So we've heard a lot of talk about under reported the Congo is in the news media in America. I personally hadn't really heard anything about it before we started the adoption process, but I wanted to remain a little more open minded. So while Jen was doing some shopping last night I decided to spend some time in the Barnes & Nobles that was nearby testing my theory.
My first stop, "International Travel". Books on traveling to Morocco, Egypt, Israel, and many others, but no Congo. Fair enough, not much tourism to a war torn country. Next section I sought out was the World History section. The Congo has a pretty eventful history where a lot has happened in the last 100 years, surely books have been written about that? Apparently not. Found books entitled, "Complete Idiot's Guide: Middle East Conflict 4th edition", "British Petroleum and the Redline Agreement", "Israel: A History", and many others involving the same countries you hear about on the news. Another book I found that deserves mention was entitled "A Biography of the Continent Africa". A book that covers the entire history of Africa in less than 700 pages. Now that sounds concise. Ironically the American History section holds a variety of books some including the use of artillery shells in the Civil War, a 500 page book on just that, artillery shells.
I was just beginning to become discouraged when I finally found something. A fair sized book on the bottom of the shelf on King Leopold. This actually sounded promising until I read the back. To my surprise the book was about his control over and dealings with the Congo, however, King Leopold is described as a humanitarian who brought industry to the country. Before we award this noble king with a peace prize let's elaborate on this a little bit. In 1885 Leopold claimed the Congo as his own land naming it "The Congo Free State". The industry that was brought was the entire country being forced into slave labor to mine and collect diamonds, precious metals, and ivory. All the proceeds of these products went to further Leopold's wealth. The working conditions the people of this "free state" had to work under caused the deaths of about 10 million in the almost 30 years he had control over the land. I think we can consider this book slightly inaccurate.
So it turns out that it's true. The troubles in the Congo are under-represented, or ignored at all.
To do my own part to remedy this a little bit here is a short little information about what's going on in that country today:
The Congo is considered to be the worst place in the world to be a woman. It's estimated that a woman is raped almost every minute, and about 400,000 annually. To give you a comparison, the U.S. is about half this amount, and about 1/2-2/3 of these are "date rapes", which are incredibly sad, but the victim doesn't not suffer nearly the level of trauma as other forms of rape.
In the Congo, rape serves as a war tactic for local militias to take control of a village. All the women are gathered together and violently raped in front of the entire village. Many of these women require emergency surgeries or die after these incidents.
Do we wonder why there are no tourism books to the Congo?
Thank you for reading. We humbly ask that you take some time to do some research on the crisis in the Congo.
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