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She could hear the sounds of artillery. “I have no idea how I am still alive,” says Lucie Kamusekera. When the city of Goma, in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, fell to a rebel offensive in early 2025, the 82-year-old artist was hiding at home.
“Soldiers were in our avenue; they were fleeing,” she says. “I get tears in my eyes thinking about what happened.”
Born in 1944 in Lubero, a green, mountainous region in North Kivu province, Kamusekera was taught to sew by Italian nuns at her convent school. “I wanted to get good to inspire the other students,” she says. “I started by designing flowers and little gifts for my neighbours.”
Now, with needles that she fashions out of scrap metal, Kamusekera diligently threads some of her country’s most unique artworks: stitching contemporary history on to cloth sacks, a record of decades of violence and upheaval.
In bright primary colours, her archive of more than 70 pieces vividly depict scenes including the 1961 murder of Patrice Lumumba, the independent DRC’s first prime minister, who was assassinated in a plot led by Belgian officers, with support from the CIA and British intelligence; the brutal colonial era of the Belgian Congo, showing forced labour and the cruelty of the military enforcers known as the Force Publique; and conflicts such as the second Congo war, which left an estimated 5 million civilians dead between 1998 and 2003.
‘There has been so much suffering in Congo,’ says Kamusekera, seen displaying her artwork outside her home in Goma, North Kivu
Kamusekera’s art is deeply personal. Her journey is a story of movement and chaos that echoes the sad tale of millions of Congolese displaced by wars. When she married a trader, she left home to live in her husband’s village of Kibirizi. “We had five children, but found little peace there,” says Kamusekera.
“There has been so much suffering in Congo that I can’t remember which battle forced us to finally leave,” she says.
The family sought refuge in Goma more than 20 years ago. It was in this city that Kamusekera began to stitch pictures of contemporary events.
“There were many soldiers dying in those days, and a military truck passed me,” she recalls. “It was not full of men, but full of corpses and blood. I knew then that I had to record these stories of my country.”
She took a small shopfront as a studio in the neighbourhood of Kyeshero, on a dusty road speckled black and grey by the volcanic rock that coats Goma’s streets. The building is attached to a modest shack of uneven wooden planks that serves as her family home.
It was in the early 2000s, when conflict had slowed food deliveries to the city, that Kamusekera’s husband decided to travel back to Kibirizi to harvest the last of the crops in their field.
But there he was seized by an armed gang from Laurent Nkunda’s CNDP rebel group, the precursor to M23, the militia that seized Goma in 2025. “They mocked him by forcing him to set his own house alight, then tortured him and beat him,” says Kamusekera. He returned to her badly injured and died in hospital within a month.
Sultani Makenga and Corneille Nangaa, leaders of M23, and Willy Ngoma, an M23 spokesperson killed in February
These days, Kamusekera’s family help her in her studio. “My children all grew up watching me work all day,” she says. “They need to know my style; I may die tomorrow, and I would like them to continue.”
A great-granddaughter, Divine Kyetia, is often at her shoulder, annotating drafts of new works or negotiating with clients.
“I know many of my stories through having lived through them,” says Kamusekera, “but my family are now the most important way I get information about what is happening across the country.”
The M23 rebels, backed by the army of neighbouring Rwanda, began its campaign of violence in late 2021. Hundreds of civilians were killed during the siege of Goma in January 2025. More than a year later, areas occupied by the armed group are facing hardship and economic crisis.
Kamusekera’s work has been limited by the M23’s occupation of the town, she says. “I have drawn some dangerous stories in my time, but there are some realities I cannot publish works about because I would fear for my life.”
Still, Kamusekera will not leave – she says her role is to keep transmitting knowledge.
“I imagine a world in which social media and the internet are gone,” she says, “but the stories will remain on the tapestries and can be shared.”
The thought is not merely philosophical: as the battle for Goma intensified, phone signals cut out and the inhabitants of the city became isolated from the world.
Peace processes for DRC have dragged on for years bearing little fruit. Caught in the middle of so many warring factions, people have been exposed to decades of violence.
But Kamusekera is determined to continue her art. “The next generation must learn the history of Congo,” she says. “These works will be my legacy.”
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