FANNING THE FLAME OF FEMINISM IN UGANDA
(Paper presented on the occasion of celebrating ACFODE's 18th anniversary, November 17, 2003 at the International Conference Centre, Kampala)

By Sylvia Tamale
Faculty of Law, Makerere University

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One should always be drunk.
That's all there is to it; it's the only way.
Not to feel the horrible burden of Time
That breaks your back and bends you to the earth,
You should be continually drunk.

Drunk with what?
With passion, with anger, with outrage or with justice, as you please.
But get drunk.

And if sometimes you should happen to awake,
On the stairs of a palace, on the green grass of a ditch, in the dreary solitude of your own room,
and find that your drunkenness is ebbing or has vanished,
Ask the wind and the wave, ask star, bird, or clock, ask everything that flies, everything that
moans, everything that flows, everything that sings, everything that speaks,
Ask them the time; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird and the clock will all reply:
"It is Time to get drunk! If you are not to be the martyred slaves of Time, be perpetually
drunk! With passion, with anger, with outrage or with justice, as you please."

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a slightly modified version of a poem entitled, "Be Drunk" by the nineteenth century French Poet called Charles Baudelaire. I believe that Ugandan feminists and women's rights activists need to be poetically drunk! The problem with the Ugandan women's movement today is that most of us, activists are either tee-totallers or only slightly drunk. We need to be absolutely giddy, elated, exhilarated, hyperventilated and drunk on our cause, our objectives, our mission, our obligations...

We need to fan the flames of feminism.

The initial fanning I did was to alter the topic that Acfode requested me to talk about. I fanned away the words "Gender Activism," replacing them with the F-word, "Feminism!" This is because the former lacks the "political punch" that is central in the latter. In our particular context here in Uganda, the term "gender activist" has had the regrettable tendency to lead to apathetic reluctance, comfortable complacency, dangerous diplomacy and even impotence. Somehow, society has managed to remove the element of "activism" from the so- called "gender activists" in this country. More and more, we see gravitation towards "inactive activists."

Our democracy (or what is left of it) is in a crisis. The gap between the "haves" and "have-nots" widens by the day. The "eat-alls" are eating everything; the "have none" are losing everything! Inequalities based on gender, ethnicity, religion, disability, age, sexual orientation, tribe, and so forth are threatening to rapture the fabric of our society. Millions of Ugandan citizens, children, women and men, have never enjoyed the "peace" that is often touted as the hallmark of the National Resistance Movement government. The formal equality and freedoms enshrined in the constitution do not translate into substantive rights for the majority of Ugandans. I really do not need to belabour this point to all of you listening to me this afternoon; you know what I am talking about. Uganda must be saved from slipping back into chaos, from political backsliding, from total decay.

It is time for us, gender activists/feminists, to remove the kid gloves and take a political, hands-on approach to save ourselves, save our people, and save this country.

My brief discussion this afternoon is largely a critical, self-reflexive analysis of the Ugandan women's movement, bringing it to bear with the larger contemporary socio-political issues pertaining in our country. This introspective analysis is meant to fan the fire under the belly of the women's movement. Hopefully, it will provide the much-needed zeal that will spark many of us into action to initiate the process of transforming our society into a more equitable, democratic and tolerant one. I genuinely believe that feminists can turn things around for this country.

Why the Urgency at This Time?

We are all aware of the widespread and multi-faceted backlash against women's rights in this country. The gains that the women's movement have achieved, especially in the last two decades, face a real danger of being lost. The severe backlash against our rights can be gauged from the rhetoric emanating from the corridors of power, as well as from the various memoranda submitted to the Constitutional Review Commission. There are hundreds of proposals to scrap sex-quotas and the policy of affirmative action. The kind of hostility, intolerance and attacks to feminism was well captured last week in the reactionary rhetoric of MP Nsubuga Nsambu when he referred to the domestic relations bill as "a nuisance," "a vexation," "a fuss," "a displeasure," "a serious bore"; he urged all responsible men not to honour it.

Of course, the domestic relations bill, which seeks to rearrange the dynamics of the dysfunctional traditional family by recognising the rights and contributions of the female partner in this basic institution of our society, represents a huge threat to patriarchy and to men's power and dominance over women. It is hardly surprising that we shall get stiff resistance from those quarters that wish to cling onto such power. It is interesting indeed, that Nsubuga Nsambu does not see the link between his clinging onto power at the family level and the "clinging onto power" that he fights so viciously at the national level. It is a clear case of hypocrisy, double-standards and insincerity. Oppression is oppression whether it takes place at the national level or in the family. True democracy is not restricted to the level of government but permeates all socio-political institutions, including the family. The personal is hugely political.

The urgency is also prompted by the concept of cultural relativism. Politicians, conservative cultural leaders, mainstream scholars, religious leaders and wanainchi are all using "cultural relativism" to challenge gender equality by arguing against universal rights and making a case for understanding different cultures and societies on their own terms and relative to their own values and beliefs. Such arguments are invoked to justify practices such as, female genital mutilation and virginity testing for women. The false dichotomy created by the debate between universality of human rights and cultural diversity is particularly damaging to the rights of Ugandan women. Universality should mean that all human beings - in all our diversity - are entitled to the full enjoyment of all human rights.

It must be understood that a backlash against "women's issues" is a backlash against democracy and progressive change. The issues for Ugandan women are in fact issues that concern all Ugandans. They are developmental issues. When the backlash is placed against the backdrop of political monopoly, economic deprivation, poverty, violence, displacement, an adjusting economy and globalisation, the crisis multiplies tenfold. It will take a new revamped kind of feminism to resist and defeat this kind of backlash. A feminism with a capital "F."

Identifying the Challenges & Weaknesses

1. Focus on Careerism
Generally speaking, when the struggle for women's rights in Uganda was spearheaded through community-based organizations and prior to the boom of non- governmental organizations, there was a genuine commitment to the cause. Women (and a few men) volunteered and sacrificed their time and resources with the fervor of a guerilla freedom fighter. However, because of the sheer size of the work that has to be done by feminists, the fact that most of us work double- or even triple-shifts (inside and outside the home), the fact that our work is under-resourced, we were forced to turn to the development industry. Today, the culture of donor-driven NGOs has overtaken the struggle and this, coupled with government's tight control of NGO work, has depoliticized the women's movement. Presently, many of us are in "the business of women's rights" not as political activists but mainly to advance our personal interests. We sit and strategize not on how to genuinely transform society but on how our positions will bring in more cash, help us win scholarships or a trip abroad. "Careerism" has eaten so deeply into the Ugandan women's movement that many of us do not even practice what we preach as feminist principles.

2. Gap Between Theory & Practice
A closely related problem concerns the wide gap between feminist theory and praxis. Feminists in the Ugandan academy and the activist practitioners on the ground tend to operate in separate cocoons. Gender equality and women's rights rhetoric hardly spreads beyond the legal landscape. Yet theory leads to informed activism. Theory is about understanding the "what?" "why?" and "how?" questions about Ugandan women's oppression, about power. When feminist theory does not speak to gender activism and when the latter does not inform the former, the unfortunate result is a half-baked and truncated feminism. Under- theorized praxis is comparable to groping in the dark in search of a coffee bean. To use President Museveni's favourite word, it leads to "obscurantism" i.e., hindering clear vision, knowledge, progress and enlightenment. Social transformation can hardly be achieved under such conditions.

3. Reformist & Issue-Based Approach
There is a tendency in our struggles to lay too much emphasis on the reform of both the received and customary laws as a panacea to the woes of Ugandan women. Reformist strategies or other "silver bullet" approaches are essentially limited in that they leave the oppressive system intact. Reformist strategies usually overlook the underlying power relations and structures that create imbalances and inequities between Ugandan men and women. Our struggle must move away from the episodic, single-focused character (e.g., struggle over land rights), from the "crisis approach" to a more sustained and continuous one. We must pursue strategies that will keep issues of gender and equity constantly visible in our society. There is an urgent need to develop a radical theoretical framework with the potential to radicalize reformist strategies.

4. Sectarianism & Co-optation
The culture of sectarianism, which inflicts the rest of Ugandan society, poses a real danger of splintering the women's movement. The cause of women's emancipation is too important and cannot afford to have divisions based on trivial rivalries and differences. The women's movement must also vigilantly guard against the risks of co-optation by the state and multilateral initiatives. President Museveni has often referred to himself as "the driver of the vehicle of the women's movement." In a very paternalistic fashion, he has requested us to leave him, as driver, to control the speed of our emancipation! We should guard against being used as pawns in a jig-saw puzzle. How many activists have been "bought off" by government by offering them leadership positions in bureaucratic organizations and in government? We have seen how the state has grossly abused affirmative action by co-opting talented women into the ranks of political elites without challenging fundamental structural characteristics of the political economy. We have also seen the top-down, co-optive fashion in which government has involved civil society in the Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP). "Gender mainstreaming" is the latest form of co-optation that is bound to compromise our transformative agenda.

5. Defeatist Approach
There is a tendency (intentional or unintentional) for us in the women's movement to adopt an ethos of sentimentalism and victimization. We often depict wives, mothers and women as ignorant, helpless, suffering victims. Moreover, we tend to invoke homogenizing and unrealistic ideas about how women should "stand up for their rights." When we as activists go down to grassroots women using the language of victimization and the politics of suffering, they come out as exclusionary, maternalistic and even matriarchal - retrenching the definition of womanhood in subordination. We need to use more empowering terms, for example, referring to people involved in domestic violence not as "victims" but as "survivors."

6. Shrinking Resources
One reality that is catching up with those of us engaged in NGO work and other institutional contexts is that financial and material resources that were readily available 5-10 years ago are fast dwindling. The dominant development approaches in the globalized world have led to a major shift in the operations of the donor community. For example, recently, the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) suffered a serious setback when the Dutch government - its biggest financial source - took a decision to cut a substantial amount to its programmes. Doubtlessly, this is going to have a debilitating and ripple effect on thousands of UNIFEM-funded projects run by women's rights in Uganda and the rest of Africa. Indeed the tendency today is for multilateral and bilateral donors to shift their support from non-governmental organizations to sector-based programmes (within government ministries) that are linked to poverty reduction strategies. We all know how gender-insensitive male-designed poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSPs) are - largely ignoring the qualitative dimensions of poverty that stem from inequality, powerlessness, "voicelessness," vulnerability, dependency and lack of choice.

7. Extremism & Fundamentalisms
All forms of fundamentalisms - whether it is cultural fundamentalism (e.g., the revival of virginity tests), or religious fundamentalism (e.g., hailing women's subordination to men), or economic fundamentalism (e.g., neo-liberal structural adjustment policies), or legal fundamentalism (e.g., criminalizing issues of women's sexual autonomy) - pose a serious threat to the feminist agenda. We need to carefully analyze and understand the capitalist social structures that go hand in hand with the resurgence of all types of fundamentalisms and their totalizing discourses. They threaten to erase all the work that we have achieved thus far and to silence us into total patriarchal submission.

Tending the Flame

• The first thing we must do is to set aside our apathetic reluctance and engage the political structures, systems, institutions, etc. Time and again, we have openly declared that our NGOs are "non-political." We do not want to be tarred with the brush of politics and we distance ourselves from formal politics as much as possible. But how can we avoid politics when women's subordination and oppression is a political issue? How can we engage the Nsabus and Musevenis of this world without confronting politics? What, for example, is the position of the women's movement on the issue of lifting presidential term limits - the most undemocratic and unconstitutional stand yet to be taken by the NRM government? Obviously, women stand to lose a great deal from the entrenchment of any form of dictatorship. We must perceive gender equity as one of the major pillars of our democracy today. Gender equity would ripen Uganda's democracy to its truest sense. All women's organizations involved in the struggle for women's rights should, therefore, declare their political agenda.
  
  
• Secondly, it is vital for us to theorize our work. I cannot over- emphasize the need for us to enhance our research capacities and vigorous engagement in producing home-grown feminist theory. We must reconceptualize the important linkages between theory and practice in the women's movement. This is the only way of pursuing our goals with clarity and inspired action. For instance, today many of us have a clouded understanding of the significant linkages between sexuality and Ugandan women's oppression. We do not recognize the link between "pleasure," "choice," "power" and women's oppression. Take the patriarchal discourses on HIV/AIDS spearheaded by the male dominated Uganda AIDS Commission. All their programmes and conferences singularly proclaim HIV/AIDS as a disease when what it really is a dis-ease with women's sexual freedom. I have no doubt in my mind that if the UAC had seriously adopted a gender approach to HIV/AIDS, the pandemic would be almost wiped out by now. It is important for us to understand that our sexuality has a whole lot to do with women's oppression. We can see how its invoked for women who seek political office, women who wish to further their education/training, abortion laws, sex workers, erotica, the way our sexuality is conflated with reproduction, the stigmatisation of childless women, etc. This means that attempts to liberate Ugandan women must address this crucial issue.
  
  
• Third, we must guard against all the "isms" in our struggles (e.g., sexism, ageism, elitism, tribalism, racism, etc.). Space should be created for all people who believe in equity and justice to actively participate. We must forge alliances and build coalitions with other marginalized groups of society. For example, people with disabilities, minority ethnic groups, environmental activists, LGTB groups and so forth. Enlightened progressive men should be welcomed to join the struggle of the feminist movement but they must allow women to own and direct feminism. No man can pretend to have a daily personal understanding of what it means to be subjugated and subordinated on the basis of gender. As people heaped with power and privileges under the patriarchal set up, men - even the most enlightened of them - will have the tendency to "take over" feminism, in a paternalistic and offending fashion. Because feminists are working in an environment that is still pervaded with patriarchy, men's presence becomes problematic at times. We must also create strategic links and networks with sympathetic elements within parliament, academia, the media, grassroots organisations, as well as regional and international women's movements. By so doing, the political agenda of our struggle shall not be lost.
  
  
• Fourth, in our struggle we must be brave enough to tread where others fear to tread. Many times we are intimidated into avoiding controversial paths, our work is discredited and delegitimized by the dominant patriarchal forces, we are made to feel lonely, isolated, and unsupported like social outcasts. Hence it is important to form our own support mechanisms, to be there for each other, to keep the fire burning, to be perpetually drunk on our objectives, not to lose track of our cause. We should not be ashamed to associate ourselves with stigmatizing terms such as "militant" and "radical" that are used to describe us, for it will only take radical and revolutionary foundations to overthrow patriarchy. Patriarchy uses the age-old trick of divide and rule. With our collective efforts, we can in fact achieve the impossible. Who, for example, ever dreamed that the tiny African country, Rwanda, would achieve the unimaginable of having 48.8 percent (yes, just under half) female representation in their parliament? Who would have dreamed that they would beat countries that have had a long history of feminism and democracy like Sweden, Finland and Denmark, which had dominated the top statistics in this area for decades?
  
  
• Fifth, we should embrace radical strategies in our struggles. We must reject the arguments that Africa or Uganda is not ready for radical feminism. What such arguments are saying in essence is that we are not ready for transformation. In fact, the majority of people that espouse the "women-should- take-it-nice-and-slow" line are those that have never directly experienced gender discrimination. We heard a similar argument in the nineteenth century, made by slave owners who argued that slavery was a normal condition to everyday living. We also heard it from colonialists in the middle of the twentieth century. And most recently, in the language of the pro-apartheid defenders in South Africa. I want us to remember the numerous legendry figures such as abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Mahatma Ghandi who opposed British colonialism, and Nelson Mandela who battled apartheid were all once labelled "radicals" by their oppressors. I am sure that none of us learning about the struggles of these men today through history books thought for one minute that their demands were too radical. But the oppressors did. We want African traditionalists to tell us when they think conditions will be right for us to adopt a radical approach? Radical feminism is a movement intent on social change, change of rather revolutionary proportions. It questions why women must adopt certain roles based on their biology, just as it questions why men adopt certain other roles based on theirs. It attempts to draw lines between biologically-determined behaviour and culturally-determined behaviour in order to free both men and women as much as possible from their previous narrow gender roles.
  
  
• "Feminism" is not a well-liked term in our society, but this is not surprising given the fact that it represents a goal that challenges dominant hegemony. A similar "ism" that is equally unpopular in Uganda is "multipartyism." We need to make sure that multipartyism leads to genuine pluralism and most important that it does not minimize or defeat the gains we have already made in the last two decades. Furthermore, we and everyone else in this country must realise that the enemy of the women's movement is not "men" but rather "patriarchy" (and these two terms are by no means synonymous) and that dismantling patriarchy will benefit both men and women.
  
  
• Finally, as we embrace radical feminism, we should not completely discard the mainstream moderate methods that have dominated our struggle. Indeed, history has taught us that all successful social movements adopted a range of approaches in dismantling the structures of oppression that they were fighting. The abolitionist movement in America that ended slavery used strategies that ranged from moral persuasion to boycotts to the endorsement of violent rebellion. The undeniable benefit of the aggressive, radical method of advocating for women's rights in Africa is that it has strengthened the bargaining position of moderate feminists. The radicals provide a militant edge against which moderates' strategies and demands are regarded as "reasonable." Furthermore, radicals can create "crises" that are resolved to the advantage of the moderates. Radical feminism was the cutting edge of feminist theory and if we are to build and strengthen Ugandan feminist theory, it is the inevitable breeding ground.

Ladies and gentlemen, these are some of the few things we can do in tending the flame of our struggles. With commitment, clarity of purpose and attention to detail, the fire will keep us drunk on our objective and continue to push the darkness of patriarchy further and further. Allow me to end with a slightly modified version of the lyrics of a Folk artist that has inspired me through the years - Tracy Chapman's song, "Talking About a Revolution."

Don't you know, they're talking about a revolution.
It sounds like a whisper.
Don't you know, they're talking about a revolution.
It sounds like a whisper.

While they're sitting in the "toninyira mukange" lines,
silently crying at the hands of their abusive husbands,
wasting time in the unemployment lines,
sitting around waiting for a promotion.

Women are gonna rise up
and get their share.
Women are gonna rise up
and take what's theirs.

Don't you know, you better run, run, run...
Oh I said you better run, run, run...

Finally, the tables are starting to turn.
Talking 'bout a revolution.

Download a copy of the paper (WORD format).

Contact person about the paper:

Sylvia Tamale
Faculty of Law, Makerere University
Email: stamale@muklaw.ac.ug
Web: http://www.muklaw.ac.ug/staff.html

or Christine Namatovu
Ag. Executive Director, ACFODE
Email: acfode@starcom.co.ug

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Last update: November-30, 2003