Muganga – Celui qui soigne (“The one who treats”) is a biopic about Denis Mukwege, the Congolese gynaecologist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018. It’s a powerful film, and much better than the average biopic. The film is structured around the collaboration between Mukwege and the Belgian surgeon Guy Cadiére, although Cadiére is no “white saviour”; Mukwege remains the moral centre of the story. It begins with a horrifying rape at the hands of soldiers, and the suffering of Mukwege’s female patients is key, because extreme sexual violence is being used as a weapon of war in the region.
East Congo is rich in minerals, in particular coltan, which is the source of elements that are essential for our modern technology. In the last thirty years, the region has been wracked by war, as neighbouring countries such as Rwanda and Uganda exploit local ethnic tensions to extend control over the coltan mines. In the film Mukwege explicitly points the finger at coltan mining as connected to the sexual violence that is being inflicted on his patients: the goal is to drive the civilian population away from the mines.
The European Union has close links with the Rwandan government, and has signed a deal on raw materials despite Rwanda’s ongoing interventions in East Congo. Europe is complicit in the violence, and unwilling to come into conflict with a regime that is a vital source of minerals, much looted from East Congo. The government of the DRC is also implicated, but compassion with the suffering of East Congo’s women has to be combined with action to break Europe’s collaboration with (some of) the perpetrators.