During my first year as a student at the University of Zambia, when I was seventeen, I left campus one Friday for a weekend with my family. It was not yet dark, and the Lusaka Central Market was busy. The lines for the minibus to Kabulonga were extremely long, but I waited patiently for my turn to board. I actually enjoyed the commotion all around.

Then two young men approached me. I recognized one as Chitumba, a friend of my cousin Natasha. They joined me in the line, and we chatted briefly before they invited me to join them in...

In May 2004, a decade after the genocide, I sat with Aimable, a state prosecutor at the Office of the Prosecutor of Butare-Ville in Rwanda. I asked him for his thoughts on why prosecutors failed to pursue allegations of sexual violence. He answered with a story, describing a curious incident:

A detainee confessed to having raped a number of women. Aimable immediately recognized that this was an incredible confession considering that the death penalty was still in place in Rwanda for those who confessed to sexual violence and other crimes listed as category one offenses. Confessions for lower level crimes...

Lynette, a Rwandan girlfriend of mine, survived the genocide because at its onset she was attending a boarding school in Kenya. Neighbors, some of whom were relatives, massacred her parents. She returned to Rwanda after the genocide and reunited with those relatives who survived persecution. She studied law and on graduation was appointed as a state prosecutor. She recounted for me a conversation she had had with her Aunt Hermien nearly a decade after the genocide. Like Lynette, Aunt Hermien was a genocide survivor, the difference being that Hermien had been in Rwanda during the genocide. Lynette expressed her concern...

I was sharing lunch with Chief Sesay, my host in the Sierra Leone provinces. He reminisced about his return to his chiefdom after his exile during the civil war. He recounted a conversation with Bintu, a woman who had lived under the rebel occupation of the town. This conversation made a lasting impact on the chief. According to him, the woman was disrespectful, angry, and rude: “‘I [the chief] tried to tease her. I asked her, ‘So, I hear you found a nice husband, didn’t you have a rebel husband looking after you?’ And this woman, this Bintu, she answered...

In February 2007, I conducted an interview with Lars Sven, a development worker in Sierra Leone. In the course of the interview, he explained that he was not at all surprised by the cruelty women and girls suffered in war because Sierra Leonean women were no more than slaves in peacetime too. According to Lars, “It’s the same in war and peace; these little girls are sold into marriage by their parents; they are slaves in marriage. They are no more than slaves to their husbands.” In January 2009, I shared Lars’s observation with Papa, a Sierra Leonean colleague in...

As a visiting scholar at the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at American University’s Washington College of Law, I was invited to speak at a conference on international criminal prosecutions of gender-based violence. It was a dynamic conference, bringing together NGO representatives, academics from various disciplines, victims’ rights advocates, and tribunal staff: judges, prosecutors, victim support officers, and defense counsel with firsthand experience of the Sierra Leone Special Court, the Rwanda and Yugoslav tribunals, and the International Criminal Court. In the final moments of the conference, Hannah, a participant, voiced her displeasure at the fact that the conference...