Denis Mukwege

It was the early 1960s, in Bukavu, on the shore of Lake Kivu, in the Congo.

A pastor went to visit the sick. His son went with him. The boy's name was Denis Mukwege. He was eight years old.

That day, they visited a boy who was very seriously ill.

After that visit, the child said to his father:

He had decided to become a doctor.

Denis Mukwege had been born on March 1, 1955, in Bukavu, in South Kivu province. The country was then called the Belgian Congo.

He kept his word. In 1983, he earned his medical degree from the University of Burundi.

He became a pediatrician at Lemera Hospital, near Bukavu. There, he saw women injured in giving birth, with no one to care for them properly.

So he changed course. He went to France, to the University of Angers, to study gynaecology and obstetrics. He finished his training in 1989.

Then he went home.

In 1999, on an empty plot in Panzi, a poor neighbourhood on the edge of Bukavu, he founded a hospital. At first, it was a clinic for gynaecological care and childbirth.

But war broke out soon after.

And Panzi Hospital became something else. A refuge. Thousands of women arrived there, wounded by sexual violence used as a weapon of war.

Denis Mukwege treated them. But treating the body was not enough.

So at Panzi, they began caring for each woman as a whole. Medical care. Psychological support. Legal help, to seek justice. Help to earn a living again.

"We have to see the person as an entire whole," he explained.

In 2008, he created the Panzi Foundation. That year, the UN gave him its Human Rights Prize.

In October 2012, five armed men entered his home in Bukavu. They threatened his family. His friend and guard, Joseph Bizimana, was killed.

Denis Mukwege survived. He had to leave the country.

He spent three months in exile.

Women then raised money. Enough to pay for their doctor's ticket home.

In January 2013, he came back. He went back to work at the hospital, despite the threats.

The prizes followed. The Right Livelihood Award, in 2013. The European Parliament's Sakharov Prize, in 2014.

In 2018, he received the Nobel Peace Prize, with Nadia Murad. The committee honoured their efforts to end sexual violence as a weapon of war.

In 2024, he joined The Elders, a group of elders.

He has said it: you can't operate against violence. You can only abolish it.

His way of healing echoes Ubuntu, without being the same: a woman is not a wound to be stitched, but a person to whom one gives back her place among her own.

An eight-year-old boy had promised medicines. As a man, he gave much more: a place where each woman is seen as a person again.