Book Notes

What Women Do in Wartime: Gender and Conflict in Africa. Edited by Meredith Turshen & Clotilde Twagiramariya. New York: Zed Books, Ltd., 1998. Pp. 180, $55.00, cloth.

What Women Do in Wartime: Gender and Conflict in Africa provides a much-needed compilation of reports, testimonies, and analyses documenting the human rights abuses targeted at women during the course of recent civil wars in Africa. Civil conflicts have engulfed twenty-one countries on the African continent over the last several decades.[1] Included in What Women Do in Wartime are contributions from women in Chad, Liberia, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, South Africa, and Sudan. This volume is groundbreaking in its depiction of the types of wartime human rights violations systematically targeted at females of all ages, from children to the elderly.

In 1994, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women that included, for the first time, recommendations pertaining to gendered violence and gender-related harms during armed conflict. Rape was recognized as a human rights violation and as a war crime in the June 1996 International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Testimony from African women presents a stark portrait of systematic violence including sexual torture, rape, and sexual slavery, which is sanctioned by both state and opposition forces as a tactic of war and a political act to terrorize communities. For example, Asma Abdel Halim, in Attack with a Friendly Weapon, reports that in the Sudan:

Women are raped either to show the southerners how they are defeated or because they are thought of as booty and do not have the right to object to the masters’ whims. Southerners believe this is a genocidal war. Men from the west or north intentionally impregnate women so as to change the demography of the whole area (p. 94).

Women and children from conquered towns in the Sudan are also forced into slavery after being captured as booty. In many nations, women found in their homes when the opposing forces attack are subjected to gang rapes and brutal beatings with family members forced to watch. In South African Women

Demand the Truth, Goldblatt and Meintjes describe specific forms of physical and psychological torture devised for females in South African prisons, which are directed at female political prisoners to elicit information about their husbands’ activities or their own activities. As the social structure in some nations collapses into chaos, females are targeted not only by their political enemies, but also by their own allies, friends, and neighbors.

The repercussions of such widespread sexual assault include physical effects like the rapid spreading of the AIDS virus, as well as psychological traumas including ostracism from communities, stigmatization as prostitutes, and prohibition of future marriage. Women often remain silent due to shame, guilt, fear of reprisals, and the futility of reporting given the lack of legal redress for such violations.

While the authors expose atrocities that have been perpetrated against women in Africa for decades without acknowledgment or redress, they also reveal the steps taken by and for women to empower themselves. For example, Goldblatt and Meintjes advocate a gendered approach to women’s testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, including provisions for privacy, security, and separate Women’s Hearings, of which several have been held. Such suggestions begin the process of establishing adequate institutional responses to the unique problems posed by gender-specific human rights abuses.

Each chapter includes a brief history of the African nation involved, providing the context in which the atrocities occur. Several authors point out that the lack of understanding of African civil wars poses a further obstacle, both to reconciliation within the nation as a whole and to the redress of those wrongs specifically directed at women. Simplistic explanations of African civil wars mask the real issues and power struggles involved. For example, characterization of the civil war in Rwanda as Hutus against Tutsis renders invisible the suffering of women being raped by all parties to the conflict while it intensifies ethnic division and impedes progress toward a real reconciliation. Such simplifications discount the historical importance of imperialism and the role of international actors, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, in creating the political instability and power vacuums often preceding the collapse into civil war.

The human rights violations against women that emerge from these pages indicate a pervasive, systematic violation of a targeted group. Bringing these women’s stories to light for the first time while analyzing them in the context of the ongoing political, social, and military upheaval in Africa does a great service to the human rights community by increasing awareness of the ways in which political violence is specifically targeted at women during periods of civil turmoil. It is only by providing access to channels of communication and institutional support that we can give women the opportunity to expose the realities of gendered violence, act to prevent similar atrocities in the future, and begin the process of healing for millions of African women. This book is an important contribution to human rights schol-

arship, providing a much-needed documentation of the gendered violence perpetrated against women in the course of African civil wars.

—Sarah Apsel

[1]. Algeria, Angola, Burundi, Chad, Congo (Kinshasa), Djibouti, Ethiopia, Gambia, Liberia, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda have all experienced civil wars over the last several decades, with many protracted conflicts continuing to this day.

Copyright © 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Harvard Human Rights Journal / Vol. 13, Spring 2000