Nine years after torture victim fled homeland, she is again lecturing in a college classroom
By Petra Cahill
NEW YORK — “Why do women have to dance for you, just like you are a god?”
The bold question posed in 1975 in front of a large crowd by 22-year-old Marie Rose Mukeni Beya did not go over well with Zaire’s longtime dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, a despot best known in the West for his jaunty leopard skin hats. “Mobutu ordered: ‘Take her,’” Mukeni Beya recalled this month. She was taken captive and tortured for three days, and from that time on was targeted, threatened, harassed and detained by Mobutu’s government and various repressive regimes that followed for questioning her government and standing up for women’s rights. Finally, she was forced to flee in 2002 and seek refuge in the United States...[continued]
