Exploring the Representation of Violence Against Women in Hotel Rwanda (2004) and The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo (2007)—A Gendered Perspective

This chapter seeks to explore gendered filmography on genocide in Africa through two films; Hotel Rwanda (2004) and The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo (2008). It examines the representation of women in these two films coupled with interviews with Rwandan and Congolese refugees based on fieldwork conducted in suburbs of Sunnyside, Pretoria and Hillbrow, Johannesburg (South Africa). The study explores the multifaceted ways in which women’s experiences are remembered through gendered accounts that concretize representations of women as subjects of patriarchal memory. Traditionally, films tend to disfigure women’s representations where women’s bodies are portrayed and re-membered as domesticated beings, subject to the vagaries of masculinity, suffering mothers and sexual possessions/rewards of genocide agents. We situate this study within a phenomenological qualitative research framework. We employ the critical approach to film theory, meaning that theories on representation, feminism, production/text audience reception and discourse analysis are used to interpret the audio-visual language formation in both films. In-depth interviews anchored on snowballing sampling also draw on the associative imagery technique. The associative imagery technique is a qualitative tool with which researchers use carefully selected photographs or images to trigger participants’ responses to explain difficult behavioural and social concepts. In this study scenes within the movies were selected. Our analysis shows that, as film seeks to accurately remember and represent atrocities against women, it must not allegorize women, and instead it should consider that what is portrayed in the present both determines how these gross injustices are viewed and shapes future actions. Consequently, social construction of gendered memories of genocide should cogitate representing female victims of violence as agents of change, and disregard gender binaries and traditional politics of representing victimhood which tend to place males as not only perpetrators but saviours too, as well as carriers of the power of representation and that of the gaze.