This book explores how women warriors transcended normative gender dynamics and wielded Indigenous Luba religion during the Democratic Republic of Congo's Five Year War (1997-2002).
Accounts of the Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC) Five Year War depict members of the Luba Mai-Mai as a violent and self-serving rebel group. Georgette I. Mulunda Ledgister complicates these conceptions of the Mai-Mai by introducing their voices to the narrative. Across five chapters, Ledgister recounts the story of Chatty (Charlotte) Masangu wa Nkulu, a Luba woman who enlisted in the Mai-Mai in the hope that her active involvement in the rebellion would help her escape her stigma as a divorcée and a woman unable to have children. Tracing Chatty's ascent in the Mai-Mai military ranks to the second-in-command of her father's forces in the southeastern provinces of the DRC, Ledgister invites readers into a phenomenological and gender-transcending encounter with Luba religion and ancestral power.
Through Chatty's story, Ledgister studies African women's reception, interpretation, and practices of spirituality, revealing how these women interrogate, embrace, shift, and reimagine religion in the public sphere. Focusing on the least likely source of military power for physically vulnerable
populations-Indigenous spirituality-this book presents ordinary Congolese civilians, and women in particular, as agentive subjects in scholarly discourses on the role of gender and religion in war. Therefore, this book equips scholars of religion, gender and violent conflict to perceive practices of agency, gender freedom, and hope amidst war in the African continent.
