Gender Roles: Old and New in Uganda

November 5, 2009

Kate, the intern I wrote about in the Sustainable Development posting, also shared with me a story about the experience of two other interns that affected me greatly. An intern was assigned to talk with people in the local village about what people who are HIV+ need to do to stay healthy and to help their children to be healthy. No one would talk to her at all and people denied that there was any problem or AIDS in the village. There was ample reason to believe that this was not the case but no one would talk. After some sleuthing around what they discovered was that the men in the village were getting tested and, if they were HIV+ they were getting the medication they needed from the hospital in the closest city. But they were not telling their wives about the situation (because of the stigma of being HIV+) and almost all the mothers in the village were dying off “for unknown reasons”. The children were being cared for by the grandmothers, sometimes in their 70s and 80s taking care of 10 – 15 in one household, including many orphans from unrelated families.

Kate and Suki (the other intern) also told me that women have no sexual power in traditional society either to say “no” to sex or to require the use of a condom.

Hearing this distressed me profoundly and I decided to modify my planned talk on Nonviolent Communication for my second and final class with about 100 students at the YMCA business school in Jinga. Over 80% of the students at the school are females, pursing various occupational trainings such as secretarial work, child care, counseling, and tourism. One of the points that I got from Kate and Suki is that most of the people are just not used to having open discussions about topics such as these, and I figured that supporting such a discussion, considering different alternatives regarding the beliefs that we want to guide our lives, the values that are supported by different types of beliefs could be very useful for them. I also wanted to be respectful of their right to choose how they want to live their lives and what beliefs are meaningful to them.

I figured a discussion, drawing from the Narrative Therapy perspectives I have been studying, would be useful. I would ask them, collectively, to generate a list of traditional Ugandan beliefs about men and women and consider the impact of these beliefs on them, how they live their lives, their values, how they want to be in the world and their relationships with each other. Then I would ask them to generate a set of other kinds of beliefs about men and women that they have been exposed to, thought about or could imagine and what the effect of holding the alternative set of beliefs is on them. My intention was to have the evaluate the effects of these sets of beliefs, potentially to consider what story or stories about men and women they want to embrace in their lives.

They were pretty excited and engaged in this activity and some of what they came up with is below.

Traditional Ugandan Beliefs About Men and Women

* A man is supposed to ask for sex at any time he feels like having it and a woman has to give in whether she likes it or not.

* A woman is supposed to do all the domestic work and raise food. Men do cultural work like hunting.

* Men are masters over women.

* Women are emotionally weak.

* A woman should not talk when a man is talking.

* Women are not supposed to sit on chairs.

* Women should kneel when greeting someone.

* Women are not allowed to work in any organization.

* Women are inferior to men.

* Women are not supposed to eat certain foods like chicken, eggs and fish.

* The first man to have sex with a woman must marry her.

* Only men can inherit property.

* Men should marry several women.

* If a couple can't have children it's the woman's fault.

* Women should not give their views in public.

* The first priority for a family is to educate its men.

* Circumcision of men and women is desirable.

* Women are not allowed to preach.

* Girls and women can't climb trees or ride bicycles.

* Women cannot wear trousers; men cannot wear skirts.

* Women cannot drive cars safely.

* It is OK for men to rape women.

* Women should always be submissive to men.

* Women are the property of men.

* Men are always right.

* A woman is to blame for everything that goes wrong.

* The children in a family belong to the man.

* A man has a right to have as many women as he wants but a woman has to stick to only one.

* A man is supposed to decide “yes” or “no” but not women.

Modern Beliefs About Men and Women

* Women and men have equal rights like freedom on speech., education, participation in politics.

* Girls and women can climb trees, ride bicycles and drive cars.

* Women can work outside the home.

* Women do not need to kneel or be subservient to men.

* Women can sit on chairs and wear trousers

Looking at the lists, I am regretting that I didn't ask them questions about modern beliefs about how men and women might run a household together or treat each other. I was surprised and relieved to learn that the belief that is prevalent in South Africa, that a man can prevent AIDS or be cured of AIDS by having sex with a virgin is unfamiliar in Uganda. Sadly, in South Africa and some other countries (e.g. nearby Zimbabwe, I believe) that belief is a cause of many rapes of young women, girls and even female babies, frequently infecting them with the HIV virus.

Although there were indications that the students were very engaged in this activity, it was extremely difficult to get discussion going in the group as a whole, perhaps because of the reluctance of females, who comprised the majority of the class, to speak in public. I talked about the implications of women not feeling free to say “no” to a request for sex. How could a man know that a woman was really wanting to be with him for the enjoyment of his presence rather than because of feeling obligated in she were not free to say “no?” Don't we all want to be with people who really want to be with us? Don't we want to be loved for who we are? We can never trust that a “yes” is honest if people are not free to say “no.” I sensed this was a new take on things for these students. Ultimately, I affirmed, they have to decide how they want to live their lives, what beliefs and stories support them in being how they want to be and which ones they want to use to guide their decisions and their lives.