Doctor who treated highest number of rape victims

After specialisation in gynaecology at the University of Angers, in western France in 1983, Dr Denis Mukwege returned to Bukavu, a serene tourist town in South Kivu Province, 1,200 miles east of Kinshasa. He began building birth centres for women, and schools for training midwives in South Kivu's village of Lemera, to reduce maternal mortality rate.

Following the Rwandan genocide in 1994, hundreds of thousands of the population fled across their western border to the nation which was then known as Zaire.

Rwandan army General Paul Kagame, who had ended the genocide, soon came in pursuit of fleeing soldiers. Fierce spill-over battles between the Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda sparked the first DRC War in 1996 to 1997. Kagame’s forces supported rebel groups of Laurent-Désiré Kabila to topple veteran despot Mobutu Sese Seko.

After Kabila's ousting of Mobutu, he exacerbated Congolese destitution by smuggling gold and timber, while former Mobutu rebels disintegrated and relocated to numerous parts of the country.

On the night of October 6, 1996, rebel soldiers attacked Lemera Hospital where Dr Mukwege conscientiously managed to evacuate some patients. Sadly, soldiers blocked the road behind him and he could not retreat to rescue the remaining patients. Thirty three patients and many hospital staff were slaughtered in their hospital beds. Dr Mukwege was vividly traumatised, rattled and depressed. When he eventually returned home to Bukavu, he was confronted by women dying needlessly during childbirth.

In DRC, maternal deaths were common. Women uttered self-defeating statements when going into labour, because they weren't sure they'd survive. In 1999, Dr Mukwege inaugurated the integral Panzi Hospital, to combat maternal mortality and offer women a latent reprieve.

Nine countries

A second bloodier war began in DRC after Uganda and Rwanda, exhausted of Kabila's unreliable dictatorial tendencies, withdrew their troops from the country. The enormity of the war attracted nine countries as Kabila used his nation’s mineral wealth to bribe other leaders to send him troops.

Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe sent soldiers in exchange for diamond mines. Angola, Namibia, Chad, and Sudan also backed him, while Kabila’s former allies Rwanda and Uganda combined forces with Burundi to battle their former ally. As a result, an incomprehensible five million people died.

Rape was used as a weapon of war with over 1,000 women raped daily, and more than one in three women in eastern DRC experiencing sexual violence. DRC inherently became 'the rape capital of the world.'

This led Dr Mukwege to construct a peerless women’s hospital within the Panzi facility to treat rape victims. The two-storey building consisted of large wards with rows of beds of women and girls. Most of them suffered pelvic prolapses or were victims of sexual violence so extreme, that their genitals had been torn apart.

Missed meals

Several of the victims suffered fistula, leading to leaking of urine or faeces, or both.

Every day, Dr Mukwege was thrust into duty at 7am and worked tirelessly up to 11pm. He performed at least five surgeries daily on rape victims, and lost over 60 kilos of weight since he tentatively missed meals.

He grades rape damage in five categories, the worst being the fifth, where the genital, urinary, and digestive tracts would all need repair and a laparoscopy would be performed to clear the abdominal cavity.

Most of the victims travelled from far flung regions including Kaloli village in Shabunda, a remote part of South Kivu, 160 miles from Bukavu, where gold had been discovered. The tantalising gold rush cast aspersions and brought a paradox of misery rather than a wealth of prosperity to villagers, by attracting mai-mai (militias). On any given day, Panzi Hospital admitted between 250 and 300 patients, most of whom were victims of sexual violence.

In Dr Mukwege’s memoir, The Power of Women: A Doctor’s Journey of Hope and Healing, he emphasises that Panzi is a harmonious environment that offers far more than medical treatment. Upon detecting that treating victims physically wasn't enough, he established a team of psychologists to support them.

As they recovered mentally, he desisted from sending them back to their villages, as most were stigmatised and rejected by their family and community. He, therefore, instigated the third pillar of socio-economic support. If they were young, Panzi Hospital paid their school fees.

He sheltered the pregnant women in his maternity refuge called Maison Dorcas. The adult women were offered a literacy course to educate them on numerous practical skills, including handicrafts, tailoring, and agribusiness. Dr Mukwege further developed a centre for babies born of rape, and who were rejected by society.

Once the women become self-sufficient, they returned to Panzi demanding justice. This led Dr Mukwege to form a fundamental pillar for legal advice, a team of lawyers who assisted them in handling legal jurisprudence. He states that what protects perpetrators is silence and the principal way to reform core principles of inclusion on gender and non-discrimination is to terminate impunity. Dr Mukwege was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018, for his efforts in combating the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.

Jeff Anthony is a novelist, a Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Centre @jeffbigbrother