{UAH} THE MULINDWA NOTES ON VIOLENCE IN UGANDA {--- Series two-Hundred-but sixty two}

Friends

 

In many ways I have stated that people hold anger but hate violence, it is very wrong for anyone to state that what has happened in Uganda has passed and we must only build the future. For some very unknown reason Ugandans have failed but refused to understand the effects of violence to people. How many studies have we actually done on Luwero people that lived through terror? What data do we have on those that survived Ombacci? What do we know about those that lived through the Teso infamy? Have we even tried to study the effects to Acholi while in camps? And as these wars have been permanent in our lives, we simply walk along and bring new suggestions of how to move forward. And I am submitting to you that this kind of abandoning the population and we simply throw different political jugenotes to the people, the population is going to reach a point and it simply falls apart. The violence that was done among Acholi population and NRM worried many people out there apart from Ugandans. Through the  National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine and The Norwegian government, Int J Qual Stud Health Well-being,  went to Northern Uganda to study  why there is a huge number of Acholi women committing suicide. Here below is a part of the report they wrote under a heading An escape from agony: A qualitative psychological autopsy study of women's suicide in a post-conflict Northern Uganda.  We are starting from a sub-heading  “Findings and Discussion”.

 

Friends we need to discuss Acholi violence candidly.

Findings and discussion

All the three women in our sample had been very determined to end their lives, as exemplified in the following narratives: (1) “… ‘One time I am going to poison myself to death. I feel the level of my sadness is increasing. Last night we had again some misunderstanding with my husband, I feel I cannot now bear the situation anymore’ …” (a deceased quoted by a friend); (2) “… as we were trying to give her antidotes for poison, she got up and said that she wants to die because of her husband who was not supporting her …” (a brother-in-law); and (3) “… When she left here she said that she should die. She went … to get a rope so that she could commit suicide, saying that ‘why did this boy go, for I'm suffering because of him’” (a sister-in-law). These statements indicate that the deceased were determined to end their lives as a consequence of relationship problems that were going on between them and some significant other(s). At the time, they seemed to have been disappointed, saddened, or raged and frustrated by what they experienced as unfair treatment by some of those they valued. They seemed to have been going through unpleasant and intolerable conditions: “I feel I cannot bear the situation anymore”; and thus searched for a way out and suicide seemed to have been the best option available.

Earlier in their lives the deceased had been through traumatic experiences attributable to the prolonged war in their area that included witnessing and loss of significant others in massacres and being displaced from their homes; which could have made them vulnerable to suicide. However, the decision to end their lives seemed to have been a combination of experiences/events within the last 3 months or so prior to their suicide. These experiences are presented in two broad themes, namely: No control in life and No care.

No control in life

Having no control in one's life was found to be one of the key factors linked to the suicidal acts of the two young women in our study. No control in life was reflected in four subthemes: distribution of labor and power, no right to fight, change of role in marriage, and health of self and children.

Balance of labor and power

The findings revealed that changes in the traditional labor and power balance may have been one of the key factors that significantly contributed to the young women's suicide. The prolonged war in the region ushered in a lot of changes, including changes in the traditional roles of men and women. As earlier mentioned the women/wives on top of their reproductive role had to take over the functions of men/husbands of providing for the family. Thus, they worked hard to ensure the family's survival, since the men's movements outside the camps were restricted and the external food aid was limited. The informant's voices below illustrate this:

Sometimes, it was difficult, especially when you do not have enough gardens and also the food aid was not always enough, so when I had no money, she could go and do casual work in people's homes/gardens and earn money or raw food so we feed on that (husband).

And

// He gave her no care, no support at all in the work whether it's a man's work or a woman's work she was the one to do all that. [] And this used to over burden my sister (elder sister).

Despite the changed productive roles, husbands remained in control of the family's resources which had been hard earned by their wives. However, instead of spending such resources on their families, they were spending them on their leisure activities including befriending and marrying other women or drinking alcohol and coming back home to harass their wives as suggested in two quotes below:

They also had struggled over produce. You know, my parents were hard-working people, and could produce crops yearly for consumption and sale. They could sell jointly and when that issue of the new wife came, every day, my father would want to sell the produce and used the money for alcohol or take it to that new wife for feeding and it annoyed my mother so much (daughter).

In a similar tone:

Well … before the issue of the co-wife, she could complain about the husband not supporting her in anything, he could not give her money for feeding, or go with her to dig or to bring food at home. She was shouldering everything like gardening and domestic work and yet he could just come and picks the produce and sell and uses the money (friend).

Judging from the two quotes above the deceased were hurting. The action of their husbands spending the family resources irresponsibly was unbearable. The reality was that men in Northern Uganda retained the leeway to make financial decisions affecting the family despite the fact that they had no involvement in providing the income (Dolan, 2009; El-Bushra & Sahl, 2005; Otiso, 2006). However, the women in our study did not seem prepared both to take on the role of being the primary breadwinner as well as being subordinate to the husband. As a result, fights could ensue as the women tried to restrict or control their husbands’ expenditures. This is clearly expressed in the following quotes:

In the camp here we have problems of men; most of them sit in the trading center drinking alcohol together with womanizing. These men just come back home to pick the little food there is in the house to take to these women. If we try to resist, they become very violent and start fighting us (sister-in-law).

And

[Initially] before her husband brought the second wife they had a very good relationship; she could work hard and cultivate a lot of crops with good yields. Following the coming of the second wife, she could complain a lot about the husband and on many occasions could seriously fight each other (brother-in-law).

The quotes above depict hurtful feelings and the betrayal felt by the women and they seem to have been caught up in an unbearable situation where they had to take on a lot more responsibility and work without gaining any advantages in return.

Note that Acholi women, like elsewhere in Africa, are socialized to tolerate a high level of conflict in marital and family life as well as tolerance of male authority (Ndosi, 2009). However, a woman's refusal to accept her subordinate position in relation to her husband is likely to cause disputes and even violence (Conner, Ruberstein, Conwell, Seidlitz, & Caine, 2001). This seemed to have been the case with the women in this study, something probably attributable to not having been socialized into cultural submission because of lack of appropriate teachers and role models due to the prolonged unstable environment.

No right to fight

Acholi is a patriarchal society and women/wives are subordinates to men/husbands and therefore are expected to be submissive, never to challenge, or question the man's actions. This means the wife/wives cannot question infidelity and have to accept polygamy as long as it is the husband's wish to marry another woman. However, the women in our sample decided to behave to the contrary. Infidelity and husbands marrying second wives instigated a lot of bitterness and unrest in the homes of these women. In an attempt to influence change, these women could either complain bitterly or refuse to carry out their marital obligations as illustrated by a sister-in-law: “1 day, when the husband wanted bathing water, instead she replied rudely, so the husband grew very annoyed and decided to … box her.” They could also aggressively attack their rivals: “… the husband decided to go in for another woman who had children and [name] … went up to that woman's home and fought” (friend). In the Acholi culture, disputes in the home may call for elders’ intervention during family meetings, but for those regarding extra-marital affairs/infidelity or marrying another wife; the elders are unlikely to decide in favor of the wife since polygamy is culturally acceptable. This is clearly illustrated by the voice below:

… elders said “a man is free to bring as many wives as one can afford. And any woman brought in the home has no right to fight or prevent a husband from loving another.” So [Name] was warned not to fight the other woman again (friend).

This quote implies that the wife attacked the husband's lover, possibly to scare her off and therefore the elders had to intervene. However, their resolutions were in favor of the husband and his lover. Furthermore, the quote seems to suggest that the common attitude was that the wife had no reason to quarrel or fight because it is a cultural norm to have more than one wife. The elders’ concern in this respect was the woman's observance of the code of behavior based on traditional values and practices (Carlson & Mazurana, 2006). Therefore, the deceased had no choice but to accept the situation.

Change of role in marriage

In Acholi culture, children work closely with the parents of the same sex to observe and learn what is culturally expected of them in their adulthood (Liu Institute for Global Issues et al., 2005). This was not the case for our subjects, given the protracted war that constrained the Acholi culture (El-Bushra & Sahl, 2005). This two-decade war hindered the process of transmission of cultural norms from one generation to another (Liu Institute for Global Issues et al., 2005). In Acholi culture, especially in rural areas, men settle within the same homestead as their parents (Harlacher et al., 2006). So when they marry, it's the responsibility of the mother to usher in the daughter(s)-in-law and to orientate her (them) in the affairs of the new home. But in the absence of the mother, the first wife takes over that responsibility. This was the case for the young women in our study. Both of them had lost their mothers-in-law during the war. When their efforts to block the love affairs of their husbands failed, the lovers ended up becoming co-wives as exemplified by this voice: “After the meeting, they resolved that the co-wife should join the husband officially and she was brought and placed under the same roof and [Name] was ordered to look after her and her four fatherless children” (friend). And because the deceased were the acting mothers-in-law, the new wives had to share accommodation during the orientation period as narrated by a sister-in-law:

// the co-wife was brought and they were sharing the same hut, because the mother of their husband died, and she [the deceased] was the older wife [the first to be married], the younger wife had to live with her and she takes care of her as a real mother-in-law.

Although it's a cultural norm, unfortunately the deceased had to take on such a responsibility when they were still very young (late 20s and early 30s): a concern that was voiced by the informants: “… Like my sister's case, she had not yet completed a year with her husband, and was given such a huge responsibility of taking care of the adopted children and their mother, yet her husband was not supportive at all” (sister). This indicates that the deceased possibly had to give up their conjugal roles which they could not have been mentally and emotionally prepared to do after not even 1 year of marriage. In addition, the husbands were unsupportive and took this change of role for granted. In normal situations, by the time the first wife undertakes the role of a mother-in-law, she is much older and would have been in marriage for several years. Even before marriage, in the process of growing up while still with their parents, they would have been socialized into such a responsibility, but this did not happen due to the war.

The marriage life thus became overwhelmingly challenging and unbearable, so at some point the deceased opted to walk out of it. However, because of the dowry and poverty, this was impossible for them as indicated in the following voices: “… she went away, when the issue of the co-wife had just started, but the husband followed her and brought her back saying that he paid his dowry for her. Her guardians [had no option but] to give her back” (friend). A similar voice said: “I had advised her to … go back to her parents … so that the tension/sadness she was experiencing subsides …. She answered that, no! Last time she went … her parents gave her back when the husband followed her” (sister-in-law). These voices suggest that these women were already a property of their husbands and therefore the parents or guardians no longer had any rights over them unless the dowry that was paid was refunded. In the Acholi culture women cannot initiate divorce (Dolan, 2002), and when a woman goes back to her home of origin, the dowry has to be refunded (Burite, 2007). Given the high level of impoverishment, refunding the dowry was impossible. Thus, these women were trapped in a painful and emotionally taxing situation without hope for either change or control over the situation.

Health of self and children

Unfortunately the strategies of rebelling and questioning the man's authority by the deceased seemed to heighten the level of violence in the home leading to physical injuries, not only for the wife but also for the children. For example one of the deceased developed a chronic physical problem because of the constant fights with the husband as narrated by the daughter:

My father could frequently beat her, every time fighting her because of some woman he had an affair with and he insisted until he brought the woman home here. // During the fight, he tended to target her head, and … she began complaining of pus discharge from the ear associated with a lot of pain.

And in one such fight, a child sustained a fracture of the skull as narrated by this informant: “One day, she was bathing the baby and he began fighting her, the baby fell down, sustained a depression of the skull. It was taken to hospital but still has a dent on the head” (daughter). In the above quotes it is demonstrated that the deceased's life and that of their children was at the mercy of their husbands. Furthermore, in agreement with Ndosi (2009) infidelity and betrayals in relationships do not only leave women feeling abandoned, intensely jealous, and unhappy, but also worried about sexually transmitted infections. It was clear from the findings that because of the husbands’ sexual behavior, the women's health was under threat of sexually transmitted infections, particularly HIV infection. Thus, apart from not being in control of their love life, they were also not in control of their own health. The women suspected that they could have contracted HIV infection, which raised a lot of emotional pain, as depicted in the informants’ narrations below:

We talked at length with her about the problem she was facing, how the husband does not give her the money for feeding and how he has gone in for a woman suspected to have HIV. I tried to console her but all in vain. Every day she could consult different people about the [HIV] status of that woman and in the process she got many different stories, which were all pointing towards HIV. The heart of my sister got so broken … What killed my sister was the issue of the co-wife being suspected of having HIV// (sister).

A friend said:

“… she could tell me how this other woman used to move with soldiers, even her last child also was not looking to be healthy. So she had a fear that the co-wife had infected them with the current problem [HIV/AIDS] but she feared to go to hospital for the [HIV] test”.

And,

He [the husband] could pick and drop women at his own will and this annoyed her … and made [Name] to worry so much about their sero-status (sister-in-law).

The above voices suggest that the women highly suspected that they had been infected with HIV in addition to the other stresses and tension they were experiencing. We note here that according to cultural norms the husbands have the right to enjoy their sexuality as they want and they can demand (unprotected) sex from their wives and thus transfer to them the diseases they might have picked up. As pointed out by Silberschmidt, (2001) it is hard for married women in Africa to negotiate use of condoms; as condom use in Uganda is greatly influenced by culture and power relations (Kabonesa, 2011; Kagolo & Nakayima, 2011) and as a result these women could control neither their own health nor the health of their children. As Dolan (2009) noted, “many suicides in the post conflict areas occurred either as a reaction by others to exercise control over the deceased or as a failure by the person committing suicide to achieve control” (p. 210). This seemed to have been fundamental in the suicide of our study subjects, because they seemed also to be without control of their own health/life. Noteworthy is that apart from being victims of physical injuries, the children were also at risk of HIV transmission from mother to child, something that could also have been worrisome to the deceased.

No care

This was either in form of intra-generational or inter-generational feelings of abandonment, depending on the deceased's specific stage of life as elaborated further below.

Intra-generational abandonment

Intra-generational feeling of abandonment was a factor also noted among the young women's suicides. This coupled with having no control in life seemed to have contributed to their suicide. These women were young in marriage and probably had certain expectations in life as married women. However, infidelity and polygamy by the husbands led to feeling unloved and neglected as implied in these voices: “… she was not happy about the way her husband was treating her. [That] he never loved her, he loved the second wife and he was not supporting her in many ways” (brother-in-law); and, “that I don't love her, I don't give money …; … because I was not loving her anymore, I did not want to support her …” (husband). This seems to suggest that these women were experiencing deprivation of something significant in their life—“love and care”. Finding out that their husbands were involved in extra-marital affairs and even going to the extent of marrying other women, possibly signified decline in the husbands’ love and care as the following quote seems to suggest: “Umh … at the beginning there was no problem because her husband loved her so much; only when he began loving the second wife that was the beginning of all the problems …” (sister-in-law). “[Name] was staying well with her husband and later on the husband decided to bring her co-wife and she became very angry that the husband was not caring for her …” (brother-in-law). These quotes suggest that the actual family context with a co-wife angered the deceased. To them it was an indication of declined love and care/attention from their husbands, something they could not tolerate.

Inter-generational abandonment

This form of abandonment characterized the elderly woman's suicide. Old age in this particular context, makes one dependent on significant others. If significant others who are supposed to support the elderly are either absent or fail their duty, the elderly find themselves in an impossible situation as explicated by this quote: “People with children are very lucky. If my children did not die, I would also equally be well off; but now am suffering” (a deceased quoted by sister-in-law). This seems to point to a person envious of those with children and agonized by the loss of her children. All of her biological children and their father had died of a sudden death and/or under mysterious circumstances. She had then invested all her love and care in her only surviving full blood relative, possibly as a way of coping with that loss, as implied by this quote “… relied on this child to forget them [the deceased children]” (half-sister). This relative, however, decided to leave her and move on with his life without her knowledge. The departure of this person frustrated her and was too painful as indicated by this relative: “… she was very disappointed and troubled and thinking of // who left her and did not know where he was. This would hurt her …. She was very disturbed; whenever she sat alone she would cry …” (half-sister). Efforts to convince this person to come back failed and this perturbed her and made her lose hope in life. She felt that her life was not worth living anymore, given that she had lost all that she valued in life. Thus she became overwhelmed with loneliness as illustrated in this narrative: “The major cause of her death was that she was lonely and had lost all her ‘valuables’ …” (half-brother). Children are the social insurance agencies of their aging parents (Dyer, 2007; Kizza et al., in press). Having lost all her children, probably the source for her social security, the deceased could have been overcome by grief and a feeling of loneliness, and to continue living was envisioned as hopeless. Social isolation and loneliness among the elderly are known contributors to suicide (Cattell, 2000).

Human beings have an overwhelming need for acceptance and belongingness (Fiske & Fiske, 2007). According to Leary, Koch, and Hechenbleikner (2001), any perceived decline or lowered relational value in the form of rejection, neglect, isolation, or abandonment, may give rise to various emotions such as sadness, hurt feelings, loneliness, jealousy, anger, embarrassment, amongst others. From what is stated above in the quotes it is apparent that these women exhibited some of these emotional reactions; reactions that are known precursors to suicide or suicide related behaviors (Leary et al., 2001). It is noteworthy that none of these deceased was reported to have suffered from overt mental illness. However, they were said to have been visibly sad, unhappy, and very distressed/perturbed by the experiences they were undergoing. This was probably in agreement with what Pompili (2011) said that “suicide can occur with no psychiatric disorder when profound distress and psychological pain become unbearable and when suicide is seen as the perfect solution” (p. 10).

 

Stay in the forum for Series two hundred and sixty three is on the way   ------>

EM

On the 49^th Parallel          

                 Thé Mulindwas Communication Group
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