How “Madwomen” Get Pregnant

The September 2009 Buganda riots attracted a lot of sound and fury from citizens and commentators. However, amidst the heated debates, there was one Ugandan with an apparently very different concern. In a letter to a newspaper, one Rogers Muzigiti from Kasese wanted to know who was responsible for the pregnancy of a mentally ill woman who wanders the town. As it was her third pregnancy, he felt it was high time that the man responsible be identified and held accountable. Unaccountable pregnancies among mentally and physically disabled and destitute women are actually quite a common African phenomenon. The Ghana News outlet in June this year reported how religious leaders in the northern town of Tamale were issuing grave warning to the men secretly responsible for the pregnancies of at least three street-wandering afflicted women. In his song Kipenda Roho, the Tanzanian musician Remy Ongala mocks the men who have relations with such women in secret, and then act shocked when the women -now nursing their children- try to approach them during daylight. Often, when cornered, the man will deny everything, telling onlookers that the woman’s claims are in fact further evidence of her “madness”. But question as to why this woman is “tying herself” on him in particular, and not any other man, remains unanswered. This is the situation in which the NRM leadership finds itself, in relation to Buganda’s demands for federalism, based on an enigmatic bush war Agreement. They make a two-pointed rebuttal, insisting that the demands are not just unknown, but also intrinsically without merit. On the first point, the official NRM party narrative is that no such agreement was ever made, and that any Bagnda involved in the war were “just found around”, to use President Museveni’s description when last on WBS television. Alternative versions have emerged from time to time -sometimes from unexpected quarters, as when the NRM’s Hajji Nadduli referred a few years back to a rebel army bush war meeting with Baganda clan heads on Radio One’s Spectrum show- but on the whole, the NRM’s line has prevailed. That is, until now. The difference is critical. If in fact it was the federalists’ activism that drove the bush war, then it means that the cause of the war has never been settled, and therefore it is completely unrealistic to expect a “bukenke” (tension)-free political atmosphere in the country today, as appealed for by President Museveni. On the second point about the merit of these demands, whether agreed to or not, we get into the reason why that unfortunate Kasese woman is now on her third pregnancy: the irresponsible man keeps on coming back for more, while maintaining his daylight denials. We have had Gen Tinyefuza refer to Buganda’s demands as “rubbish and nonsense” in a parliamentary statement; General Otafiire call the Buganda institutions “obsolete”, and compare them in value to an NGO; and President Museveni derisively refer to cultural heads as “chiefs” who had nothing of value to add to the national development agenda. However, each of these gentlemen are known to have sought some kind of political sustenance from the very same institutions when the need arose. During his ultimately futile battle to extricate himself from UPDF service over a decade ago, General Tinyefuza famously turned up at Bulange wearing a kanzu; General Otafiire escorted General Muhwezi and sought audience sympathy on a talk show on the (now unplugged) Buganda CBS radio a the height of their internecine NRM battles during Temangalo; and president Museveni only just last week revealed that he had clocked two years of “missed calls” to the Kabaka of Buganda. Ugandans need to ask themselves why such important and respectable gentlemen seek to maintain relationships with what they have described as NGO-type obsolete institutions headed by mere chiefs who specialise in rubbish and nonsense? Maybe, just maybe, the demands matter would have simply eventually faded away, had it not been for such contacts, that keep on re-energising it with false hopes? To an uninformed onlooker (or any graduate of the Kyankwanzi political education course), what happened across Buganda in the course of the last week did indeed look like an act of collective madness. The NRM ideologues have also sought -like the men in Ongala’s song- to portray it as such, and hope that the rest of the country will swallow their allegation that “the woman is just mad”. However, the denials will not work this time. It is obvious that this bending of history is becoming a national and regional liability, as the demands -like the pregnancies- will simply not go away. The fact is that much more information on this Buganda-NRM relationship is going to emerge over the next week and months, and concerned citizens will be able to make their own judgement as who has been fooling who. The real question now is if there is anyone in the NRM party with a strong enough sense of duty, who will step forward and insist -as Rogers Muzigiti is doing- that those responsible should do the right thing and “take care of the woman’s ante-natal needs”?