> [!NOTE]+ Meta > Author:: Hugh Kinsella Cunningham, Sophie Neiman > Reference:: https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2024/0826/congo-m23-goma-lucie-kamuswekera-embroidery > Date:: 2024 > Tags:: #Africa/Congo #embroidery > WeftLinks:: > - [[Historical value of craft]] > - [[Cultural value of craft]] > - [[Peace and justice value of craft]] > Claim:: [[Claim - Craft helps in recovery from war]] > [!SUMMARY] Summary > Lucie Kamuswekera, an 82-year-old artist in Goma, has spent 30 years documenting the DRC's wars and colonial history in embroidered tapestries stitched onto burlap sacks, creating an archive of over 70 works so that future generations will not forget. ### Highlights > Lucie Kamuswekera, an 82-year-old artist based in Goma in eastern DRC, has spent 30 years stitching tapestries that document the Congo's wars, colonial era, and political history — an archive of over 70 works exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. She learned embroidery from Belgian missionary nuns as a child, making flowers and birds, but changed direction after her husband was killed in the First Congo War in 1997. Her works depict scenes including the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, Belgian colonial violence, and ongoing M23 rebel conflict. She stitches onto old burlap sacks using needles fashioned from scrap metal. "I imagine a world in which social media and the internet are gone, but the stories will remain on the tapestries and can be shared." She is now passing the craft to her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. > Needle grasped in her wrinkled fingers and tongue between her lips, she pulls a length of green string in and out of burlap, stitching a soldier's uniform the colour of pine needles, with civilians fleeing beneath the spray of gunfire in the background. > One of her largest works shows Congolese men with their hands bound and backs lashed in punishment by Belgian colonial authorities — a scene she witnessed herself. On the opposite wall, a rendering of Laurent-Désiré Kabila, the former Congolese president who took power in the war that killed her husband. > At the bottom of a far wall, a tapestry shows people happily drinking and playing drums beside their thatched huts — a celebration of Pan-Africanism. She wants to make more like it.