Manitoba Colony is a remote Mennonite settlement in Bolivia, named after the Canadian province, and the real-world setting of the assaults described in the opening note to Women Talking. The note establishes the colony as the historical point of departure for the novel, while distinguishing it from the fictional Molotschna Colony where the women’s discussions and decision to leave unfold.

Setting and Historical Background

The note places the assaults in Manitoba Colony between 2005 and 2009. During those years, many girls and women woke feeling drowsy and in pain after being attacked during the night. In the community, the unexplained events were attributed to ghosts and demons. Explanations and reactions varied: some people understood the suffering as punishment from God or Satan, while others accused the women of lying, or dismissed the events as the product of female imagination.

Discovery and Aftermath

The note reports that eight men from the colony had used an animal anesthetic to render their victims unconscious and rape them. In 2011, a Bolivian court convicted the men and sentenced them to lengthy terms in prison. The convictions did not, however, mark an end to the danger described in the note: in 2013, while the convicted men remained incarcerated, reports indicated that similar assaults and other sexual abuses continued in the colony.

Relationship to the Novel

Manitoba Colony is not the fictional community where the novel’s central debate takes place. That community is Molotschna Colony, whose women consider whether to remain, resist, or leave in response to violence and the social order that permits it. The distinction matters: Manitoba Colony supplies the real events to which the novel responds, while Molotschna gives the book imaginative space to examine women’s choices, faith, and safety.

The opening note describes Women Talking as both a fictional reaction to the real-life events and an act of female imagination. Manitoba Colony therefore stands at the boundary between documented history and the novel’s invented deliberations. The later reports of continuing abuse also prevent the convictions from functioning as a simple resolution: in the note’s account, legal punishment and the persistence of violence coexist.