Holding Back the Shame
continued...
"The last guerrilla group has just signed a joint statement with the government agreeing to end hostilities. Burundi feels like a country on the verge of improving enormously."
Circumstances in Burundi do make it easier for men to get away with rape. Outside of Bujumbura the countryside has few villages – instead people refer to their “colline,” the hill they live on – and houses are scattered and isolated. The civil war has undermined what community there was, destroying families and dispersing neighbours. Moreover, many men were killed and women have become heads of families. Often they work in the fields and have to rely on houseboys, who have easy access to vulnerable children on their own. All too often rapists are neither caught nor punished, even when they are known.
5 months pregnant; it tore her
family apart
One boy whose 13-year-old deaf and mute sister was raped by a neighbour told me he still sees the man in the market sometimes, but will do nothing because the man’s family has threatened his if they try to go to court. In several other cases the man is in jail, but is unlikely to be tried – delays and costs often put victims’ families off. MSF refers women and girls who do wish to pursue justice to the organisation Avocats Sans Frontières (Lawyers Without Borders), who currently have 74 cases of rape on their books, but only half are expected to reach a judgement.
Unfortunately, as is often the case with rape, there is usually little concrete evidence to convict a rapist, and even with a “certificate of rape” provided by the MSF doctor , without a witness the case too often comes down to the woman’s word against the man’s. That doesn’t mean the victims have given up on justice, however. “I want him to die in prison now,” declares Alice, a spirited 10 year old who was raped the previous day by a neighbour’s son while her mother was at Mass (60% of the population is Catholic). Her mother, elegant in a purple satin dress and headscarf, looks a little embarrassed at her daughter’s headstrong response. “Perhaps he should just remain in prison forever,” the mother modifies. Actually, I think to myself, Alice got it about right.
On our last day, we visit Josephine just south of Bujumbura in a neighbourhood made up of people displaced by the civil war. Such neighbourhoods are chronically poor and lack the social cohesion of a more established community. It is full of people who have lost everything – home, job, family – and radiates vulnerability. The director of the local health centre tells me they receive on average eight rape cases a month – though there are surely many more committed – and the rapists are often government soldiers or members of former guerrilla groups that have been absorbed into the army, and prey on those least able to fight back.
Josephine is 16 and has a one-month-old son whose father is her rapist. She has a cat-like face, with high, wide cheekbones, slanted brown eyes, and full lips drawn around a small mouth. She wears a yellow shirt and a blue and green sarong, and sits with me on a woven mat on the dirt floor of an empty room. Josephine shares this and another room (also empty except for a plastic mat she lays her son on) with a widow who has taken her in.
I have begun to understand what poor means in this country, and this is as bad as it gets – no furniture, no food, no clothes but what she has on. Josephine used to live out in the countryside with her parents. They were killed in 2002, towards the end of the war. She has no brothers or sisters. She ended up in an area for displaced people in Bujumbura called Kiname, where 10 months ago unknown robbers broke in and raped her.
Neighbours heard her cries and helped her get to a local health centre. She was passed between various local associations – of which there are surprisingly many – who ended up moving her to this new neighbourhood. Josephine’s upper lip wrinkles with almost genteel scorn when asked about her circumstances. “I would rather be back in Kiname,” she says. “It’s not so poor as here.” She has few opinions about the direction her life has taken, why she was raped, or what will become of her. My questions slide off of her, and begin to seem ridiculous.
Cushioned by material well-being, health care, and education, I have the luxury of ranging far away from the present – analysing the past, anticipating the future. Josephine, however, lives completely in the moment; she does not dwell on her wretched past, and shrugs when asked about the future. I have never met anyone so completely disconnected from the continuum of time. Past and future may as well not exist; there is only her son’s open mouth that needs filling, his body to be washed and clothed. She asks for food – she admits she doesn’t eat every day – for clothing, for soap. Those are her immediate needs.
Josephine is the last woman I interview before I leave Burundi, and she abruptly enlarges the picture I have been focussing on all week by refusing to engage with the trauma of her rape. I ask her at last which has affected her life more, the rape or the war. “The war, of course,” she responds promptly, “for it is still affecting me.” She gestures at the nothingness around her. She is polite with her answer but I feel naïve to have asked such a question. The rape at least gave her her son, the one concrete, positive thing in her life. “He is my future,” she says, much more concerned about him than any possible future husband.
When Tom suggests that she cover her face with her hands to preserve her anonymity for the photos, Josephine thinks for a moment, then reaches up and pulls the polka-dotted scarf from her hair and winds it around her face, leaving one eye exposed. It is a confident gesture worthy of a fashion shoot; in another life, with her bee-stung lips and her self-possession, Josephine might have been a model.
In another life, she might have been many things. She is here, though, and her hand-to-mouth existence is likely to be punctuated by hunger, hardship, and loss until she at last loses her own life. She stands in the doorway holding her baby and watching us go, and I feel I have lost her already.
This article was written by Tracy Chevalierand first appeared in The Sunday Times Magazine, 11 September 2005