66 Years Later: What Remains Cannot Be Taken From Us

Hero Women Rising Founder, Neema Namadamu, reflects on Congo's Independence Day, the legacy of generations shaped by conflict, and the enduring humanity, faith, and hope that continue to define her people. 

This Independence Day, June 30, was a most challenging one. It was the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s 66th year of Independence from our Belgian colonizers, but we have yet to be able to move from A to B. 

I was sitting, reflecting, trying to comprehend; really sitting in consternation, utterly confounded. How is it that we continue to suffer oppression, marginalization, poverty, hunger, and ongoing wars that relish in the employ of rape and mutilation of women and girls, and of our precious homeland. 

I am an early Gen X’er. Since my generation there has been Millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and now we have Gen Beta emerging. Colonization deeply affected the generations of the population, my people, the people of the land that became the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

When the Europeans came, they didn’t just divide up this one whole beautiful continent, they began sowing every other form of division as well. They gave our land different names, they gave people groups different names, taking the names of social classes to now be the names of the different ethnicities they named us, so they could sow further division among us. Division and separation was their goal, to destroy our continental unity.  

In this land that was now called by different names, there were borders saying you are now Congolese, your family on that side of the border is Burundian, your family across that border is Rwandan. They took us from one family and divided us into different nations. The colonizers began enslaving the people of whatever nation they took authority and control, to make them work for their own capitalistic endeavors, violencing our motherland, taking our trees, our gold and minerals; raping the earth of our heritage. And using extreme violence against us, the people of their slave-nations. 

In Congo, cutting off the hands of people was common punishment. Their rule was so brutal, so cruel, that half the population of DR Congo lost their lives over the first 23 years of Belgian colonization – 10,000,000 people – called the Colonial Genocide by historians. 

The Belgian colonizers systematically destroyed the fabric of families by targeting women, marginalizing women with their religions and their western systems, stoning and burning them with fire because of their wisdom and natural medicines; enslaving the whole population to do their bidding, as if we were not also human beings.

Can you imagine the trauma of those that survived?! 

I was thinking about the Gen Z generation, who are now the mothers and fathers of a next generation. What have we been able to sow into them to prepare them? What do they have to sow into Gen Beta? What has been our legacy? What will be the legacy of Gen Z? 

Gen Z has grown up as displaced persons in their own country, hiding in the bush from war, from their own government dropping bombs on them every day. What are they going to be able to give into the generation they birth, of which they are the mothers and fathers? 

After 66 years, we are still in survival mode, trying to survive the daily bombing from our government who is sending airplanes without pilots to drop bombs on us. What do they want and why do they want it? Why do they want to end us. Even on Independence Day they were bombing and warring against our indigenous population. Why are they still warring. What are they wanting from us that they didn’t get 66 years ago. I see the people come and go, but the systems, the institutions remain. Why isn’t peace enough?

It used to be that our young men fought with the lion and the bear to develop their strength of character. Now they live as Internally Displaced Persons, running with their families to the bush when they hear the drones. 

For sure, resilience is our hallmark, our DNA. They come with many allies from the so-called nations around us, even mercenaries from Europe. They have burned our homes and villages to the ground, killed or stolen all of our cows, burned or stolen all of our belongings, and killed those to too old or lame to flee. But we remain. We remain on this land of our birth, where I got polio, where my illiterate Mom made sure I got an education to be able to cultivate a voice for myself and my people.

When I look back on my own 59-year history of our 66 years of independence, I see what all the hardship has worked into us. We are still a hospitable people, warm and embracing. Perhaps continually being the target of the nation our colonizers created, has something to do with it. We are still a deeply spiritual people. We are still somehow a very hopeful people. What else is there? This is our treasure: a deep sense of humanity, of faith and of hope. Not hope for tomorrow; hope for today. Today is all we know. Today is the day we make it. Our intention for this day is to be, and to be for you. It is good to be together. 

I think maybe in spite of it all, we have sown good things into Gen Z, and they have good things to sow into the next Generations. I know above all, we long for peace. But I also know that what remains – who we are – can’t be taken from us.