Women in Uganda

My homestay mother is 22, I found out a few nights ago. She got married at 16. She has two children under 6, and a third is on the way. My neighbor got married at 15, and yesterday a woman came over to visit with her one-month old baby — she was 14.

Oh, and my dad is 40.

But don't get me wrong, my dad is great. And maybe, because they HAVE to mature so early here, out of necessity, it's not as outlandish for a young woman to feel ready to be married. I don't know though...

It is illegal in Uganda to marry a minor, but that is not enforced (like most laws in this country), especially in the villages, where parents marry off their daughters so they can get the bride price.

My mom said she is lucky; she is so happy with her husband, and many women who marry so young are not happy in their marriages. If the man decides to end the marriage (divorce isn’t really necessary, the man just gets to make that call), the woman gets nothing. Women can legally own property, but this is just another useless law with few real-life ramifications. And many of these women are uneducated, so good luck trying to provide for yourself if your marriage goes kaput!

If she’s lucky, she can go back to her parents until some other man comes along and wants to marry her. But if she has children, or if she gets to keep the children, her parents usually won’t accept her back; she has to “find her own way,” as one man told me.

Many parents won’t accept their daughter back regardless, because they’d have to “refund” part of the bride price. Don’t worry guys, you can return your purchase if you aren’t fully satisfied, but because it’s “used,” you can’t get all of your money back.

But my mom said she would be fine if her marriage ended — her husband paid for her to attend school for sewing and design, and she’d just open up a shop, selling dresses and making wedding cakes, another lucrative skill she has acquired, she told me as I learned how to pound sim-sim (sesame seeds, I think?) into a flour like powder, then grind it with a rock into paste.

A while back, we went to the Acholi Cultural Center to learn about “nonformal education” and watch some traditional dances. The directors of the center told us about their mission and the pillars on which they based their programs, one of which was women empowerment, while another was “eradicating bad culture,” an interesting choice of words, I thought. They told us about Acholi traditions: the chief, who is the firstborn son of the chief before him (but don’t worry, the women can be in charge of the cows), the inheritance of property (again, women traditionally can’t own property), and the way they prevent incest. If a man sleeps with a woman of the same clan, he must jump off the roof of a hut, naked, in front of the whole village, then pee on the woman with whom he committed the crime. Then they bring out a female dog — apparently bestiality cures incest.

I’m guessing this is the “bad culture” the center tries to end. But they never said that; they just said it’s shameful for the man and he would never do it again. And when we asked them about what they were doing to promote gender equality, they didn’t exactly give us the answer we had hoped.

They told us they promoted nonformal, traditional education in the family settings, which consists of pairing the boys with their fathers to learn hunting and planting, and the girls with their mothers to learn the duties expected of a good Acholi wife.

The girls learn to carry jerry cans of water for miles, for cooking, drinking, and bathing for everyone in the family; carry firewood the same; they learn to pound and grind millet for millet bread, groundnuts for groundnut paste, sim-sim for whatever dish I had yesterday, stir the impossibly difficult pot of posho (made from maize flour, I think?); plant and cultivate and harvest alongside their future husbands; cook after they, the women and the men, come home from the day’s work on the farm; sweep the house with a tied bundle of hay, and mop it, bent over, with just a wet cloth; wash the whole family’s clothes if there isn’t enough money to hire a housegirl – never a houseboy – to do it for them; care for the children; and produce more children.

These cultural practices “teach a moral way of life,” the director said; they teach women to be “well-behaved.” If a woman doesn’t know to sit by the door chasing chickens away while a man eats, or if she doesn’t kneel when she offers water to a man visiting her home, well, no one will want to marry her. Women have to be respectful.

In the camps, during the war, the husbands’ duties decreased; they had no land to farm, so men just sat and drank, for the most part. They felt they had no power, no authority, so alcoholism and domestic abuse skyrocketed.

On the other hand, women’s responsibilities doubled. While the men did nothing, most women took up petty trading, taking whatever they could find or whatever they could make, and trading it with other women doing the same thing. Along with their old roles of mother, cook, cleaner, pack mule, etc., the women were the breadwinners, and they had to pay for children’s school fees as well as taxes, and, because the World Food Program provided the food, the alcohol for their husbands.

Many men in Uganda have multiple wives. If a man is monogamous, one lecturer told us, people would say "he has been defeated by his woman." The more wives, the more power. Same goes for children — one man my age said his father had 15 wives (unusual even for Ugandans), and 48 children. He didn’t even know the names of some of his siblings. And his mother was a rare one; she left his father and set out, much like my mother says she would, setting up a shop and finding her own way.

The men at the center said that rape was never a problem before. Women didn’t complain; men would just pick them up off the street and take them home, “whether they liked it or not.” Slapping was an expression of love.

But during the war, rape became an issue because rebels (and government soldiers) were kidnapping and/or raping young girls and women. The international community brought attention to it, so some changes started slowly happening. Now rape is illegal, and now female genital mutilation in Eastern Uganda is "discouraged" by culture and by law.

Since the war ended, the director of the cultural center told us, things have been improving. It takes time, and we are just "culture romanticizing," because A) America has complete gender equality and B) gender equality is something only Westerners push for/want, right? Wrong.

And then he said that women are "cheap" now because they complain. Or at least the educated ones do.