When Hens Begin To Crow

Gender And Parliamentary Politics In Uganda

Sylvia Tamale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429982712
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique africaine

Among African countries, Uganda is unique in its affirmative action program for women. In the late 1980s, President Yoweri Museveni announced his belief that Uganda's successful development depended on increased gender equity and backed his opinions by setting several women-centered policies in motion, including a 1989 rule that at least 39 seats in the Ugandan parliament be reserved for women.In this fascinating study, based on in-depth interviews with both male and female parliamentarians, women in nongovernmental organizations, and rural residents of Uganda, Sylvia Tamale explores how women's participation in Ugandan politics has unfolded and what the impact has been for gender equity. The book examines how women have adapted their legislative strategies for empowerment in light of Uganda's patriarchal history and social structure. The author also looks at the consequences and implications of women's parliamentary participation as a result of affirmative action handed down by the president, rather than pushed up from a grassroots movement.Although focusing on Uganda, Tamale's study is relevant to other African and non-African countries grappling with the twin challenges of democracy and development.

1
Introduction

Female chickens normally do not crow. At least popular mythology claims that they cannot. Hence, in many African cultures a crowing hen is considered an omen of bad tidings that must be expiated through the immediate slaughter of the offending bird. During the 1996 general elections to Uganda's national legislature, a male observer at a campaign rally reminded a woman candidate of this old African apothegm: Wali owulide ensera ekokolima? "Have you ever heard a hen crow?" The message was clear: Women have no business standing for political office. The rowdy applause from the other men at the gathering signaled their broad sympathy and support for their colleague's observation.¹ It is popularly believed that women are not supposed to speak up or express their opinions in public, a view that is deeply embedded in African patriarchal values, which relegate women to the domestic arena of home and family.² Such a view assumes that men are the anointed link between the home and the public world; they are the "natural" players in the game of politics. However, women are increasingly negating the metaphor of the crowing hen. They are defying custom, culture, discrimination, and marginalization to join formal politics in Uganda. That process is the subject of this book.

Field research for this book coincided with a momentous event in the political history of Uganda: the 1996 parliamentary and presidential elections. Two "firsts" were associated with these events. Presidential elections had never been held in the history of the country.³ Furthermore, these elections—if we do not count the sham elections of 1980⁴—were the first direct elections to take place in thirty-four years of formal independence. The 1996 Ugandan elections signified the ongoing breakdown of authoritarian rule that has swept much of Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe in the late twentieth century. A striking difference between this new wave of democratization and earlier ones is that for the first time, women have become an important part of the dialogue on the subject (Seidman 1993; Waylen 1994). The rhetoric of new regimes everywhere expresses a commitment to greater gender equality.⁵

Uganda is one example of an African country engaged in the process of democratization. The wheels of this process shifted into gear way back on January 26, 1986, when a bleak chapter in Ugandan politics ended with the National Resistance Movement (NRM) taking over power after almost five years of guerrilla war. The transition from years of dictatorship under Idi Amin and Milton Obote sparked considerable optimism among Ugandan women. President Yoweri Museveni emphasized the importance of gender equity to Uganda's development: "The challenges of development enjoin us to pay more than just lip service to the core issue of unequal gender relations in our society" (New Vision, March 9, 1988). Such political rhetoric was not new, but nobody would have predicted the concrete steps that the NRM took to follow up on this promise; not only did it defy conventional wisdom but it also cut through deep-seated ideologies that stemmed from strong patriarchal forces.

President Museveni concretized his promise in the following ways: (1) Women were accorded mandatory seats at all levels of the grassroots people's resistance councils and in the National Resistance Council (NRC)—the interim national legislature; (2) the Ministry of Women in Development was created;⁶ (3) the Directorate of Women's Affairs was set up within the NRM secretariat (the government mobilization body); (4) a women's studies program was instituted at Makerere University; (5) all females enrolling in government-funded tertiary institutions were granted preferential treatment;⁷ and (6) women became more visible in high positions such as the cabinet and the judiciary and government commissions. All these developments set the stage for women's increased participation in formal politics and provided an avenue for their enhanced struggle for empowerment in all spheres of society Moreover, Ugandan women have taken advantage of this recent state of restructuring, as evidenced by the mushrooming of numerous women's nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) covering a wide arena of social, economic, cultural, and political activity (Tripp 1994).

This book examines Ugandan women as new formal political actors. My research focuses on women legislators who were beneficiaries of a 1989 affirmative action policy that guaranteed women a minimum of thirty-nine seats (one from each district)⁸ in Uganda's premier lawmaking institution—parliament.

The Sociopolitical History

Despite their numerical majority and the important role they played in the politics of precolonial Uganda, women are conspicuous for their absence in the literature on the political history of Uganda; most of the analyses in the standard texts have generally proceeded as if women did not exist (e.g., Morris and Read 1966; Ibingira 1973; Mittelman 1975; Karugire 1980; Uzoigwe 1982). Beginning in the late 1970s there have been attempts, mainly by Western "Africanist" scholars, to examine the role of African women in politics (e.g., Steady 1976; O'Barr 1976; Rogers 1980; Staudt 1981). Politics in precolonial Africa was far more complex that it is today, especially insofar as it fused with other aspects of social life.

Here I reexamine the precolonial role of women in the political history of Uganda by adopting a nontraditional meaning for the term "politics." In order to fully understand the political role played by women, it is imperative to challenge and redefine the boundaries of public and private life. Thus this section revisits Uganda's sociopolitical history with a difference—refocusing the historical lens to bring into vision a gendered view of Uganda's past. But what exactly is meant by the term "gender"?⁹ Care must be taken not to uncritically project the Western conceptual paradigm of gender onto African cultures and societies.¹⁰ Most importantly, the notion of gender as conceptualized in early second wave feminist writing was largely ethnocentric and generally isolated from other concepts, such as race, ethnicity, class, religion, age, and sexuality. Several feminists have criticized such an approach, arguing that gender identity cannot be separated from all the other attributes that make up an individual (Collins 1990; Spelman 1988; hooks 1984; Smith 1980; Lugones 1994). Furthermore, gender analysis in the African context must incorporate a critique of the imperialist imposition of Western notions of gender and the effect of neocolonialism on gender relations.

Concretely, a gender paradigm relevant to a peasant Catholic Sabiny woman in eastern Uganda, for example, would have to roundly address (1) elements of her indigenous culture that oppress her (e.g., clitoridectomy); (2) Catholicism, which further dominates her morality and sexuality; (3) capitalism, which places her at the very bottom of the class/gender hierarchy; (4) imperialism, which imposes alien sociocultural values, economic constraints, and political structures that dictate her existence; and (5) neocolonialism, which dehumanizes her and is reflected in policies such as structural adjustment programs (SAPs), diminishing terms of trade, and the unequal exchange of values across continents. AH five systems of oppression form an integrated matrix that produces a specific social location for the Sabiny woman. Therefore, the dialectical relationship between gender, class, ethnicity, religion, imperialism, and neocolonialism is especially pertinent for an analysis of gender relations in the African context. Any analysis that lacks such a multifocal approach to gender relations in the African context can only be superficial and truncated.

The political history that follows is integrated with an analysis of the historical construction of gender, focusing on the processes through which gender relations were reshaped by extant sociopolitical conditions. By gender relations I refer to the interaction that occurs between men and women as they carry out their different roles in society. Such relations are a reflection of the roles/activities that males and females perform in society and the relative value/meaning attached to those roles by wider society (Brydon and Chant 1989, 1). My discussion of this political history is divided into three distinct periods: precolonial, colonial, and postindependence. The analysis of gender relations draws on Marxist feminist theories that criticize patriarchy in the wider context of imperialism, development, and underdevelopment. The Marxist dialectical method is particularly useful for this analysis because it links the "present" to material, historical, and structural forms, enabling a more elaborated elucidation of complex social phenomena.

The Precolonial Period

Uganda was declared a British protectorate in 1894 and remained so until it attained formal independence in 1962. Before colonization, the political setup in Uganda varied from kabila to kabila.¹¹ At least forty different makabila resided in the area that was mapped out and baptized "Uganda" by the stroke of the imperialist pen at the turn of the century Broadly speaking, two types of political systems prevailed in the plurality of Uganda's social structure prior to the advent of British rule: the centrally governed kingdom states of Bugan...