Stitches in time: the artist chronicling the DRC’s blood-soaked history in embroidery

Using handmade needles and thread, Lucie Kamusekera has recorded the decades of conflict she has lived through in the Congo 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. Kamusekera, 82, stitches scenes of contemporary Congolese history on to tobacco sacks