, South Kivu and Maniema. The

DR Congo government followed up by briefly outlawing all artisanal mining specifically in the same three provinces (Geenen 2012). The latter law was lifted the following year as tracing requirements came into effect. However, unable to comply with the certification process, a large

98 The tropes were further used in 2017 to oppose the repeal of Dodd Frank. See Shih 2017. 99 Sanchez de la Sierra found that armed groups’ control and taxation of mine incomes only benefitted the local population if the armed groups were local militias rather than external groups (2013).

226 consortium of electronic and tech companies ceased purchasing in the “target zone”, creating a de facto boycott on artisanal mining of the 3Ts (Tungsten, Tin and Tantalum) in eastern DR

Congo (Wolfe 2015).

The reforms led to a “grave impact on socio-economic activities for the local population”

(Mathysen and Zaragoza Montejano 2013) . Between 2010 and 2014, a period overlapping with my field work, the price per kilo of cassiterite that miners and secondary traders could get fell from $7 to $4, even as average prices on the global market had hit $18 a kilo market (Raghavan

2014). The reforms increased corporate market share and reinforced the monopolies of export offices such as Canadian-owned MMR-Somika, which in turn decreased local prices (Geenen

2017) 100. While communities close to large centers where artisanal mines became certified and regulated by the UN and government reported an uptick in trade and a decrease in violent instability, these were a very small fraction of mines. As of 2015, the government reported that only 11 out of 900 mines in South Kivu were certified (Wolfe 2015). Incomes and security declined outside of these more central mines (Matthysen and Zaragoza Montejano 2013). Those miners who could reoriented themselves towards artisanal gold mining, given that it was easier to smuggle gold (United Nations 2011). Armed actors also moved into gold mines and they became the site of increased active arm conflict (Parker and Vadheim 2017). Over all, local civil society groups estimated one to two million artisanal miners lost all work (Drajem, Hamilton and

Kavanagh 2011). Rather than support artisanal miners to improve their labour conditions, the top-down formalization process destroyed their livelihoods on a mass scale (Geenen and Radly

2014; Seay 2012).

100 For more information on the reform’s role in reinforcing a trading monopoly held by MMR/Somika owned by the Canadian Chug family, see Spittaels 2010, 19.

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Relatively little attention has been paid to what happened to the women, including the large proportion of bambaragas , who, through their service work, trade and mining work were also dependent on artisanal mining economies. Yet, in Sub-Saharan Africa, women have been found to be the worst affected by mining declines. One study across the continent found that when mines closed, men who had worked in manual labour at the mines returned to agricultural production. However, for reasons that are unclear, women who had been in service work at the mines weren’t able to return to agricultural labour but were pushed out of the labour force altogether (Kotsadam and Tolonen 2016). There are some indications of the gendered economic impacts of the reform in the DR Congo. In areas unaffected by the embargo infant mortality continued its decreasing trend. However, in the villages near the 3T mines targeted by the embargo (in the three eastern provinces), the probability of infant deaths increased by 143%.

Infant mortality in the zone affected by the embargo increased even in communities around 3T mines that had never been under non-state armed group or military control (Parker, Foltz and

Elsea 2016). Towns around mines are where bambaragas claimed that a large proportion of women were bambaragas . Researchers submit that the steep rise in infant mortality in these sites occurred through a reduction in mothers’ economic power: “We find suggestive evidence that the legislation-induced boycott [increased infant mortality near 3T mines in the target area] by stunting mother consumption of infant health care goods and services.” (Parker, Foltz and Elsea

2016, 2). In other words, many women living in mining environments affected by the reforms no longer had the means to pay for the maternal and infant health care that might otherwise have kept them and their infants healthy and their children died as a result.

Indeed, many bambaragas were failing to find “life” in artisanal mining environments despite continuing to search. Marie-Ève was a direct witness to the economic impacts of the

228 reforms in tandem with the industrialization of mining on poor bambaragas . In fact, she had begun to feel them indirectly too. Having made her wealth selling sex and goods in mining environments, she had decided to invest in women like herself and became a creditor to bambaragas who needed initial funds to depart for the mines. In the recent years since the reform, women had become slower to repay their debts. Then, bambaragas she had financed began defaulting on their loans. Most recently, she had financed a number of women who had gone to work in artisanal gold mining environments in South Kivu. Now, they too, appeared to be defaulting. Artisanal gold mines were riskier but still relatively lucrative since the embargo.

However, overlapping with the period of the reform, the Canadian multi-national BANRO had been shutting down artisanal gold mining in South Kivu to make way for industrial production

(Geenen and Radley 2014). Some locals returned from the area and reported that her debtors were unable to make enough money to return. “BANRO, BANRO is killing me,” Marie-Ève exclaimed in frustration and disgust, reserving her greatest anger for the corporation that was shutting down some of the few income possibilities left for bambaragas in mining environments in South Kivu in the wake of the reform. 101 Marie-Ève was considering going down to the artisanal mines to recoup whatever money she could from the women as they worked, but she lamented that there probably was no point because the bambaragas indebted to her had most likely been reduced to barely subsisting off what income they were making 102 . Otherwise, she

101 A recent study offers support to Marie-Ève’s perception. It found that artisanal mines in Western African had spill-over economic benefits to local communities, and in particular to those selling goods and services to diggers which they hypothesized was in part due to collective local access to the mines and thus a more flexible and widespread access to its wealth by unskilled labourers, and to those who (also) provided service work or trade to them. In contrast, industrial mines, generally depending on skilled labour, though they may have profited governments (or governmental actors) did not significantly impact local house-hold consumption rates (Bazilier and Girard 2017). In fact the profits to government, which could then be privately appropriated, are a reason the DR Congo government was seen to favour industrial mining over artisanal mining. See Seay 2012. 102 This dynamic bares similarities to the debt situations many artisanal miners who depended on initial loans to begin mining. Unable to repay what they had borrowed, many miners found themselves stuck in the mines unable to

229 reasoned, they would have returned, if not to pay her, then to bring some money for their children.

Beyond their economic impacts, the legal reforms impacted the working conditions for bambaragas and other women in mining environments. Under the auspices of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the International Conference on the

Great Lakes Region (ICGLR), an all-male group of authorities and stake-holders had decided that to be certified as “conflict free”, mining environments had to be found free of armed groups, children under 16 and pregnant women performing what was deemed hard (mining) labour

(Kelly, King-Close and Perks 2014). This was justified based on stated health preoccupations not for pregnant women, but for fetuses, despite no clear evidence-base for specific fetal risks

(Bashwira et al. 2014). 103 The measure was opposed by an association of women transporters and rock-haulers, though to little effect (Bashwira et al. 2014). The formalization of prohibitions on pregnant women was widely interpreted, if not publicized, as banning all pregnant women from not only all mining work but all mining environments (See for example, the Enough Projet

(Lezhnev 2015)). This potentially made it difficult for bambaragas and other women to work at precisely the moment when they needed to amass funds to protect against the risks of maternal and infant mortality. Furthermore, the exclusion of pregnant women from hard labour gave normative force and cover to existing practices of interdicting women’s presence in uncertified mining environments (Kelly, King-Close and Perks 2014). In effect, the reforms consolidated

overcome subsistence needs and repay their creditors. For further discussion of long-term debt and debt-bondage among artisanal miners see Geenen 2011 and Maconachie and Hilson 2011. 103 The claim of fetal harm was based on the dangers of vapours produced when mercury was used to extract gold. Although, the inhalation of mercury vapours does present a fetal risk it also poses risks of nervous system and cerebral damage to all children and all adults. For a more detailed examination of the claims, see Bashwira et al. 2014.

230 men’s power over mining environments and reinforced the dynamics that relegated women to work in more dangerous and clandestine conditions (Bashwira et al. 2014).

Simultaneously, mining environments in general, and the region as a whole, became less safe. Despite the reforms’ aims, between 2013 and 2015, the time of my fieldwork, a Belgian research group surveyed 1615 informal mines in the DR Congo and found that at 56% of them at least one “armed actor was present”: 26% were run by non-state armed groups and 25% were run by government soldier (Home 2018). The Enough Project did their own research which found armed groups present at only a third of mines, an improvement they attributed to the law they had advocated (Bafilemba, Mueller and Lezhnev 2014). A number of armed groups and the military had, however, simply moved from direct control or taxation at the mines to indirect taxation through road-blocks coming to and from the mines, trade in gold and other commodities, as well as armed pillaging of civilians (Parker and Vadheim 2017). A mapping of conflict events in the region found that “conflict in mining areas has increased both in concentration and in magnitude since the regulation, radiating out into what were previously more peaceful areas” (Harrison 2013). For bambaragas searching for life in artisanal mining environments, as the chances of being able to sustain their children were being reduced, their labour became more hazardous and the areas they inhabited and traversed became more dangerous too.

Jeanne: Aside from Starving, There’s no Problem. (North and South)

The lack of economic possibility for bambaragas in many rural contexts meant that many women continued, despite the decline in labour conditions, to eke out subsistence in artisanal mining environments. However, in some cases, the lack of income at given mines made the

231 strategy simply untenable. This left limited options, including falling back on working in environments women would otherwise have judged too dangerous due to a high risk of open conflict or threats to their safety related to personal histories with armed actors. This was the situation Jeanne found herself in. Then, due to the high level of conflict, those strategies failed too.

When Jeanne had departed Maneno eight months pregnant to go to the mines, her goal had been to go to gold mines, (where conflict had increased), and if she didn’t make it that far, she had planned to see what she could find at the cassiterite (for tin) mines (where incomes had fallen). She had made it the 13 hours north to the cassiterite mines, but she hadn’t been able to walk farther:

“These days, I don’t have the strength to go as far as before. I made it up to [a mining

area in Walikale] and found bambaraga friends coming back and they told me not to tire

myself for nothing. There’s nothing there now and I came back.

The cassiterite (for tin) mines were no longer gainful. The gold mines were too difficult to attain and negotiate this trip. Jeanne fell back on finding clients in Bunyakiri even though she had hoped to avoid the risks of violence of this strategy. Her preference for the mines was for both financial and safety reasons. Bunyakiri carried the risks of an explosive environment and the dangers of potentially being killed due given her previous associations with armed actors from multiple sides. Jeanne assessed that her need for income was greater than the risks. However, the conflict situation made even relying on income from clients unworkable.

232

Lately, there are patrols by the Raïa Mutomboki armed group and the FARDC soldiers. It

is not going well between them. Everyone is hunting everyone. The Raïas are hunting for

the FARDC and the FARDC are hunting for the Raïas. Open fire could start at any

moment. Right now, there is no shelling but tension is high and it could all start at any

moment.

The conflict had dispersed everyone from rebels, to soldiers to civilians.

(…) Here, you see, we live alongside the road. There, now, there isn’t anyone alongside

the road. You can’t count 10 houses with people in them and [by the road] is the area we

know. People are no longer in the towns; they have all gone up to the hills because they

are scared. In Kambale, Kambegeti, and Lwana, there’s barely anyone left. There are a

few people when you get to Bulambika, Bututa et Bitale. But from Kambale on, there’s

barely any one. People come down on Saturdays and Sundays for the market days, but

then they are all gone again by Monday.

As she spoke, Jeanne’s initial good humour slowly gave way to something far heavier.

There was no mouvement d’argent (money flowing for sex work) [in Bunyakiri]. It didn't

go well with my [sex] commerce. In those instances, I tell myself I cannot come home

empty handed. I came with brooms (made of dried grasses) to sell. Two for 500FC (less

than 50 cents US).

233

Jeanne pointed to a pile of no more than a dozen brooms on the dirt floor next to where two of her children sat. She knew then it would not be enough: it would not be enough to feed her already malnourished children, it would not be enough to pay for her caesarian section, it would not be enough to cover the costs of feeding her kids while she would be detained in hospital for non-payment.

Here, aside from starving, there’s no problem.

In Maneno, I feel like we are safe. The only problem is the lack of mouvement [flow of

money to sex work] in order to find food. It’s a huge problem, but other than that it’s

fine.

It is noteworthy that as transnational and national law and policy reforms led to an embargo on artisanal mining, no one stopped to consider or evaluate the safety, health, economic or social effects such changes might have on bambaragas - who, after all, worked there too .

Prevalent moral discomfort with sexual labour strategies has created a reticence to grapple with social and economic consequences when changes to sexual economies depress the earnings of those selling sex and reduce demand for their sexual labour. Even among people who recognize sexual labour as labour, there is often a tacit acceptance that removing or reducing the possibility of sexual labour on the level of a subsistence strategy is in itself a good thing. This is reflected in the frequent conflation of selling sex for basic needs with “sexual coercion” and thus, its separation from (other) sexual labour 104 . For the human rights groups and advocates who advanced the top-down formalization of artisanal mining reform, it was easy to overlook what

104 See for instance Kelly, King-Close and Perks 2014.

234 would happen to all the bambaragas selling sex, food, care, beer, hauling rocks and gathering dust in admittedly impoverished and dangerous conditions in artisanal mining environments.

Indeed, dominant human rights institutions and narratives have often marginalized socioeconomic rights (Evans 2011). With regards to sex work, they have historically been more concerned with its morality than its labour conditions (Doezema 1998). The analytic implication of this omission was the erasure, or perhaps worse, the acceptance, that a possible cost of the reform would be the deeper and life-threatening impoverishment of bambaragas and their children. Indeed, the decline in mining economies pushed bambaragas into debt, into more dangerous working circumstances and placed them and their children at increased risk of death.

The obstruction of sexual labour subsistence strategies in mining environments robbed bambaragas of chances to search for life and of chances to find it.

235

Chapter Six Crossing Militarized Borders in Armed Conflict

Mobility, Militarized Border-Crossing and Gendered/Bambuti Sovereignty

Bambaragas in Maneno and Mugunga moved back and forth across militarized borders.

Mobility was not only a sexual labour strategy, but also central to many women’s identities as bambaragas and to their mutual recognition. Indeed, the strength of bambaragas’ reciprocal ties and constant collaboration are what enabled them to travel across shifting and volatile militarized environments. In the process, bambaragas refused to be bounded by claims upon their sexuality, labour, mobility and even their lives by various competing factions.

Movement was one of the few constants in many bambaragas’ lives. Bahati had headed out in search of soldiers, rebels or miners over and over again for three decades, through two wars and lasting armed conflict. Still, every trip required its preparations, she explained as she began to packed up her shack.

“Before you leave, you have to prepare yourself in consequence. First, you have to find

someone to care for your children. You need to search for money here and there to pay

the person. I will even do work in the fields. You need to find something before you can

leave- enough so that, for however long you are gone, there is enough for your kids to eat

each day. I used to leave with other women but then, you learn how it works and you can

go alone and meet up with women.

Then when you come home, you buy a pagne for [the woman who took care of your

kids], she chooses the pattern and you buy it. If I’ve brought back quantities of food, I

236

give her a portion. Usually, I bring back large bags of flour, jerry-cans of palm oil and

meat that I’ve hunted [in the forest along the way or at the site].

When I go somewhere, I usually stay about a month, then I leave. I look at how much

I’ve made and I come with it and provide for the children. Then, when the time comes

that it starts to not be enough, I get ready to leave. Then, I leave again.”

“How did you learn to go? To travel in the forest like that?” I asked.

“Famine. Famine is the master of the world. When I’m hungry, I need to go chercher [la

vie ] (search [for life])…That’s the moment when your intelligence opens everything up

for you: I could go here, to X place. Then, with each step, you plow ahead…”

Women’s movement through shifting and contested militarized environments was typically a response to hunger and child suffering. However, it was not solely reactive, nor only the consequence of being a parent. In fact, for many bambaragas , it preceded parenthood.

Mobility was also a celebrated freedom, often the product of a vaunted set of skills (some of which were tied to the valuing of Bambuti identities 105 such as the ability to orient oneself in the bush; to hunt or trap along the way) and even a characteristic of what made

105 As stated in the introduction, the term Bambuti, particularly among anthropologists, generally refers to the (predominantly) small-statured people in Ituri province in North Eastern DR Congo while the term Batwa is used for the (predominantly) small-statured people in North and South Kivu. Most of the bambaragas who self-identified as Bambuti would most likely be identified in most traditional cultural classifications as Batwa not Bambuti. However, “Batwa” are commonly referred to as “Bambuti” in the region (Lewis 2000). All the bambaragas I interviewed used “Bambuti” as a self-identifying term that grouped all peoples locally racialized as “pygmées”. The only distinctions among groups was made by indicating their region of provenance according to the ethnic customary authority that governed the territory i.e. “Bambuti-Hunde” “Bambuti-Hutu”. I defer to their self-appellation and classification and use Bambuti to refer inclusively to people otherwise called Bambuti and Batwa.

237 bambaragas into bambaragas. Unlike other women who required permission from a male spouse or relative to travel, the freedom to come and go was part of what constituted women socially as bambaragas and, for some women, what first made them into bambaragas. The decision to go somewhere (another town, a mine, a camp…) with other bambaragas or to find other bambaragas was how all but one woman at the settlement in Mugunga explained first becoming bambaragas. The moment they first had sex for money or goods was secondary in their telling. In Neema’s community, there was a shared belief that when a young woman became a bambaraga for the first time, she could harm or kill older bambaragas in her family if she touched their food or pots without properly cleansing herself. This risk, however, did not apply to older bambaragas who were not part of a young woman’s family of origin. Neema could not explain the reason this was contaminating, only that the threat was strong enough that young women often felt it was necessary to go elsewhere to become bambaragas in order to protect their bambaraga kin. She later added that even in sparsely populated areas that did not hold this belief, when young women became bambaragas, they almost always had to leave.

Staying risked creating competition for sexual clients that threatened the livelihoods of their older bambaraga mothers, aunts and grandmothers (who had often raised them) and could cause painful rifts.

The common expression “ Les bambaragas n’ont pas d’addresse ” “ Bambaragas have no address” captured both the centrality of mobility to many bambaragas’ identities and the many tensions at the heart of that link. It had multiple valences. When bambaragas themselves employed it, the phrase could boastfully invoke the reach of a woman’s travels or the mobile nature of her life. Alternately, it was used to convey the tenuousness of bambaragas ’ shelter,

238 given the hard scrabble lot of moving to search for “life,” or as an aggrieved statement on the repeated evictions and exclusions women living without men so often faced.

The expression could also refer to bambaragas ’ refutation of military or ethnic alignment, playing on both their mobility and on the ambiguity of their positioning in relation to women’s ethnic mutability under the patrilineal systems that dominated in North and South

Kivu 106 . In the DR Congo, ethnicity was territorialized and politically institutionalized in ethnic customary authorities that governed rural areas (Mamdani 2002). Armed groups in North Kivu arose out of ethnic organizations or the ethnic customary authorities and “defin[ed] [themselves] in ethnic terms (…) expressed first and foremost in the language of kinship” (Jewsiewicki and

N’sanda Buleli 2004: 253) 107 . However, as Taylor wrote of pre-genocide Rwanda, women in the

Kivus were often “socially positioned at the permeable boundary between […] ethnic groups”

(2001:167). According to government policy and in accordance with most patrilinear traditions, children inherited the ethnicity of assigned fathers 108 , not of their mothers (Jewsiewicki and

N’sanda Buleli 2004). When women married, they (and their children), commonly claimed the ethnic identity of their husbands (Taiwa 2016). Furthermore, due to the dominance of patrilinear land inheritance, rural women commonly moved on to their husband’s land, placing them under their husband’s ethnic customary authority (Women for Women 2014). These dynamics gave rise to sentiments such as “…mwanamke hana kabila, kabila yake ni ya bwana” (“a woman has

106 Patrilineal systems were the overwhelmingly dominant norm in the areas of my fieldwork. Matrilineal systems are more common in the southern parts of the DR Congo that belong to what is known as the “matrilineal belt” in Africa (see Lowes 2017 for a detailed updated geographic mapping of matrilineal systems in DR Congo). 107 Some Mai-Mai groups, such as the Mai-Mai Padiri in South Kivu outgrew a solely ethnic identity to cast themselves in racialized and nationalist terms as “African”/Congolese and “autochtonous” in opposition to Tutsis (and occasionally Hutus) deemed “allotochtonous” (See Hoffman 2006). 108 All children were assigned a “ père juridique ” or “legal father” under the law.

239 no ethnicity, only that of her husband”) (Quoted in Taiwa 2016, 44). 109 Bambaragas ’ mobility and unmarried status untethered them from the most common ethnic referents for women

(husbands and generally by extension, homes in a given territory) and thus, for many, from clear militarized loyalties. This was what underpinned a woman in Masisi’s use of the expression to explain her time with many competing armed groups of various politicized ethnicities:

“Bambaragas have no address. We have no tribe. We have no region.”

Camionne once recounted slinging the expression pointedly at a rebel commander who had had her abducted from Mugunga. In a rage, he had charged her with “infidelity” and intimated that she would be killed if it were true. She shot back: “Go with someone else? I’m a bambaraga . Me? You know me. I am a bambaraga . Bambaragas don’t have an address !!!” In her usage, it signified bambaragas’ sexual autonomy as central to who they were and positioned it against attempts to coerce, confine or kill them. Bambaragas did not belong to any man (or to his home), and they did not belong to any army or rebel group either. In one sense, it was a liberatory exhortation: bambaragas claimed the power to come and the power to go, their mobility enacting their sexual autonomy. However, the underlying implication of using the expression in this sense pointed also towards stark constraints: homes (“ addresses ”) belonged to men (as they almost all did) (Women for Women 2014), and if bambaragas didn’t belong to men, they never had homes. The latter understanding undergirded, too, the use of the expression to deprecatingly or pityingly refer to bambaragas and their children, to cast their mobility as borne of lack: of stability, of ability, of protection, of belonging. This was the case for example, when Fino, the long-time client, lamented that most children of bambaragas didn’t have “an

109 One exception to this were Banyamulenge or Tutsi women, and in some cases Hutu women, whose ethnicity was cast as “ allochtonous ” and who were considered to be inherently aligned to Rwanda or Kinyarwanda speaking groups. Batwa women who were Kinyarwanda-speaking were also at times cast in this category.

240 address” because they were not “properly identified” and “didn’t even know their families”. It was not an uncommon view that the fact that many bambaragas’ children were not paternally claimed or patrilineally housed rendered not only their shelter, but their identities, their kin relationships and their social place deficient.

One day, Mpenda gave me what Rho made sure I understood was a powerful compliment, when she said: “You’re like us. You are tout-terrain ! You are un véhicule tout- terrain !” To be “all-terrain” or an “all-terrain vehicle” (ATV) was to be able to move through and navigate environments. Large all-terrain cars were the vehicles used by the UN and NGOS with their ubiquitous no AK-47 signs plastered to the window. They were the only vehicles that could make it through many washed-out unpaved roads where the trucks and even motorcycles got stuck in two feet deep mud trenches. Most bambaragas had never rode in them, but were far more tout-terrain themselves. Bambaragas would refer to themselves in the plural as “ FUSO s”

(after the large Korean Fuso brand trucks that ferried most goods and many people) and as

“papillons ” or “butterflies” that fly around and alight momentarily, before taking off again.

Some compliments such as “ Elle est visage passeport” (“She has a passport face”) highlighted some women’s ability to maneuver through militarized checkpoints without payment or hassle due to their sexual allure, ingenuity or contacts.

Camionne’s full name was Kahindo Camionne. She was called Camionne, a term for a large truck, as an honorific because, other women reported admiringly, she would crisscross the countryside more than large trucks. “Oh Kahindo,” Nyota said once: “She is a really big FUSO.

(…) You can find Kahindo Camionne in Ziralo, Sake, Minova, Goma…everywhere. I couldn’t even tell you where she comes from because she’s been all over. She is a vehicle that goes all over. She’s a FUSO.” Camionne and others rode the FUSOs when there were passable roads on

241 the routes they were going. They would pay the fee to sit on top of the perilously teetering over- packed cargo beds reaching 10 feet high, with dozens of others. Frequently, though, bambaragas got rides on motorcycles that could navigate large paths or small roads or they walked long distances through the forest. “I have walked all over this country,” Bahati said. “I have walked and walked and walked all over.”

In rural areas with a limited number of passable roads or accessible means of transit, travel often involved a certain amount what women in Maneno called “ faire de la forêt ” or

“doing the forest.” As well, a number of bambaragas frequently went for short or long periods to destinations, such as rebel encampments, military positions, and (often militarized) resource extraction sites that were in the forest. Bahati told me that though men were often present on forest circuits, women were less so, and most often, those who were, were bambaragas. “The forest belongs to bambaragas!” she proclaimed. “We bambaragas are real forestières, women of the forest.” In so doing, Bahati, who was (Batwa) Bambuti from the South, re-appropriated

“forestières ” (literally “foresters” in the feminine) – a historically derogatory term to refer to

Bambuti, Batwa and other peoples racialized as “ pygmées ” (“pygmies”) – and extended its connotation of both closeness to the forest and ungovernability by sovereign claims to all bambaragas. This drew on intersecting dominant representations of the forest, Bambutis and bambaragas as feminized and uncontrollable and on Bambuti meanings of the forest as a space of belonging.

“La forêt ” (the forest) is a key social signifier in Eastern DR Congo. The meanings that circulate more dominantly are of an ominous space full of threatening people. La forêt can evoke “darkness, wetness, danger, and uncertainty” (Grinker 1994:74) within a gendered and racialized moral mapping of overlapping oppositions between “village versus forest, culture

242 versus nature, the civilized versus savage, male versus female, (…) darkness versus light ”

(Grinker 1994:73). Historically, such oppositions have shaped both colonial and pre-colonial racializations of forest-dwelling people of small stature as sub-human and bestial, child-like or inherently subservient and often as racially distinct from other Africans (Bahuchet and

Guillaume 1982; Lewis 2000; Mary 2010; Rupp 2011). The forest and people deemed

“forestiers ” (of the forest) are often conceived of as uncontrollable, unrestrained and feminized, using “gender as a metaphor of denigration” (Grinker 1994:73). Further, the forest’s association as a space of unregulated mobility contributes to the notion of the “uncapturability” of those who enter it. These attributes collide in visions of women racialized as “ forestièr es” or as “ pygmées ” as unbridled and “sexually wild - like the forest in which they live” (Grinker 1994). These associations fed the common view in Maneno that “ pygmées ” women should be presumed bambaragas unless there was proof of the contrary (i.e. they were married to a non-pygmée man or married in a church ceremony and no longer mobile).

In Sierra Leone, a similar pre-existing social narrative of “the bush” as untamed and anti- social, in opposition to the domesticated space of the village (Jackson, 1977) gave rise to militarized constructions during armed conflict. Coulter writes that in war-time Sierra Leone “the bush” was a dominant metaphor for war-time rebel space. Many abducted women, for instance, described their war-time lives as “being in the bush” and their role as that of “bush wives,” even if they were in fact in villages (2006:100). In contrast, Bahati’s designation of herself and other bambaragas as “ forestières ” was not delineating a militarized space outside of sociality. Rather,

Bahati’s articulation of bambaragas’ claim to gendered freedom intersected with and drew on

Bambutis’ 110 longstanding resistance to attempts at severing their relationship to the forest by the

110 See footnote 1 above on use of the term Bambuti as a referent for both Bambuti and Batwa people.

243 colonial and post-colonial state. Indeed, there are competing longstanding meanings of “ la forêt ” among Bambuti peoples. The forest is seen as a space not only of plenty, but also of protection

(Turnbull 1963). As Turnbull wrote: “The pygmies hold (…) that the forest looks after its own, a belief that is borne out by their daily experience” (1963:36). These views are reinforced by the fact that historically, movement to and through the forest could at times shield Batwa and other

Bambuti people from predations or attack from the state or from neighbouring ethnic groups seeking their forced labour, forced sedentarization, or expulsion from the forest (Bahuchet 1991;

Lewis 2000; Turnbull 1965). In the 1960s, Turnbull wrote of the Bambuti of Ituri: “(…) [T]he

Mbuti always have the ultimate escape of flight to the sanctuary of the forest” (1965:84).

Subsequent decades of armed conflict resulted in large-scale violence in forested areas, including massacres of Bambuti people 111 . Nonetheless, the forest has remained, on the whole, a place that many Bambuti people still represent as nourishing, protective and enabling freedom of movement. Bahati echoed some of these meanings when she claimed the forest as a space of life, sociality, mobility and freedom, and she advanced a gendered politics that placed reciprocal belonging between bambaragas and the Forest above other sovereign claims.

As bambaragas “searched for life ” across contested social, political and military lines they enacted a form of what I call “gendered sovereignty”. In the case of Bahati and the (Batwa)

Bambuti women from the settlement, this was an interconnected “gendered-Bambuti” sovereignty rooted in the claiming of overlapping gendered and Bambuti freedoms to move across imposed boundaries, as well as to maintain a connection with the forest. Common sayings like “ Les bambaragas n’ont pas de frontières ” and “ Les bambaragas n’ont pas de limites ”

(“Bambaragas have no borders” and “ Bambaragas have no limits”) were generally used to

111 See Survival International 2002 and Musangu 2004 on massacres of Bambuti people in north-eastern DR Congo. A number of massacres also took place in (Batwa) Bambuti communities next to Maneno.

244 celebrate not only their mobility but a broader notion of bambaragas as women crossing over boundaries to follow their own paths, unlimited by other claims. “ Elle est décodée ” (“She is unlocked”) was another allusion to bambaragas and their gendered freedom of mobility and connection. It referenced cell phone technology and the idea that certain women could, as Rho put it, “roam anywhere” using “whatever connection they wish, they are not locked down.”

Bahati and many other bambaragas refused on various levels to recognize the sovereign claims of competing armed groups or to abide by the gendered terms of loyal citizenship or subjecthood. At times, these refusals were declared and at others, they were quietly enacted.

They did so by circumventing prohibitions on crossing militarized or “enemy” lines; by creating relationships across ethnic lines with other bambaragas and at times, with militarized men who rejected interpellation into militarized ethnic alignments; and at times, through overt or covert denials of efforts to enlist them in support of militarized aims. Bambuti bambaragas like Bahati further refused to be “sedentarized”, to relinquish their connection to the forest or to abjure their gendered and racialized association with it. For Bambuti bambaragas, all of these refusals may have been rooted in whole or in part in Bambuti political membership. However, such refusals did not necessarily derive from allegiance to an alternate political collectivity. Amongst bambaragas of all ethnic groups at the two sites, bambaragas’ transgression of different armed groups’ militarized limits (and often laws) was consistently explained as a gendered assertion.

This was not a desire to command or to institutionalize their power. It was a mutual recognition of the legitimacy of their own claims of gendered freedom of movement, of relationship, and of finding the means of survival above other sovereign claims. The enactments of this gendered and gendered-Bambuti sovereignty did not have the power to place bambaragas above the violent dispossession or constraint of other sovereign claims or to upend them. Rather, it was

245 used to negotiate not only the risks of non-violent death but the distinct systems of gendered economic seizure, coercion and violence under competing, conflicting or sometimes colluding, sovereignties. It was how bambaragas searched for life.

In Mugunga and Maneno, the core groups of bambaragas I spent time with had all travelled great distances and across rebel lines for work. Not all bambaragas were mobile, crossed militarized lines, or engaged directly with militarized actors, however. Mobility was less commonly reported by the sex workers in the Kadutu slum in the provincial capital of Bukavu or among the higher-earning younger (and more recent) sex workers in brothels of rural Miti which had a solid client base due to its location as a trucking and transit stop and gateway. Staying in one place did not preclude military lines crossing over bambaragas or the reach of militarized groups into their daily lives and work. In Bukavu, for instance, bambaragas had to contend with police, military, armed gangs (some of whom were rebel connected) and UN blue helmets, as well as, occasionally, rebels or army soldiers in civilian clothes. Miti, though currently under civilian rule, in the recent past had also been the site of active combat, occupation and incursion by different armed groups. Sometimes, even without mobility, bambaragas found themselves crossing militarized lines when environments became militarized around them or where power changed hands. In Goma, Mugunga and areas just to the north of Maneno, militarized lines crossed over bambaragas during the time of my fieldwork when the M23 and Raia Mutomboki armed groups occupied and/or emerged from the community, then retreated. In some places, militarized borders were diffuse, fluctuating, highly intricate or masked. This was the case in some of the rural communities in South Kivu near to Maneno that were ostensibly under army control, but where some of the population were affiliated with Raia Mutomboki. These

246 militarized borders, though unmappable, were no less real or perilous to navigate for bambaragas.

Nonetheless, the bambaragas I interviewed in the Birere, Majengo and Katindo slums of provincial capital of Goma, in Uvira and in the capital of Masisi, and near-by towns and camps almost all reported working in many areas and across rebel and government lines of control.

Indeed, in rural areas in North and South Kivu, any kind of mobility of significant distance often required crossing such boundaries, or at the least, negotiating militarized road-blocks by different armed actors. Furthermore, sex workers often specifically aimed to work in places where groups of militarized actors worked or lived or in places that were frequently under non-state armed group or military control (such as mines), because that was where they could gain the most income.

These settings varied and included military or rebel camps, “positions” (generally meaning a shorter-term camp, sometimes strategically located in relation to active conflict),

“défenses ” (outposts, particularly in active combat) and “ barrières ” (barriers or checkpoints) .

Not all camps or “positions” were open to bambaragas, and access depended at least in part on armed groups’ policies on cohabitation with wives and children. Those camps that were generally most favourable to bambaragas were those where “ femmes ” (“wives” in this context), sometimes referred to as “ femmes légitimes ” (“legitimate wives”) were not in the camps but in other cities or town. These offered a broad clientele and at times, the possibility of arrangements where bambaragas cohabitated for a time with armed men at the camp itself. Bambaragas in the south had reported that some camps only allowed access to wives a couple days a week, and so they sought to fill the breach, entering the camp on the other days.

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Some bambaragas had experienced armed camps in which bambaragas selling sex comingled with women occupying other roles such as when female soldiers or rebels were present. Some female soldiers and rebels were in fact also “wives” if they married male soldiers or rebels, while others identified as femmes libres or bambaragas and took advantage of living in militarized camps to sell sex to their armed colleagues. Bambaragas were also sometimes present in camps where superior officers had abducted and enslaved women. 112 Indeed, a number of bambaragas had experienced being abducted and enslaved at armed camps. In some women’s telling, many or all of the other women enslaved at the camps of armed groups were bambaragas. Indeed, a number of bambaragas recounted being targeted for abduction with other bambaragas in attacks on their shared spaces such as hotels or shacks where they were known to live and work together 113 . The FDLR camps in the South were reputed to be unique among armed actors’ camps in that all women present were reportedly abducted and enslaved (as were many men), sometimes for years. However, this was not typical; thus, while bambaragas strongly avoided the FDLR camps in the south, they frequently sought out other camps.

Défenses were sometimes conflated with positions, but generally referred to smaller outposts close to conflict lines, and it was rare for wives, military commanders or even large groups of bambaragas to be there. Some bambaragas avoided défenses due to the dangers inherent in their location and their purpose. However, the lack of competition, the fact that an advancing armed group might have acquired significant riches through their conquest, and the sense of complicity with armed men in the face of danger could make them alluring. A

112 Enslaved women were referred to by armed actors as officers’ “wives”. The abduction of women is similar circumstances is often termed “sexual slavery” or “conjugal slavery” rather than simply “slavery” (Mibenge 2013). I use the term “slavery” in line with Mibenge’s insight that focusing on the sexual and conjugal aspects of enslavement obscures both that the total control over the conditions of sexual and reproductive lives is a facet of slavery in general (for both women and men, albeit in differently gendered ways) and that enslaved women are also forced to perform a wide range of (often hard or dangerous) productive labour (Mibenge 2013). 113 For more on bambaragas being specifically attacked by armed actors see Chapter 2.

248 bambaraga I met in the Birere slums held as a point of pride that a series of atrocities she had survived had left her with no fear. This quality, she explained, allowed her to maximize her earnings by “specializing” in défenses and chasing front lines during conflicts, going where most other bambaragas wouldn’t.

The small rotating encampments at the barrières (road-blocks or check points) operated by military and armed groups to extort money were of similarly small scale. Targeting men who had accumulated significant private profits from manning a busy barrier was a profitable strategy for some bambaragas . Women also sometimes traded sex in lieu of payment for passage. This was a proposition of greater value where the cost of crossing was close to 5$ US rather than

500F (about 45 cents). However, unless they were personally connected to those manning the barrier, on their way to a “ rendez-vous ” with an armed colleague, or were deemed to be “ visage passeport ,” (i.e. due to soldiers recognizing them as the lover of a superior officer or to soldiers hoping to curry their favour due to their beauty), trading sex was at times the only means available of crossing a barrier for women without money. In such cases, though, they could nonetheless try to negotiate higher payment.

It was possible to simply present oneself at a militarized locale to find clients. Women from both Mugunga and Maneno described initiating sexual transactions in this way by signaling their interest in them through certain social cues: prolonged direct gaze, a seductive walk that emphasized the hips (“ faire l’élégance ” “doing elegance”), and at times, flirtatious conversation with unknown men. At Mugunga women explained that married women walked past men “fast, fast” avoiding all eye contact. Bambaragas , on the other hand, were easily identified by their slow sensual walk and because: “We have eyes that talk. (…). Even if a man looks at you, you look at him twice as long. He says: ‘Aaaaah, I can approach this one’. It’s always like that.”

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However, women often preferred to operate “ sur rendez-vous ” or by appointment. They would first go to a nearby “ centre ” (town) or frequent a nearby bar from where they would be invited back to an armed man’s hut for a period of time. It was believed to be safer in such situations to avoid jealousy by not going from one client to the next, but to return to the town at the end of one engagement before starting another. Commanders of some armed groups regulated sexual labour arrangements or bambaragas ’ presence in camps. Though they did not dictate the specific terms of an exchange, their approval often had to be sought out once an agreement had been come to and its terms disclosed. Women reported that armed commanders claimed this was to settle disputes arising from non-payment or to reject arrangements that could cause jealousy or resentment among armed men.

At times, bambaragas started their own camps of women and children near a position , camp or even défense . These were made up of a series of “ maisonettes”, huts generally made from banana leaves and grasses. The soldiers would leave their encampment to find women, sometimes having sex there, at other times bringing women back to their own huts. At Mugunga,

Solange explained that the number of bambaragas in these camps varied “depending on the address and luck. There are work shifts: women come, women go. Sometimes, you can be over

10 [women].” Locals and local health and humanitarian NGOs sometimes referred to these and other camps of bambaragas and their children as “ Camps Vodos ” or “Ass Camps”. Farther inland in the north, in the Masisi area, women reported living and travelling near to non-state armed group camps in groups of up to 30 or 40 bambaragas and children. Some women adopted the strategy of building homes in forested areas near rebel camps on an individual level. Bahati operated a makeshift bar out of a hut in the forest not far from a large rebel encampment for a number of years. There, she sold home-made alcohol, an assortment of snacks, and sex to rebels.

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Her example is also notable in that she was able to maintain her strategic encampment at the limit of rebel territory over a long period of time. She did so by relying on bambaragas like

Mpenda, whose frequent yet secret trajectory back and forth between the village and the rebel camp, enabled them to assist her in restocking her wares in exchange for a small cut.

Bambaragas were so closely associated with militarized actors in the social imaginary that frequently all, or almost all, women involved with militarized men were assumed to be bambaragas . Soldiers were often deployed far from home and if they had wives, the latter frequently remained in their area of origin. Similarly, rebels’ wives, often remained in towns or villages rather than at potentially besieged rebel encampments 114 . It was well known that this left a large market for sexual and care labour in militarized encampments filled by bambaragas .

Nonetheless, some women living with militarized groups were simply soldiers’ (or rebels’) wives who had decided to follow them. As well, a number of bambaragas’ client-sex worker relationships evolved into long-term commitments with soldiers that were more conjugal (i.e. ostensibly no other clients, shared shelter, less negotiated financial arrangements, shared children) and could last years. In cases like these, the distinction between bambaragas and soldiers’ wives could become blurry. This was particularly true at the lower-end of the class spectrum because poor soldiers or rebels often didn’t have the financial means to formally marry 115 . Such nebulousness contributed to the fact that soldiers’ wives who lived in military or rebel camps, whether or not they had been bambaragas prior, were often understood to be disguised bambaragas. This social perception of indistinction between bambaragas and soldiers’ wives was particularly prevalent amongst middle and upper classes. As an example, a (middle-

114 I am grateful to Dr. Carla Suarez for introducing me to the wives of two rebel commanders who lived in Bukavu and were participants in her research. 115 For more on the increase of “informal marriages” and lack of bride wealth payment in Eastern Congo as it relates to poverty and economic changes through the conflict years see Cox 2012.

251 upper class) women’s NGO in South Kivu funded to do HIV-prevention work with sex workers had as one of its specific targets “soldiers’ wives” at a nearby military base, all of whom they considered be sex workers. Rho, the sex worker from Bukavu who was my research assistant, disagreed that the soldiers’ wives at the base were all bambaragas . However, to the married middle-upper class women at the NGO, there was no debate: they all were .

These conflations animated the multiple uses of the term “femmes soldats ” (literally meaning either or both “soldiers’ wives” and “soldiers’ women”) . The term could be used to literally refer to the wives of military soldiers. However, even in this sense it was haunted by its other meaning: bambaragas . Indeed, the term was frequently used socially to disparagingly imply that a group of women were bambaragas. In such uses, soldats was often an ambiguous referent meaning at times military soldiers, and at others, rebel or militia soldiers. Indeed, the term femmes soldats rather than indicating that women “belonged” to one group of armed men, could often indicate to the contrary, that they went with any armed men and belonged to no one and no side, in essence, that they were bambaragas. However, even in its precise variations such as “ femmes FDLR ” or “ femmes Mai-Mai ” the usage of the term still generally suggested that women were bambaragas particularly when it was well known that a given group didn’t have wives present at an encampment.

The term femmes soldats could also be used to imply that all bambaragas were involved with militarized men, regardless of whether this was in fact true. The association of bambaragas with militarized men drew on the fact that militarized environments relied heavily on bambaragas ’ labour and were, in turn, a prime labour strategy for many bambaragas . However, the assumptions also played on social and political anxieties about the uncontrollability of mobile women in a context of armed conflict. Women who were bambaragas could move and if

252 they could move, they could move into militarized spaces and across militarized lines. Amidst conflicting sovereigns, bambaragas’ autonomy always risked becoming their gendered sovereignty – and for those who sought to control them, this was their gendered treachery.

I Cannot Spend the Night, Unless It Is Next to a Bambaraga: Cooperative Strategies, Collective Ties and Militarized Border-Crossing for Sexual Labour

To move across volatile militarized areas and borders, bambaragas depended on connections with other bambaragas and collaborative entwined labour, mobility and care strategies borne of these. This minimized the risks of militarized border-crossing and reduced the perils of non-violent death to themselves and their children. Furthermore, some bambaragas negotiated these strategies on a collective level across ethnic differences associated with different sides in the highly ethnically-aligned regional conflict. Heightening the personal stakes of this association, they further did so while accessing the encampments of militarized enemies of opposing ethnic alignments. Indeed, as they moved through spaces governed by competing military regimes, bambaragas constantly entrusted each other - sometimes upon first meeting - with their livelihoods, their children, their secrets and their safety.

Safi, a Bambuti bambaraga from the IDP camp next to the settlement, explained the centrality of these connections in her life one day. She was sitting with other women from the settlement and the camp as they got ready to play with their band. As the others listened, she turned to me and said that she had been considering my research question and had an answer for me:

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“This is what you need to know about the lives of bambaragas in war: The life of a bambaraga is a life of complementarity.

You want to leave one place to go to another place, even if you don’t know anyone. You get there and you are searching for where to stay: the bambaragas . Maybe you come, for example, to my place or to another bambaraga . You come and all you do is explain: ‘Me,

I am a bambaraga . I come from this place and I am searching for the means to live here.’

You will stay with [that bambaraga], she will show you the stratégies du milieu [the strategies of the milieu] , the way to negotiate the environment, because you are new and don’t know the spot. This is how you do it, and then she goes out [to do sex work] and you begin going out together, making money and sharing. You eat together, you share what you make together. You share the domestic work. Now, you find yourself in your family [of bambaragas ]. And you all live better that way. (…) But if, for example, [when you are living together], there are [outbreaks of armed] conflict in this or that place [nearby], she knows the milieu. She will go that way and she will flee like this and you will go that way, too. Or maybe, there is conflict right where you are and she will say ‘These are the conditions and rules in this place, here is how you need to act now.’ Or for example, if you want to leave and head to another place. If she knows the milieu or maybe she’s from near there, she might say: ‘Don't go there. I don’t want you to get killed. Wait here, for it to calm down.’ And then, you need to listen to her. You wait for the situation to calm down and then, you go. Because you will see one day that the other bambaraga helped you. She protected you too. That’s the complementarity in our work. That’s what I have to share.”

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At Maneno and the Mugunga settlement, collaboration amongst bambaragas in order to navigate militarized and conflict areas happened all the time on an individual level. What’s more, as the following section details, at Mugunga, it also happened on a collective level. When bambaragas wanted or needed more income, they would undertake longer and farther labour circuits to the highly unstable and explosive interior of the province - and they would do so as a group. One day, Camionne described how this worked as she undertook the preparations for her upcoming trip to Pinga. She was sitting in her best friend Julienne’s living room, in shacks next door to the settlement. Julienne had just excused herself to tend to what all the women referred to jovially as her “M23 pigs”. The pigs were a local bambaraga point of pride and aspiration: two large swine that she had bought with her earnings from trading sex at the M23 rebel camp the previous year when they had conquered large swaths of the region with Rwandan government backing (Smith 2012 b). After encouraging me to photograph the pigs, Camionne smiled: “It’s my turn now to go find well-paying soldiers for myself.” She would go to an area across the province that had recently been the site of active fighting (Radio Okapi 2014). However, she explained, she would not go alone:

“Normally, we go in a group of about 10 bambaragas. We have [ bambaraga ] friends [at

the various rebel camps and mines], and we work in shifts: We take over, they come

down, and we go up. That’s how we organize ourselves, because all the wealth in the

world is in the forest, it’s in the villages there. Even if it manifests itself in the city, it all

comes from there. There are the miners, the gold, the minerals and lots of goods – to find

it, you have to go.

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The militarized terrain of the Kivus is complex, shifting and dangerous. Camionne and her friends would deal with the army and at least three different rebel groups at their final destination or along the way: The “Janvier Mai-Mai” (a majority Hunde army with great enmity towards Hutu and Tutsi populations116), Hutu FDLR and the Hutu Mai-Mai Nyaturas (both with great enmity for Hunde and Nande populations) (Human Rights Watch 2015). The money was good at the Mai-Mai Nyaturas, but, according to Camionne, they were also known for attacking bambaragas and robbing them of everything as they left. All three groups alternately collaborated or actively fought each other. They also periodically fought the army and UN blue helmets and attacked civilians perceived as of being of “opposing” ethnicities (Human Rights

Watch 2015). A fourth group, commonly referred to as the Mai-Mai Shekas, a Nyanga army committed to the “extermination” of both Hutu and Hunde, often attacked the area (Human

Rights Watch 2015). Two women in the South reported having previously worked at the Mai-

Mai Shekas; however, the bambaragas from Mugunga avoided them at all cost. They were reputed to be especially violent towards women, and stories abounded of women returning from the Shekas terrorized or wounded, warning other bambaragas never to go there. Faida recounted a woman returning having had her hand cut off, imploring women not to go. Similarly, women in

Masisi recounted bambaragas returning from the Shekas telling them that Sheka himself, the commander of the Shekas, had cut off the arms or killed bambaragas who disobeyed him.

Echoing these claims, Human Rights Watch reported that the Mai-Mai Sheka mutilated victims and massacred scores of civilians by hacking them to death with machetes. Many of their atrocities were committed around Pinga (Decapua 2015; Human Rights Watch 2017).

116 The Janvier Mai-Mai are also known as Alliance du peuple pour un Congo libre et souverain or APCLS.

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In order to navigate the complex dangers of militarized environment such as this one, bambaragas frequently depended on the acquisition and sharing of nuanced knowledge about the constantly changing militarized configurations and the variable regulation of bambaragas under each one. Such exchanges often happened individually. However, the bambaragas Camionne travelled with would share knowledge as a group and engage cooperatively in strategies that were responsive to the milieu. They would inform each other of which armed actors were dangerous for women of specific ethnicities and would instruct each other on where to go. Then, they would plan a time to meet at the nearest large intersection and would depart together either

“pita-pita ”, on foot, or by FUSO truck.

In any case, we are not imprudent. We know to separate and we divide ourselves so one

group goes here to the [Hutu Kinyarwandan speaking] Nyaturas, and the other group goes

to the [rival] Mai-Mais. We leave with a fixed plan of where we are going. It is all

planned in advance. When we get together, we are all mixed ethnicities and languages but

we subdivide [at the turn-offs for different destinations] based on language 117 . The [Hutu]

ones who speak Kinyarwanda: “You! Follow this path to this [Hutu] group!” The ones

who don’t: “Follow these other paths!”

Bambaragas ’ cooperation across ethnic lines is notable in that it exposed them to significant risk in the region they travelled in 118 . This was true even for women like Camionne

117 Language was often considered a proxy for ethnicity. 118 Inter-ethnic cooperation was not particularly notable in Mugunga which was quite diverse and near-by to the relatively cosmopolitan city of Goma. However, conflict in Walikale and Masisi over land distributed according to ethnicity has violently enflamed politically institutionalized ethnic divisions (Pottek 2016).

257 who were ostensibly not ethnically interpellated by the conflict. Travelling with women from a targeted ethnic group heightened women’s risk of being attacked. In their interactions with armed groups, if bambaragas were found to be associating with women from an opposing ethnic side, or accessing an opposing side’s armed camps, it heightened the risk that they - and the bambaragas with them - would be killed due to the perceived dangers of their militarized border- crossing. In separating themselves by ethnicity, Camionne and her friends yielded to an extent to the violent territorialisation of ethnic identity advanced by armed groups. However, this was in order to mitigate its dangers. Separating by ethnicity was in fact a crucial point of solidarity. It was both itself a collectively-devised strategy and bracketed by a continuous engagement in collective strategies across ethnicity that constituted, despite the risks, a gendered refusal to be enlisted in conflict logics and their violent claims.

By virtue of being Bambuti, Camionne was not considered to be ethnically aligned in the conflict. This positionality opened up greater possibilities for trade across militarized lines: “I can go to the side of the [rebels of predominantly] Banande, Bahunde and [some] Bambuti soldiers.” Later, on her way back, if she was careful to go through neutral territory first, she could always take a detour to access the Hutu Nyatura and FDLR. However, she had to be careful never to go too directly: “We can’t do a back-and-forth movement between the two sides, really, that is too risky.” Crossing directly between enemy groups was highly politically charged and placed women at very high risk of violent retribution for their militarized border- crossing. Crossing indirectly allowed women a degree of plausible deniability of contacts with

“the enemy”.

Bambaragas also frequently deployed various collaborative strategies to protect their safety and earnings as they returned back across militarized lines. Camionne relied on three

258 different yet interdependent cooperative labour strategies to facilitate both her return and the return of her income to her child. The first entailed collaboration with the bambaragas she had travelled with to incrementally bring back earnings converted into goods to evade the risks of violent theft by armed actors. The second required the progressive selling of these goods in order to provide and care for her child. The third required regrouping with other bambaragas who had worked at different armed groups’ camps to travel back home.

Camionne could make $60 USD in two months at the Nyaturas, and had once managed

$120 USD in two months at another rebel barrier. Making money was one thing, but safely bringing it back across militarized lines was another. When money flowed, Camionne said:

I can be there working and I see a [ bambaraga ] friend of mine who is getting ready to

come back down from there. I buy lots of goods, like food, and I send them down to my

child, and I say “My child cannot die from hunger there and you can help me and send

these to my child, I am still cultivating [my field] over here…”

Camionne either left her daughter Jibu with her bambaraga aunt or the bambaragas at the settlement. Their ability to provide for Jibu in her absence was serious concern. Marguerite, a bambaraga who lived near the settlement, had left her young child with neighbours while she went to the relatively nearby mines in Rubaya, and had returned to find her child starving and close to death. To minimize this risk, while she was away, Camionne would send back flour, oil, onions, tomatoes or charcoal to whomever was taking care of Jibu. Her caregiver could sell these goods and turn a profit from which she was entitled to take a cut (with which she could feed her own children in some instances), all the while ensuring Jibu had enough to eat while she was

259 away. In turn, other bambaragas at the settlement might later ask her to care for their children and participate in their “petit commerce” (“small-scale trade”) while they were away at distant militarized camps or mines.

Periodically sending items back home was a strategy that protected Camionne from having the whole of two months’ earnings violently robbed as she attempted to cross back across militarized lines. It was not uncommon for bambaragas to be targeted for violent theft, particularly by armed groups. Women’s presence along routes to militarized areas marked them as targets since bambaragas were generally the only women there, and armed actors knew that they were potentially carrying back significant sums of money or items of value from trade.

Indeed, sometimes women were targeted by members of the same armed groups with whom they had just traded or for whom they had just worked. The economic effects of losing months of income could be devastating, prolong already long separations from children and imperil their chances of survival. Resisting theft by armed actors, on the other hand, could be lethal. In South

Kivu, after Raia Mutomboki began violently robbing sex workers who had just traded with them, women developed a system to minimize their losses. Those who had not had many clients and were less likely to be targeted for theft were enlisted to carry some of the money out for those who had been more successful in return for a small cut.

When it was time to return home, Camionne, would again seek out other bambaragas , including those who had gone in different directions to various rival rebel groups. She explained:

There is a time and place, when there is a market [in a government/UN controlled town]

and all [rebel and government] groups go to the market. Everyone and everything is

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there. We meet up with our group of bambaragas there at a set time. [When it is time to

leave], then we meet, we plan how we will all go home.

Even once they had achieved their goal of reaching their destination and making money, bambaragas saw a benefit in regrouping across different ethnicities to plan and to depart. It would appear that women calculated that the risks of being targeted were outstripped by the benefits of cooperation and of the cultivation of an ethos that placed links amongst bambaragas above conflict loyalties.

Indeed, whether they relied on group or individual collaboration, the qualities bambaragas appreciated in each other were frequently those that facilitated connections and protections as they moved. A bambaraga who was “ souple” or “ flexible” (“supple” or

“flexible”), was one who could be counted on to react quickly and easily to changing circumstances. A bambaraga who was chaude (“warm”) would not only assist but welcome and care for you. Women would frequently explain that bambaragas were “ soudées” (“soldered” or

“welded together”), invoking both their closeness and the solidity of their bond. Other scholars have noted that male workers in isolated and highly dangerous conditions that require collaboration and trust, such as sailors and miners, often have high social cohesion and are more likely to “develop their own codes, myths, heroes and social standards” (Kerr and Siegel

1954:191). Scott refers to the resulting subcultures as “communities of fate” (1990:136). Some bambaragas espoused a similar sentiment. In the 1800s, a journalist described the prostitues, women ex-convicts and vagrants who lived together on the periphery of Irish military camps differently though. He percieved them rather as a large family of women raising their children together (Luddy 1992). Similary, many bambaragas , particulary those who lived together and

261 raised each others’ children, explained their collective link in kinship terms 119 . Nyota, for example, would frequently say that she belonged to the “bambaraga family.” These emerging kinship structures resemble those described by Hoefinger amongst Cambodian bar sex workers who were often mobile and yet also shared living quarters and workplaces (2013). Bar girls, she writes, became each other’s family in the Butlerian sense of: “a community that binds, cares, and teaches, that shelters and enables” (Butler 1993:37). Bambaragas’ claiming and support of each other were exceptional, though, in that they enabled socially linked women to navigate through militarized areas and across militarized borders. The expression “Les bambaragas n’ont pas de frontières” (“ Bambaragas have no borders”) was sometimes extended to “ Les bambaragas n’ont pas de frontières entre elles” (“There are no borders between bambaragas ”) . This foregrounded bambaragas’ connection to each other and placed it in a position of strength and resistance to other sovereign claims. Thus the gendered and gendered-Bambuti sovereignty that some bambaragas deployed, though not a collective political project, was nonetheless undergirded by the power of bambaragas’ connection to each other. It is akin perhaps to what Audra Simpson has called “feeling citizenships”: “alternative citizenships to the state that are structured in the present space of intra-community recognition, affection, and care, outside of the logics of (…) rule” (2014, 109).

Of course, the above expressions also romanticized relationships amongst bambaragas which were fractured by class and could succumb to ethnic and militarized divisions, exclusion

119 Some bambaragas were of course each other’s kin in a conjugal or sexual way, though none were openly so at Maneno and Mugunga and the topic was highly stigmatized and very reluctantly discussed. Near to Maneno, two bambaragas lived together openly as a couple and were raising a child. During my field work, I heard that a community meeting had been held to decide if they should be tortured to death or simply let be. The community opted for the latter. Despite some women claiming to vaguely know them, no one would introduce me to them. In the Birere slum of Goma, however, discussion was far more open and there was an openly same-sex couple, one of whom was a bambaraga living in what was known as a sex workers’ area (and had previously been the Quartier Général or sex workers’ quarters).

262 based on sexual orientation or gender identity, and of course, personal conflicts. Groups of bambaragas could even at times violently fight each other over who did and didn’t have the right to work in a given space. It was nonetheless true that bambaragas constantly and consistently relied on other bambaragas. “I can’t spend a night, unless it’s next to another bambaraga ,”

Nyota once said to a murmur of ascent from women sitting outside the settlement. Throughout her adult life and decades of armed conflict, she explained, wherever she was and wherever she went, other bambaragas were always her point of reference, who she looked for and “where” she felt “safe and at ease”. Indeed, as they moved across militarized lines and in and out of conflict zones, bambaragas counted on finding each other: for mutual recognition, necessary collaboration, and safe haven.

If by Grace, I Survive and You Survive, Come Find Me: Militarized Border-Crossing,

Soldiers and War (North and South)

For reference: The three territoires discussed in this section are (from north to south) Walikale, Kalehe, and Kabare. References in this section are generally to a zone or to the nearest town to a mine, not to the specific town.

Maneno and Chombo are small towns in the territoire of Kabare , South-Kivu. Maneno is located on the eastern edge of the park (indicated in blue shading).

Bunyakiri is both a town (“centre”) and a zone in the territoire of Kalehe , South-Kivu. The towns of Kambale and Kambegete are in the zone of Bunyakiri.

Itebero is both a town and a zone in the territoire of Walikale , North Kivu. Musenge is a town in Walikale.

The forested areas that became national parks are indicated with blue stripes. Large forested areas also exist alongside and outside of the parks. The Buloho river is the thick grey line that traverses all three areas, passing alongside towns and through the forest.

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Map produced by CAID department of the DR Congo government 2016

Jeanne: Beginnings

Jeanne recounted her life and labour history to me over many afternoons in Maneno, leaning up against her shack as she came and went from various trips. Jeanne had spent many years moving across militarized lines that were spatial (territories controlled by different armed groups) and interpersonal (relationships with men on opposing sides in a shared or disputed area) to sell sex and perform other complementary labour. Her experiences illustrate how mobility across militarized lines was often more than just a way of seeking out labour opportunities. It could also be a means of searching for better terms and conditions of labour (as related to armed groups’ regulation of bambaragas , specific intimate arrangements or regional conflict contexts)

264 and of rejecting forms of gendered governance that could imperil bambaragas . Indeed, leaving was a prime means by which bambaragas refused or attempted to refuse armed groups’ or individual armed actors’ lethal claims on bambaragas ’ lives. Nonetheless, mobility for bambaragas was not just an “exit” in Hirschman’s sense of withdrawing from social groupings that no longer benefit you (1970). Rather than remove themselves, bambaragas like Jeanne moved extremely carefully back and forth, refusing to come under the firm control of any sovereign claim to their loyalty, their labour and their lives.

Jeanne’s labour history exemplifies as well how women’s intimate entanglements with various militarized individuals and groups could have their own kind of longue durée that exceeded events. The effects of having sexual partners across militarized lines could endure for women long after the ending of sexual arrangements, the cessation of active conflict or the disarmament of groups. For bambaragas , evading being killed as they navigated militarized environments required contending with their own layered histories in a place, and the layered and changing histories of the militarized men to whom they sold sex.

1988-2004 Jeanne was born in 1988, in Chombo, a small Batwa village surrounded by Kahuzi-Biega park, although she identified as Batembo with a Hunde grandfather 120 . She remembered little of her early childhood except that she was seven years old when her parents died of an illness. By that time, seven of her siblings had already died in childhood of illness or starvation. Her older brother, Zairois, a married young adult with three children of his own, took her and her three siblings in. Two years later, as Hutu refugees and the Interhamwe fled through the area

120 The Batembo had intermarried a lot with Batwa communities in the area, and there was some dispute in Maneno over whether women who identified as Batembo were actually of Batwa and Batembo descent.

265 massacring locals and being massacred by incoming armed groups, Zairois was shot and killed as he fled. Jeanne’s adult sister-in-law could not manage the burden: two of her daughters died.

Finally, Jeanne’s grandparents, fearing for all of them, took in Zairois’s surviving son, Jeanne, and her three remaining siblings. However, her grandparents were frail and struggling to care for them. A neighbor, Marie, who had been good friends with Jeanne’s mother, heard of their situation. She came and saw the state of Jeanne’s grandparents and the children and said: “I lived very well with your mother. I cannot leave you like this.” Marie took Jeanne and her sister,

Judith, to live with her in Bunyakiri area in the district of Kalehe, a few hours away. Jeanne later learned that her sister and brother, Françoise and Jean-Claude, who had stayed with her grandparents, starved to death not long after. Marie and her husband treated Jeanne and her sister kindly and equally to her biological children. They became a family.

2004-2011 When Jeanne was 16, her adoptive father died and all of the family property was claimed by his relatives, according to custom. It came as a painful shock when in a public ceremony, the paternal relatives agreed to allocate some of the inheritance to Marie’s now married biological daughter, but excluded Jeanne and her sister. Marie had no power to protest, as she was stripped of any rights of her own. As soon as Marie’s biological daughter’s husband received part of the property, he threw Jeanne and her sister out.

Jeanne went to Bunyakiri where she met a man and began an informal relationship. She had three children with him, and then he disappeared. In order to support herself and her children, she began selling sex. To do so, she went farther north to Walikale, a more unstable and remote but lucrative part of North-Kivu. She worked at gold and cassiterite (tin oxide) mines.

The money was good. Some mines were run and worked directly by a Mai-Mai group, others

266 directly by Raia Mutomboki, and others were in areas under the control of government soldiers or Raia Mutomboki soldiers. 121 Jeanne had no trouble crossing Raia roadblocks and would sometimes be allowed to pass for free since she spoke Kitembo like most Raia.

Jeanne: Selling Sex, Soldiers and War 2011-2012 In Itebero, a mining town in Walikale, Jeanne began a paid liaison with a member of the

Raia Mutomboki armed group (“a Raia”) 122 . She met a sweet mbaraga named Viviane whose family lived in the area and they became close friends. Viviane had a client who was an FARDC soldier.

I got information from the rebel side, and Viviane got information from the government

side. And we exchanged what information we had with each other often. Then one day,

she came and said: ‘We’re expecting something to go down, any time now. You have to

get out of here.’ I let it be. Then, I heard from the my Raia friend [/client] that in two or

three days, bad things would happen and that I should get out of here, but I let it be.

Viviane and I talked about it, we thought something bad was on the horizon, but we still

didn’t leave. We planned though to meet up in Musenge if we did. Then that same day,

my Raia friend came, he said: “The climate is not good. Now, you have to leave. I’m

going to get you a motorcycle taxi, you get the food ready [to take with you].” The first

moto taxi driver came and took the three kids, and I said, “I am just going to finish

making the food.” I was there pounding the pestle when the shots started ringing out and

121 This was cross-referenced and verified with the IPSIS data bases on artisanal mines and armed actors. 122 The conflict events Jeanne describes are corroborated in whole or in part by a number of contemporaneous news articles. However, I have not included them in order to leave central how she experienced events.

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I realized there was nothing left to do but run. I told my RM friend “I’m leaving. If by

grace, I survive and you survive, come find me in Musenge.”

I got to Musenge and I found my three kids in the hotel where the moto-taxi driver

brought them. Three days later, my friend resurfaced at the hotel and we stayed together

another two months. I found Viviane, like we had planned. After a while Viviane said:

“Le mouvement (the money)’s not so good here. Let’s go back to Bunyakiri.” And I

resisted going, but she gave me the address where she was from [so I could find her

again].

Jeanne had become accustomed to the area, so she stayed on, but she and Viviane kept in touch. There is no postal system; it had been eliminated under Mobutu, as a possible source of civilian resistance to authoritarian power (Reno 1997). They could not afford cell phones, which rarely worked in very rural areas anyway 123 . They could have relied on itinerant “Motorola” operators who on market days set up appointments to contact other towns with a radio system, but it involved a lot of planning. Instead, Jeanne and Viviane sent letters back and forth to each other through itinerant market-vendors who had a side-business as messengers to towns in the area.

123 The cell phone network was very spotty. This led to the famous pagne design that featured someone climbing a tree to grab a signal and the slogan “ Panda Ku Réseau ” “Climb for the network signal!” Even in areas with cell phone towers, outages were constant because people would siphon gas off from the generators operating the towers or occasionally, because the towers were frequent targets in combat. As well, one often needed to travel to a town to recharge batteries at a battery-recharging hut.

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There was a Mai-Mai-operated mine in Walikale next to the town where Jeanne was based. She went to work there and found another bambaraga with whom to share a maisonette or shack. However, the environment had become tense.

The Mai-Mais were not getting along even amongst themselves , and that created a big

problem for the bambaragas . For example, if one Mai-Mai wants to go out with me and

so does another, they will kill each other or kill me. Then, the community and the chief

will blame you. If you notice that there is a problem like that between two Mai-Mais, that

they both love you…you have to get out of there because if they don’t kill you, they will

kill each other.

That’s what happened to the friend I was living with. Two Mai-Mais killed each other

over her, and I told her, “this is going to turn against you.” All the other bambaragas , we

asked her to flee: “Don’t wait, don't take anything. It’s the night, you leave now, at

night.” She went to the river bank, and followed the shore and that’s how she left.

A few months later, the conflict was becoming active again. One day, when there was artillery fire, Jeanne decided that she needed to take her children and leave again, this time to

Bunyakiri, the region to the south of Walikale, where Viviane was. However, Viviane had since left. Money had been slow, and so she had bought manioc and sombe and travelled a short distance south to Maneno to sell it. Jeanne found her a few weeks later when she came back to

Bunyakiri to restock. Before leaving again, she told Jeanne: “I am in Maneno now. Go to [here and here] and ask for so-and-so’s place and you’ll find me.”

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Then, it began to heat up in Bunyakiri and I was forced to run again (…) because there

were too many massacres, I remembered [how to find her]. My children and I took the

Buloho river and we followed its banks until [a nearby town] and then we took transport

to Maneno. You couldn’t take the road because it was war.

Jeanne and her children stayed with Viviane in Maneno for a time, and then returned to

Walikale, and back again to Bunyakiri where she found another longer-term arrangement with a man with whom she conceived her fourth child, Flora. After Flora was born, he left. Jeanne and her children returned North to Walikale in search of miners and soldiers again.

2013-2014 It was good in Walikale, it was stable and we were well. The issue was lots of

bambaragas started to go there and soon it was 5 women to one client. 124 (…) I left and

went to Itebero but then there was conflict between the Raia Mutomboki itself, they were

not getting along. I left with many others [back down to Bunyakiri].

I tried to go to many places, but they were all in conflict. In Hombo, it was between

FARDC and Raia Mutomboki. The FARDC wanted to take back the community, so the

Raia attacked them. The FARDC want to sabotage the community that supports the

Raias, so I kept on moving down to Kambegete.

124 The period in which Jeanne spoke of incomes falling around the mines and a high sex worker to miner ratio overlaps with the embargo on artisanal mining that resulted on massive loss of employment and incomes for artisanal miners in the region. It is possible that the numbers of sex workers increased in Walikale as women may have moved from faltering mines to an area known for its high income potential. However, what is certain is that the number of miners decreased during this time (see Chapter Five).

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In Kambegete, I rented a room to live in and I had an FARDC client who came from time

to time and the Raia had already noticed. When there started to be attacks between the

FARDC and the Raia, my client told me that I had to escape quickly (…). Since I was

with an FARDC soldier, the Raia might kill me. So, I took my luggage and sent it onward

to Kambale and then I left. I heard that moments later, the Raias attacked the place and

came looking for me, but I was already gone. They said that the day they see a

bambaraga with the FARDC, they will kill her. And the FARDC also say that the day

they see a bambaraga with the Raia, they will kill her because bambaragas bring the

conflict in, they give signals, they identify weaknesses, they do all that they do.

It was exceedingly rare for bambaragas to be involved in militarized tasks for an opposing side

(i.e. spying). However, state and non-state armed groups frequently associated bambaragas with gendered treachery and the risk of violent destruction due to their gendered autonomy and by extension, their presumed militarized border crossing.

2014 In Kambale, Jeanne had lots of clients. They included both FARDC and Raia

Mutomboki. Then, two women she knew were killed by the FARDC, accused of sleeping with both sides. She was scared to see any more militarized men, given her past involvements. She was relieved to find a civilian client to settle with, and when he agreed to live with her kids and support her through her pregnancy, she was over the moon. Even though he had a family in another part of the country, he paid for her children’s schooling. It was more than she had hoped for.

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Jeanne’s home was next to the FARDC military camp. One day when she was home alone with her youngest, now a toddler, one of the bambaragas living there, came over to her.

She whispered in my ear: “ Something bad is going to happen. They are getting ready in

the camp .” I thought: How? Maybe she’s competing with me [for my client]. Maybe she

is jealous and is lying. Then, five minutes later, the bullets started flying over my head

[and through the house]. I saw the child. I took the child. And I ran. But before I ran, I

called out to the other women [still in the camp]. I asked them to leave with me. They

called back that they were with the military, what could happen to them?

Jeanne fled to the church. Then, the military soldiers fled, and only the women were left as the

Raia went door to door through the camp. Two of the bambaragas managed to escape to the church. The women who escaped told Jeanne that at least two bambaragas had been killed, but possibly as many as four.

“The only ones left [in the camp] were bambaragas and they were killed.”

Jeanne’s lover and client was hit with a bullet and died. Their house was burned down as both

FARDC and Raia Mutombokis set fire to houses. Jeanne’s youngest child had “ des chocs ” or

“shocks” from the bullets that had flown across their house. She gathered her three children 125 and fled again, yet further south, to Viviane’s in Maneno.

125 Jeanne had four children at this point, but at some juncture she only lived with three. She never explained this and generally referred to her three children, even though she consistently referred to four pregnancies and deliveries.

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I met Jeanne a week later in Maneno. It was dawning on her how much she’d lost. She was fearful about her high-risk pregnancy and concerned about her youngest who still had

“chocs ”.

Love is a chance. It’s luck. You do not find it just anywhere. I really loved him and he

accepted to take care of the kids and the pregnancy that were not his. He provided for all

our needs. He loved me and all my multiples.

Viviane persuaded Jeanne to live with her. She, too, was raising children on her own. They could take turns going off to the mines or soldiers while the other took care of their combined children in the relative safety of Maneno. When they went to the mines in Itebero, they could stay with her parents.

A few weeks later, in anticipation of the costs of her coming caesarian section, Jeanne was preparing to go up to Walikale again, in the late stages of a high-risk pregnancy and on foot.

Solange and Mwezi had already departed in that direction. She sat on a low bench leaned up against her house and explained the steps.

If you get ready to leave here, to go another place, say Walikale, you need to prepare

your transport money and your roadblock money. You need to pay the armed groups their

money, and the government soldiers their money. (…) FARDC barriers are 200F each,

though in Kambale they can be as much as 2500– and there are many. I get through the

Raia ones without paying because I speak Kitembo (…). Most of the mines are Raia

mines and they charge you 200F to enter, unless they know you.

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Then when you get to the community, you need to find the village chief to identify yourself. You will need to pay a few bottles or a whole case of beer, it depends. This way, he knows you are there and if something bad happens to you, he will have to look into it. (…) And if you die, he knows how to maybe repatriate you, he knows you are there. If you are not identified and you die, they don’t give a damn, they just bury you.

For some of the mines, you have to show an ID card. It’s in your interest to go identify yourself at the chief’s because if you don’t, and they know you came into the area, and an incident happens in the night, they will go after you (…), and that can cause you many problems. Whereas, if they go after you after an incident but you followed the normal process of going to the chief, then he will say “She came to my house and is in the area.

It’s just bad luck this incident happened, it’s not her fault”.

There are nurses who sell condoms by the mines. When the FARDC controls, it must be their nurses. When its Raia, it’s probably someone from the community or from their side. You can pay them also for medical treatment or medicine.

Now, if you want to go work in the mine run by the Mai-Mais, you go see the chief and he will invite the Mai-Mai commander to come and introduce you to him: “This is my guest who has come to work here. This is what she does. If someone wants to stay with her, for a certain number of days, he can come see me.” And the commander gives instructions to you and to whoever wants to stay with you [as a client]. Now, you are sous la sécurité , under the protection, of the chef and if something bad happens, it is the chef who is going to manage it or go after whoever did it. There, you need to “ fidélise”

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“faithfulize” yourself [stay with only one client] 126 . All those who want can sign up with

the chief and then they say, this one from Monday to Friday. But everyone killing

themselves over a woman, no!

When a man is selected, then he goes over and speaks to you and you negotiate a price.

You say to the chief: ‘We have come to an agreement. I am with him for this amount of

time : this many days, weeks, months.’ The chief needs to know the deal because if [the

rebel client] doesn’t pay, then he will have problems.

This was how it worked, in theory, but, as Jeanne’s experience had shown, if bambaragas agreed to situations where men became jealous of each other, it could quickly get out of hand and threaten their lives.

It’s better to work with the Raias then the Mai-Mais because the Mai-Mais aren’t good

people. If they decide to kill you or do something bad, they don’t hesitate. Whatever you

do, they will carry through. Whereas the Raias live well with the community, they

understand the community and its problems and they want to be close to the community

and the government soldiers are better too. (…) It is easier with the FARDC than the Raia

Mutomboki, because the Raias think that someone who doesn’t speak their language, the

Kitembo or Kirega, is a spy, and so, for women who don’t, there are all those risks,

126 “Fidéliser” has other contextual meanings. For further exploration of these, see Chapter 2.

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whereas the FARDC, they don’t believe that kind of thing, you just have to try and

understand each other 127 .

The law that says that a bambaraga who works on both sides must be killed because she

is a spy is still in full effect. If you are with the FARDC and with the Raia, you still do it

but they mustn’t know. So, you see, I had a Raia in [Kalehe] and I can’t do another Raia

there, unless it’s bing-bang, in passing. I had an FARDC client there last summer [too]. I

can’t tell them that story because they will kill me or it will cause conflicts. So, I hide it,

it’s my private life.

Now, I can’t go into the ngandas (bars/sex work venues) [in the Bunyakiri zone of

Kalehe]. Someone who is just passing through and gets their clients, in the nganda , no

problem. Someone, though, who gets clients and brings them home, she can’t work the

ngandas anymore. If you have someone and he finds you in the nganda – or two clients

find you in the nganda – it gets complicated. He might not know that you have other

clients. He goes there because he is a client for everyone. He is free. But you, the fact that

you went out with him, you are no longer free. He goes, he finds you there, he will cause

you problems. If you go, and by bad luck, you find TWO clients who you spent time with

at home - then, it becomes complicated for you and for THEM, if they know each other.

In bambaragas ’ lives, especially those who have fidéliséd a client- or who go with

military men - we have very private lives, our lives are not to be shared with everyone.

127 Since FARDC officers were deployed from other parts of the country, they often did not speak Swahili. The official language of the army was Lingala.

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The spaces in which one could seek out a livelihood selling sex across lines could open and close according to the layered histories bambaragas had with the militarized men within them and to what became of those men. This was all the more salient as armed groups emerged, dissipated, or were absorbed, or as military battalions reconquered or retreated. Within the flux of conflict, bambaragas ’ current and previous militarized relationships took on different significance, conferring and, at times, carrying forward, their own opportunities and their own risks. Hoping to outrun or outsmart attempts to kill her and to improve on what was possible wherever she was, Jeanne, like so many other bambaragas , kept on carefully assessing, shifting and moving.

Necropolitics and the Militarized Regulation of Gendered Labour

Many bambaragas across the North and South described, like Jeanne, a “law in place” amongst all armed groups that bambaragas who were suspected of crossing militarized sides were to be killed. In actuality, this law could – and did at times – apply to any bambaraga since all bambaragas were suspect of crossing militarized sides. This gendered, classed and racialized 128 terror was constitutive of a politics of “subjugation of life to the power of death” amongst competing armed groups making sovereign claims (Mbembe 2003, 39).

Wright asserts that gender is central to the violent dynamics of necropolitics. She builds on Mbembe’s insight that “the threat of violent death continues to prevail as a technique of governance” (2011, 709) by drawing on a body of feminist theorizing that posits that “gender

128 The killings of bambaragas occurred within certain racialized dynamics. Notably, unmarried women who were racialized as “blancs”/ “muzungu” (“white”/non-African foreigners) could cross militarized borders as journalists, humanitarian workers, aid workers or indeed, researchers without ever falling under the “law”. The law discussed above applied to women who were racialized as “noire”/“Africaine” (including women who were also or otherwise racialized as “pygmées ”) and who were poor. Future research might investigate whether the law also applied to women who were thus racialized but of a higher class background or in a position of authority. Notably, Mibenge found that conflict violence specifically targeted Rwandan women at both ends of the class spectrum (2013).

277 politics are (…) foundational to the organization of states as the legitimate arbiters of violence”

(for example through states’ coercive (violent) enforcement of women’s exclusion from public space). Wright argues that these two processes are linked. She cites the gendered necropolitics of the Mexican government letting multiple women continue to be killed by non-state actors by labelling their deaths as justified due to their transgression of gendered exclusion from pubic space (2011).

Notably, the existing theorizing of gendered necropolitics has focused on situations where states allow or normalize the killing of women by non-state perpetrators (see

Ahmetbeyzade 2008; Fuentes 2016; Wright 2011). In contrast, Sjoberg and Peet examine when women are directly killed by state or non-state armed groups making sovereign claims in conflict. For Sjoberg and Peet, the predominant political dynamic at work in the killings of women in war is not the punishment of women’s gendered transgressions but rather the presumption of their feminine innocence, civilian status and importance as symbolic centers of nations or communities (2011). They argue that these dominant gendered narratives incentivize killing women because doing so becomes a means of attacking an armed adversaries’ claimed masculine ability to protect “its” women and children.

Bambaragas , though, were killed because they were perceived as a threat in their own right. The law Jeanne described was set within a security logic that apprehended bambaragas not as the civilian center claimed by any side, but as the embodiment of gendered treachery and the menace of violent destruction. If bambaragas were to be killed it was because, as Jeanne explained, and as was often repeated, they “brought the conflict in”. Such justifications placed bambaragas as always arriving from elsewhere, as “in” the community but never “of” it 129 .

129 I am indebted to Chris Bruckert for the analysis and formulation of how where sex workers are often construed as “in” but not “of” the communities they inhabit.

278

Moreover, it positioned bambaragas as the origin and cause of violent siege, rendering killing them necessary for peace. Bambaragas were not necessarily suspected of loyalty to another side

(other men), but rather of a dangerous disloyalty inherent to their nature as autonomous women.

It was poor bambaragas’ enactment of gendered sovereignty – their militarized border-crossing, their unregulated labour and their uncontrolled sexuality – that threatened armed groups making sovereign claims. Bambaragas challenged (both state and non-state) armed groups’ control over the regulation of gender (what Wrights calls the “violence of gender” (2011:710)) and conjured fears of the destruction that follows a diminished sovereign hold on violent control.

Bambaragas’ danger and perceived treachery persisted beyond any actual evidence of military assistance (or even of militarized boundary-crossing) and in the presence of evidence that men from opposing militarized sides neither claimed them nor attempted to protect them. In

Masisi, Nathalie described recently having survived a massacre by Mai-Mais. She had been encamped in the forest with a group of bambaragas of different ethnicities and their children, not far from the armed group camp whom they hoped to approach for clients when, to their shock and confusion, the Mai-Mai soldiers opened fire, killing women and accusing them of being spies. In interviews, ten bambaragas independently recounted bearing witness to or arriving soon after eleven separate massacres that targeted multiple sex workers. Bambaragas ’ perceived militarized border crossing was a recurrent theme in the recounting of the stated motives for their killings, although rarely with any evidence of it having occurred.

If bambaragas embodied the stigma of gendered treachery due to their enactment of certain forms of gendered autonomy, it always threatened to settle on other women too 130 . This

130 This has parallels to Gail Pheterson’s work on the whore stigma as one embodied by sex workers but always threatening to affix itself to women suspected of transgression and often presumptively applied to poor women or women racialized as subordinate (1996). Wright has similarly stated that women femicide victims in Mexico were

279 reinforced the military or armed groups’ control over all women by demonstrating that they too risked being violently targeted if they claimed too much freedom of movement, labour, sexuality or relationship – and sometimes they were. In one study, former rebels and soldiers in Eastern

Congo cited presumed gendered treachery as a common motivation for violent attacks on women

(those they said were the most severe and gruesome) even though there was no evidence to link attacks to women’s actual military collaboration (Elbert et al. 2013). If women generally benefitted from a presumption of civilian status and innocence in conflict (Sjoberg 2013), it was always conditional on the perception that they were submitting to gendered restrictions on their autonomy imposed by masculinist authorities– and thus a presumption that bambaragas were always excluded from. Bambaragas ’ experiences suggest that some women are killed in conflict not as civilians, nor as militarized enemies, but as something else: sovereign/treacherous women.

In tension with the belief that bambaragas’ real or perceived crossing of militarized borders was so dangerous that it required punishment by death was the common knowledge that many women crossed sides all the time. In fact, armed groups and actors often depended on them doing so. A number of militarized authorities thus deployed various forms of violent repression short of death or regulation to control bambaragas’ labour, sexuality, and movement, and thus, their “dangerousness”. Clarisse reported being repeatedly physically and sexually tortured by the military in the North for her border-crossing. Mpenda recounted that a young bambaraga who lived next to her was abducted by Mai-Mais and enslaved for two years at the rebel camp in response to their receiving information that she also saw military clients. Other authorities developed more institutionalized regulatory and repressive schemes. In internally displaced

discursively framed as deserving death by state actors who attempted to stigmatically associate them with sex workers due to the fact that they were women who worked and occupied public space (2011).

280 persons (IDP) camps, bambaragas recounted being evicted, imprisoned or tortured under the accusation by camp authorities and camp police that bambaragas caused “ insécurité ”.

In the scheme Jeanne experienced, the Mai-Mai chief and mining chief registered women for a fee. In the process, bambaragas became more person-like, their lives placed, albeit marginally, into a web of belonging and intent that required its own reciprocal responsibilities from authorities. They would be protected from the (violent) scapegoating from armed group members or their sympathizers if an attack on the armed group occurred, at least until further inquiry. Their labour agreements would be upheld. Their deaths would be looked into, perhaps their bodies returned to families or communities of origin. However, circumventing regulation

(and its gendered thefts or coercions) was itself confirmatory evidence of bambaragas’ dangerousness and guilt: any violent scapegoating was permitted; any bodies found would be buried.

Some authorities tried to control and exploit women’s boundary-crossing in various ways. This could occur in exchange for “protection” from or under threat of thefts or violence. In one town 131 in rural North-Kivu, the local authorities “allowed” registered women to sell sex free of extortion or violence by police in exchange for a regular payment and their pledge to monitor and report on any armed group-affiliated men using the hotels where they saw clients and/or lived. Local sex workers recruited to the scheme, in turn, leveraged the imposed conditions to protect their market share. They formed an association and negotiated a monopoly on permission to sell sex for their members. This excluded women from nearby communities and IDP camps who faced police extortion and violence when they attempted to sell sex out of IDP camps and punishment from camp authorities when they tried to sell it inside the camps. The women who

131 For safety reasons, I am not disclosing the name of the town.

281

“benefitted” from regulated “permission” to sell sex were left, however, in the dangerous position of being attacked by any militarized men from the “other side” who learned of the scheme.

Authorities also sought to exploit bambaragas ’ extensive connections to other bambaragas to unearth “dangerous” women. These attempts relied on disrupting shared secrecy and solidarity amongst bambaraga . In Miti, authorities from the Agence Nationale de

Renseignements (ANR) , the intelligence ministry, recruited bambaragas to fulfill their patriotic duty and spy on “enemy” women posing as other bambaragas while in fact being military actors.

In 2013, the local representative of the ANR Ministry of the Interior participated in a meeting of bambaragas convened by the head of their association, who also happened to be vice-president of the local civil society association, which worked very concertedly with authorities (evidence too, of the local sway of monied bambaragas in Miti). The representative read out (and later shared with me) a communiqué that Rwandan forces had been training Rwandan women soldiers to pose as school-girls on vacation to cross the border and work as bambaragas in order to entrap and attack FARDC soldiers who were combatting the Rwandan backed and Banyamulenge

(Congolese Tutsi)-led M23. Bambaragas were asked to play an important role for the nation and denounce suspected Rwandan bambaragas to authorities. The directive was a direct attack on all

Banyamulenge women in a context where long-standing racialized discourses accused all

Banyamulenge (Tutsi) Congolese of secretly being “Rwandans” 132 and of Banyamulenge women deploying their beauty for duplicitous and destructive aims 133 . In reality, cases of bambaragas engaging in actual combat-related missions were a rarity. However, the intervention relied on

132 On the long history of Banyamulenge being considered “Rwandans” and understood as racially different see Mamdani 2001. 133 The gendered and racialized narratives about Congolese Banyamulenge (Tutsi) women’s beauty and duplicity echo many of those that circulated about Tutsi women before the Rwandan Genocide described by Taylor (2001).

282 and dangerously fed the notion that bambaragas could not be trusted (or trust each other), particularly across racialized ethnic lines. It also required women to be loyal to a sovereign militarized state, above loyalty to each other’s freedoms. Women present at in the association agreed to keep an eye out for suspect Rwandan bambaragas . A year later, it seemed at least, that none had been reported, leaving unclear whether the local bambaragas had ultimately been loyal to the state or to each other.

Bambaragas had various strategies for navigating gendered forms of necropolitics that were at work in competing (and at times, cooperating) militarized regimes. Some bambaragas attempted to gain the “protection” of a regime by aligning themselves with it. One means to attempt to shed their border-crosser/ bambaraga status, and with it many of their freedoms, was by cohabiting with a militarized actor long-term in a militarized encampment in a more conjugal type of relationship. This moved women closer to the role of civilian/wife and potentially more worthy of protection in the eyes of the non-state armed group or military they aligned with.

However, it placed them more firmly under the control of a given armed group and of an intimate partner. Furthermore, they simultaneously became more militarized actors in the eyes of

UN agencies. Cohabitating rebel “wives” then risked having their children removed by UNICEF due to international law and related humanitarian policies on taking children out of armed groups for their protection (even if they are not soldiers) (UNICEF 2011). Both cohabitating military

“wives” and rebel “wives” also generally became excluded from food aid distribution by humanitarian groups aiming to avoid indirectly supporting armed actors in the conflict. 134 In a handful of cases bambaragas became or remained soldiers or rebels themselves (moving into/staying in the role of militarized combatant), or, extremely rarely , they provided other

134 Conversation with humanitarian worker, December 2014.

283 military labour (i.e. information, stocking of weapons, surveillance) on an ad-hoc basis as proof of loyalty (moving into a non-combatant militarized role). Even if they remained firmly in the role of bambaragas , women could at times use their connections to one militarized side (or men on it) to gain protection from another side. Camionne, for instance, recounted how on one trip to

Pinga in the interior, two of her bambaraga friends had been caught by the Mai-Mai Shekas, feared for their brutality. So, she ran to a rival Mai-Mai armed group and asked for help. They went and fired shots at the Shekas and her friends were released.

Most commonly , bambaragas refused to align themselves and used their mobility, secrecy and specific labour strategies to reduce the risks they faced. Labour strategies included the curtailing of sex work in public venues once they had already had one militarized labourer as a sexual partner; the selection of armed group environments that regulated sex work in ways that mitigated risks of violence due to jealousy or scapegoating; and the selection of militarized environments according to their ethnic affiliation. Another strategy that was described to avoid lethal violence specifically targeting bambaragas in certain militarized mines, near front lines or where power had recently changed hands, was to subtly mask or create some ambiguity about one’s being a bambaraga. This was done by posing as a woman selling something else or by simply “searching for company”. As one woman put it:

You can’t ever admit to being a bambaraga [at the outposts near frontlines during active

combat]. (…) You have to pretend you just came along and ‘Oh! an opportunity

presented itself’ and he will pay you well, he will pay you fully. You know it’s work but

[you] can’t let that show.

284

Mobility enabled women to change environments and escape being violently targeted, as well as to conceal whatever militarized contacts they had had previously. Some women further used militarized borders as shields, crossing them when fleeing violent reprisals and leveraging the fact that it was dangerous for militarized adversaries to enter the territory. Camionne had done precisely this to save her life. When the FLDR officer who had had her abducted threatened to kill her, she escaped the FDLR camp. She had barely arrived in Mugunga when she encountered a low-ranked FDLR soldier she was friendly with who warned her that the officer was searching for her and when he found her, he would kill her. She sent the soldier back to the camp with word that she had already moved on to rival Mai-Mais’ territory in the hopes of buying herself some time. She then fled to the rival Mai-Mais where she stayed and worked until word reached her that the FDLR officer had himself been killed in battle.

Bambaragas sometimes deployed narratives of gendered sovereignty or labour neutrality that eschewed a higher or hidden loyalty to other men or warring parties. The latter relied on a trope many men also used to stake out neutral terrain: “ We are in our work. We are just in our work ” one woman remembered answering armed men questioning her about whether she had contact with men on the “other side”. Another bambaraga would explain: “ Bambaragas, we are like water, we just flow over all the stones ,” to dismiss any sense of her investment in different sides in a conflict. For some women, this was true to the point that they had no idea which armed groups they were going to see, or had seen, let alone their ideology: only that they were

(primarily) men with arms. Many women used the term “ soldat ” to refer interchangeably to combatants with non-state armed groups and regular state military soldiers. (Indeed, as militia and rebels were integrated into the military, then defected, then reintegrated in endless cycles, the distinction was not always clear). Other women were very politically astute but feigned

285 ignorance, deploying beliefs about women’s inability to comprehend political matters as a defensive shield. Discourses of bambaragas’ neutrality could mitigate the threat of being perceived as loyal to an “enemy” though it didn’t disarm fears of bambaragas as autonomous women. Indeed, being “nobody’s women” was what constituted bambaragas as politically and socially dangerous under competing sovereign claims.

Bambaragas ’ networks and obligations of reciprocal care – even with women they didn’t know – were the crucial cornerstone to mitigating many of the harms of necropolitical targeting of boundary-crossing women. Bambaragas gave each other shelter and provided assistance within and across conflicting military lines and across militarized-civilian lines. They shared sensitive and dangerous information and they protected each other’s secrets. However, bambaragas’ speech and secrecy exceeded the concealed subaltern “symbolic and ideological dissent” that Scott terms “hidden transcripts” (1990, 196). In a context of armed conflict, communication has the power to consign death or to avert it and “a word can fix a fate” (Theidon

2012: 15). Complicity among bambaragas in silence and speech were political acts of refusal to be aligned with military claims of death over women’s lives. It was one means of enacting gendered sovereignty against a gendered necropolitics.

286

Conclusion

Bambaragas’ experiences of war-time governance open up several new insights and raise many new questions about armed conflict. Firstly, bambaragas’ experiences highlight how an examination of non-violent death is key to understanding not only death in armed conflict, but the contours of life in war. This raises further key questions for studies of power and war. Chief among them is the question of how engaging centrally with non-violent death might contribute to evaluations of “private” or “hybrid” governance, transnational humanitarian or human rights interventions, and transnational economic policies (i.e. off-shore banking). What, in other words, are the broader political economic factors at work in the production of non-violent death in contexts of armed conflict? How are such deaths distributed unevenly across population categories and how do they figure into reckonings with the politics of death in war?

Taking non-violent death seriously alerts us to the fact that while there has been growing interest in women’s productive labour in war (El-Bushra 2003; Theidon 2013; Turshen 2001), there is still very little in-depth work specifically examining armed conflict’s effects on reproductive labour and, especially, child care. Yet, for bambaragas , among the most critical impacts that episodes of active armed conflict or local militarization had on them were the constraints or opportunities imposed on their ability to care for and provide for their children.

Many women’s reactions to conflict situations, such as the decisions to go work in and across militarized areas or with armed groups, were made in relation to those considerations. A core insight to come from this dissertation is the need to ask how war affects women and men’s reproductive labour, in the broadest sense, and, with that, how reproductive labour affects war, in its broadest sense.

287

Secondly, bambaragas ’ experiences of being considered neither civilians nor military actors, but as (what I have called throughout this dissertation) “gendered traitors”/ “sovereign women” complicate the longstanding civilian/military actor divide in research on armed conflict.

They also trouble the theory that, following this divide, women are presumptively conferred civilian status under a gendered “immunity principle” in war (Sjoberg 2013). Bambaragas’ experiences thus shed light on an important current academic and social discussion about who is designated as a civilian in armed conflict. Further research might use this finding to look comparatively across armed groups with very different characteristics or contexts at when, why and how their policies and practices, spanning the biopolitical (Foucault 1990) to the necropolitical (Mbembe 2003), apprehend women as civilians, gendered traitors/sovereign women or military actors. Future inquiry might also examine other individuals or groups who cross militarized borders such as humanitarian actors, male peddlers or religious authorities to compare and contrast their experiences of governance by state and non-state armed groups with those of bambaragas .

As well, the intentional killings of women have been identified as key events for analyzing both gender and civilian status in war (Mibenge 2013, Sjoberg 2013). Bambaragas’ experiences of witnessing or surviving attacks of multiple sex workers raise crucial questions to be explored in further research. How are killings of bambaragas by armed actors different or the same as when other women are intentionally attacked? Are non-bambaraga women killed as

“gendered traitors” and, if so, in what circumstances? Furthermore, events in Maneno raise a raft of questions about social patterns of killings in war (Lubkemann 2008). Is there a relationship between the killing of women by external armed groups and factors in a locality, such as

288 authorities’ gendered policies, levels of (gendered) social marginalization or recent changes in gendered social power?

The centrality of bambaragas ’ relationships to each other was pivotal to their labour and reproductive labour, to their gendered refusals and to the socio-political shifts they were part of creating. Yet, if armed conflict studies frequently eclipse women, the field has even more rarely looked in depth at women’s relationships to each other through and after conflict. In so doing, our research risks missing out on the social and political impacts of cumulative, and at times collective, gendered and classed strategies and alliances on war and on life in war. Without looking at bambaragas ’ relationships to each other, it would have been impossible for me to understand the extent to which poor women collectively resisted their children’s non-violent deaths and the frequency with which they subverted militarized ethnic-alignment related to the conflict. Furthermore, bambaragas were contributing to significant social changes in gendered property ownership and the social possibility for unmarried women to keep their children. But beyond their social and political import, the relationships between bambaragas were of profound personal and often familial meaning. Despite my hundreds of questions about life in conflict and the men in their lives— clients, authorities, romantic male partners— conversation would turn, time and time again, to other bambaragas . Women’s everyday was not only sustained by other bambaragas ; it also was lived in close relation to each other through extremely life-threatening circumstances with all the complexities, tensions and beauty that such closeness creates. I thus humbly propose that the field of conflict studies might benefit from the insights gained through applying a modified Bechdel test (also known as the Bechdel-Wallace Test, Bechdel 1985). The

Bechdel test looks at gendered representation in popular culture and holds that in order to pass, a work must have at least two women, who talk to each other, about something other than a man.

289

Such a methodological challenge might allow for new empirical findings about the social experiences and political dynamics of armed conflict. It might also broaden our theoretical horizons with regards to the nature and process of power formation in conflict areas.

Beyond opening up further questions, bambaragas ’ lives tell us something central about war. If armed conflict affected bambaragas’ lives in profound ways, their lives also affected the war and life in it. For one, their various forms of labour were not only often of central importance to armed groups, they were at times key factors in conflict dynamics. As well, though women selling sex was nothing new, the rise to prominence of the concept of bambaragas was inextricably entwined with the almost two decades of armed conflict. The women in this study participated in the forging of new gendered social categories, subjectivities and kinship dynamics in armed conflict. Furthermore, the money bambaragas gained through their labour in militarized contexts at times changed gendered relationships to land and housing and, by extension, to local power dynamics. Lastly, when money from sexual labour economies, including mines, declined in relation to transnational humanitarian embargoes and nearby active conflict, and supplemental income dried up as crops failed, it was bambaragas who began escaping hospital debt and detention en masse around Maneno. In so doing, they created a public example of collective resistance to the privatized political economy of care at the heart of both state and armed group governance that, in interaction with armed conflict, generated mass non- violent death.

Bambaragas demanded payment for their gendered labour. They did not “belong” sexually or otherwise to any man. They claimed the right to come and go. They valued their own lives and those of their children. They did so in a protracted armed conflict known for forced labour, gendered terror and enslavement, forced mobility and immobility and mass avoidable

290 death of poor women and their children. If they were at times reviled, violently targeted or killed, it spoke both to their frequent relative powerlessness to enforce their claims and to the transgressive and threateningly transformative power of the social and political figure they embodied.

291

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