How Congolese Women Are Recapturing Their Visual Narratives In The Fight For Liberation – Essence

TW: mention of sexual violence.

“Everybody wants a piece of Congo”—its land, its power, and its women—but The Mamas* of Eastern Congo are asserting that the world, in fact, does not want a piece of them (and could never capture them, try as they might). Instead, The Mamas are capturing the world and recapturing themselves through the lenses of their own cameras. With the art of photography, they build community, dignity, and self-determination, all while wielding the most potent kind of beauty as a weapon against the state: liberation—the animated subjectivity of the objectified.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is one of the wealthiest countries on the globe. Despite the incalculable abundance of The DRC that intimidates the constraints of commercialism, the country’s worth has been codified to a strangely monetized $24 trillion of natural wealth. The country hosts numerous major mineral deposits—from cobalt and coltan to diamonds and gold—that power international economies and the technology companies that fuel them. 

Gluttonous international Big Tech companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Tesla have been complicit in the exploitative supply chain in the Congo for decades, but the hands of consumers aren’t any more clean. Our participation in the development and usage of convenient, luxurious, solution-based innovation—from our interaction with digital content (including this article) on our “smart” devices to the use of “sustainable” electric cars that are powered by Congolese minerals–-depend on the pillaging of The Congo.

Additionally, the international community is cosigning rebel groups from neighboring countries on Congo’s Eastern border—Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, and others—and their brutal participation in destabilizing The Congo. Their goal is to exploit the weakness of The DRC’s authority in the aftermath of the ethnic and political conflict of the 1990s. 

The devastating genocide in The Congo has not been “silent,” as it is often regarded; we simply have not been listening, even as it rhymes with other genocides that are being amplified in this global moment of polycrisis. Still, the over 25-year-long humanitarian crisis remains the deadliest in the world since World War II—seeing 7.3 million people internally displaced, 25.4 million people who are in need of emergency support, and over 6 million people killed, most of whom are women and children. This catastrophe is too large to be ignored. So why has it been?

The negligence of advocacy for Congolese liberation, even by the socially conscious world, can be confidently attributed to anti-Blackness; many regard Africa—humanity’s motherland, the second largest continent in the world—as a mere mass of land meant for death, or the objectification of its living and breathing land and people. I attribute this to the world’s inability to understand Africa and its people beyond colonial contexts. The brutal disregard for natural and human life is consistent with that of The DRC and is particularly potent as the world fails Congolese women. 

The war waged on women in The Congo is intentional. Along with resource deprivation tactics and bombardment that is formidably common in areas of displacement, the state also uses sexual violence against women as a form of physical, social, and psychological warfare. Additionally, voyeurism and other exploitative journalism practices of eco-war/genocide tourism is commonly overlooked in The Congo. This inhumane practice visually captures and manipulates aesthetics of Congolese women into images of impoverished, oversexualized, and destitute archetypes from the lens of the (usually Western-adjacent) voyeur, furthering agendas of objectification.

Though the women in The Congo have been victimized, they refuse to be victims. The Mamas of Yolé! Africa’s initiative for displaced women are a prime example.

The Mamas are a group of 50 mothers from 13 villages across Eastern Congo who are currently surviving internal displacement in the Bulengo displacement camp, which holds about 800,000 people. The Mamas began taking photography classes as a part of an empowerment initiative by Yolé! Africa, a Congo-based arts and culture organization that meets “internationally induced problems” with “organic, local solutions.” The women’s exposure to photography classes allows them to reclaim their own narratives and assert their own subjectivities in the face of terror. 

The photography classes of Yole! Africa is led by a brilliant Congolese visual artist, Botembe Moseka Maïté. Born, raised, and based in Kinshasa, Maïté graduated from Académie des Beaux-Arts (The Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa) with a degree in Visual Communications. Her personal artistic work focuses on “capturing time through her photographs” and “creating captivating archives and memories that tell timeless stories.” What was seeded as an art project for an internship with Yolé! Africa blossomed into a revolutionary training program with The Mamas.

“We are here because we have to see the school of Yolé!” Maïté tells me via call a day after touching down in Goma with Yolé! Africa founder Petna Ndaliko Katondolo. “Yolé! Ekolojia… it’s currently under construction and we have to check if everything is going well—and meet with The Mamas who were excited to see that their classrooms are about to get ready.”

Yolé! Ekolojia is a school that is currently being built in the Bulengo displacement camp, where the Mama’s first participated in Maïté’s photography class. As an extension of Yolé! Africa’s cultural organization, it offers many creative classes that center the experiences and practical needs of the displaced people in the area, from agro liberation farming and shoemaking to filmmaking and other forms of storytelling.

“It offers a space of liberation,” Maïté explained, “a space of expression through art for The Mamas and the families of the camp… we teach them about liberation—how to integrate themselves through ancestral knowledge, ancestral ecology—and that’s really the spirit of Yolé! Ekolojia: community building.”

When asked if the women have any “self-care regimens” that aid in their survival, Maïté reminded me, “that the space where they are currently is a place designed by violence. And in this space, they don’t really have that right to really think about health, about beauty, about makeup,” she says. “We do it freely, but they can’t. So in the school, they build their own space where they are not victims anymore, but they are actors of their own beauty—a beauty that is like resilience, that is a call of their own freedom. That’s even the beauty of art, because through art, they extract themselves; they feel mentally and physically free.”

The unimaginable stakes in the Mamas’ worlds bar them from access to many forms of care, including from themselves. Still, though the form of maintenance is not as concrete, what Maïté described is a beauty regimen, and arguably the most potent form. I’m sure I have stars in my eyes as a Piscean Afrofuturist who luxuriates in dreamy optimism for African people globally. However, as an artist, I can testify to the incredible ways in which communal artistic practices and self-expression carry potential for healing and care, even on a cellular level. Art is a kind of maintenance—a more creative health regimen, a more spiritual wellness routine, and a more visceral ritual of adornment and beauty.

One example of Yolé! Africa’s curriculum is, in itself, a masterclass in disassembling the visual politics of beauty as a colonial construct. Maïté details that, “The idea was to make a triptych of their own objects. While I was observing them, I thought, ‘why not [include] a piece of theater?’ So I asked them to each bring an object of value for them from home.”

While recounting this part of the curriculum, she remembered how the class naturally and creatively reanimated objects for the assignment. “One who came with a jacket said, ‘this jacket, for me, is like a sister.’” Meanwhile, another “came with a spoon and called it ‘my brother who will help me nourish my kid.’” One who came with a mattress, “said that this mattress is her sister. She ran away from war three times with the same mattress. And her sister is always jealous each time she’s dirty.” The reanimation of what we deem inanimate play human-like roles in The Mama’s lives, turning still-life photography into a kind of portraiture. This perhaps reminded the women of their own ability to resist objectification through storytelling. 

Maïté intuitively offered to the class, “‘Why don’t you guys just give them a new name, give them a new story, and give them a new song?’ It started with storytelling, then presenting the objects, then presenting a song by a group of three. And, at the end, it was a show that we presented in another space in the town. And that was just beautiful.”

The photographs in this article are selected works of a few of The Mamas in Yolé’s photography training program. These 50 Congolese women are showing us a more-than-physical beauty with lenses through which we could never even begin to peer. The subjecthood with which the women endow the focal elements of their photos makes a case for their own subjectivity and agency as human beings, despite how the world seeks to objectify them.

My interview with Maïté left me questioning the significance of aesthetic beauty as we celebrate it in our culture; does it even matter? Are Western beauty tutorials and trends, even when performed by Black people, relevant at all? If beauty is self-expression, then what are we expressing other than our ability to conform to an ideal that is ultimately irrelevant to our liberation? Even as we attempt to flex, force, and forge open the once seemingly immalleable standards of beauty to include greater differences, the concern with its manipulation alone implies our validation of an oppressive concept that was never going to free us.

Black thinkers like Toni Morrison have been known to critique the “accurate but wholly irrelevant observation” that is “Black is beautiful.” Morrison’s commentary urges us to realize that liberation from white supremacist, patriarchal constructs isn’t possible through enrollment in yet another white supremacist, patriarchal construct. Her words are a reminder that aesthetic beauty is a concept created to drive an even deeper wedge between people who are deemed worthy of freedom and those who are not. 

bell hooks says it plain in her collection of essays Art on my Mind: Visual Politics, suggesting that, “We need to theorize the meaning of beauty in our lives so that we can educate for critical consciousness, talking through the issues: how we acquire and spend money, how we feel about beauty, what the place of beauty is in our lives when we lack material privilege and even basic resources for living, the meaning and significance of luxury, and the politics of envy.”

The coloniality of—capital B—Beauty^TM is more pungent than ever in today’s world. The world’s desperate subscription to Beauty and adjacent colonial constructs do not simply distract us from the current season of concurrent disasters; it also grants delusions of status and immunity from affect. These disasters and distractions are intentionally invented by white supremacist, patriarchal empires to work tangentially and symbiotically. 

This is how “Pretty Girl Core,” fascism, natural disasters, and dead people can alternate all-too-casually on the news feed of any given social networking app during a leisurely 5-minute scroll. To the conscious world, the former increasingly feels like the largest inconvenience of these examples, leaving many to question and critique its relevance—the first step in disrupting this dynamic.

Black Beauty content in the digital age transforms its triviality into an ironic cruelty; Black beauty creators are benefitting from unspeakable violence on people with whom we share common origin by the hands of what is in our hands: our smartphones. 

Black lives matter, obviously. Whether or not our Beauty does is not as black-and-white. Both are concepts that we never needed to scream at the world but to prayerfully whisper into a salve for our own apathy. Our participation in irrelevant Beauty content from people who look like us that overshadows relevant liberation work from people who also look like us is unethical. The fact that the former is produced by way of the technology that relies on the exploitation of the latter makes this dynamic existentially unbearable. 

To fully understand the tragedy of this reckless dereliction, we must collectively consider The Congo—not only for the ways in which it is being exploited, but for the beauty that The Mama’s are teaching us to zoom in on—the freedom they embody from in front of and behind their cameras. 

Support the initiative of The Mamas by bringing the photo display to your community or ordering the photography book. Get involved with the Free Congo Movement by becoming a friend of the Congo.