The Haunting State of Women’s Rights in the DRC

Alain Kassanda’s documentary, Colette and Justin, provides a window into understanding how colonial legacy continues to shape the lived experiences of Congolese women today. 

The Democratic Republic of Congo has had a tumultuous, harrowing history. Despite being one of the most mineral-rich countries in the world, the DRC has endured nearly two centuries of brutal exploitation, with each change in control merely sustaining the cycle of oppression. In the beginning, it was called the Congo Free State by King Leopold II of Belgium who claimed the land as his in 1885, legalized by the assent of the powers present at the Berlin conference, and who mobilized, through incredibly dehumanizing means, an ivory (and then, an increasingly profitable rubber) trade with the West. He created a quota system with mortal consequences; hands and feet were cut off if daily quotas were not reached. This barbaric model would lead to the death of millions and leave millions of others without their limbs.

After the Casement Report detailing the widespread mistreatment and death of the Congolese people was published in Britain in 1904, it formed a key part of Leopold’s finally letting go of the Congo State in 1908, leaving it in the hands of the Belgian Government, who then christened it the Belgian Congo. Leopold would die a year later.

It was during this colonial period, as with all of cinema’s incursion into the continent, that film came to Congo, not as a tool for entertainment or social justice, but to validate the colonial project, which in itself had become another subtler form of exploitation. This is one of the issues that Colette and Justin, a documentary film released in 2022 by Alain Kassanda, tries to engage and critique.

Colette and Justin doesn’t simply recount the past; the film invites reflection on how the colonial legacy continues to shape lived experiences today, particularly for Congolese women. The documentary became a lens through which I began to trace the persistent structures of violence and erasure that have long defined the country’s political and social landscape. This film led me to examine how the gendered dimensions of colonial oppression laid the groundwork for the ongoing systematic marginalization of women. This essay uses Kassanda’s film not as the central focus, but as a foundation for interrogating the continuity between the past and present forms of injustice...