Gloria Carlini Università degli studi di Milano-Bicocca

Gloria Carlini Università degli studi di Milano-Bicocca

From okukyalira ensiko to family planning: the social and political construction of female sexuality between traditional rituals and governmental programs in the urban area of Kampala (Uganda)

Sexuality is controversial notion that has to do with many aspects of our lives. It is not only related to our intimacy and privacy, but it goes beyond the bedroom, involving power, national and economical policies, gender imbalances, agency, creativity, and empowerment. In my speech I would like to explore the political and social influences on the construction of female sexuality in contemporary Kampala, the capital city of Uganda. To do so, I will give you two different examples, one rooted in the tradition of the largest ethnic group of the country, the Baganda, and the other one related to modern techniques of fertility and reproduction control, the governmental family planning programs. We must admit that the notion of sexuality, when referred to Sub- Saharan Africa, is often associated to negative concepts such as primitiveness, death, diseases, war, violence, and suffering. Unlike the West, where feminist activists, scholars, and also public opinion seem to support an image of sexuality connected with pleasure, desire, sensuality, and eroticism, the dominant image of sexuality in the Sub-Saharan Africa seem to suggest other. This is particularly true when we refer to female sexuality. Even if from the 1980s many African and western scholars have started focusing on positive aspects of women’s sexuality

, the dominant thinking on this issue continue to be negative. Trying to trace the origins of these negative prejudices means to face our colonial past. The earliest written records of African sexualities were archived from colonial explorers and missionaries in the late years of nineteenth century. During this period of colonial expansion over the continent African bodies and sexualities, especially those of women, became one of the main focal points for justifying and legitimizing the fundamental goals of colonizers: to civilize the barbarian natives of the “dark continent”, affirming a supremacy of Western mores over the African ones. The Western caricatures of male and female African bodies and sexualities, reported as brutal, primitive, hyper sexed, promiscuous and immoral, revealed a clear pattern of the ethnocentric and racist construction of African sexualities

. Western ethnologists and anthropologists also contributed in constructing this mis-representation of the African sexuality as

1 See, for example, the works Carol Vance, Arnfred Signe, Sylvia Tamale, Stella Nyanzi, Gayl Rubin, Audre Lorde 2 Just think about the case of Sarah Baartman, also known as the Hottentot Venus, who was forcibly taken to Europe in the early 1900s and exhibited like a zoo animal with a focus on her genitalia that the costumers could also poke for an extra charge

“something other” opposed to a “Western sexuality”: until the 1960s, the writings on this issue were overwhelmingly dominated by male authors who tended to characterize “Africans” as essentially heterosexual, sexually insatiable and without mores or even control.

The late 1970s and 1980s saw an increased interest on sexuality in Sub-Saharan Africa due to the impact of HIV/AIDS on the continent. On the one hand, there was a tendency to stress an idea of

“African sexuality” as something homogenous: a unique definition that didn’t take into account the differences and peculiarities of this fragmented country (see, for example, the controversial work of Caldwell and the so-called Caldwellians); on the other hand a process of medicalisation of sexuality started in those years, considering the sexual and reproductive behaviors of African men and women (especially those of women) particularly dangerous and one of the main responsible for the diffusion of the virus in the continent. Sex became a mechanical act to be put under control: the idea of love, eroticism, desire, pleasure, seduction, and sensuality were definitely pushed away from the notion of African sexuality. It’s been only by the 1990s that it had become apparent that the prevailing research agendas and also methods related to sexuality in Africa (most of them drawn from biomedical science and public health policy) ignored its important pluralities. It was especially after the United Nations International Conference on Population Development held in 1994, that African activists and scholars underlined the urgency of re-conceptualizing sexuality, especially female sexuality, stressing the positive aspects of desire, pleasure, eroticism, empowerment, and agency since then ignored

. African women, usually depicted by international organizations and public opinion as victims of a male power, unable to negotiate their sexuality and their reproductive rights, are now represented by the latest anthropological accounts as agents of their lives, involved in the process of negotiation of their sexuality and of resistance against oppression and male control. Even if things and approaches are positively changing, there’s still a lot of job to do.

Sexuality is, in fact, a system of power – as Foucault had reminded us – in which the socio-political structures of power define what is acceptable behavior for men and for women for each society.

Regarding African women’s sexuality, it is still particularly interwoven with ideologies of reproduction and domesticity that put the female body under the control of governmental institutions and male power. This is particularly true in the Ugandan context. Even if Uganda has been considered, since the 1990s, a leading country in the process of emancipation of women, the condition of women – especially of those living in rural areas – is strictly connected to the so called

“domestic virtue” model, as McIntosh and Kyomuhendo remind us. Although the struggles for female rights of freedom and independence from men within the society, a woman’s primary identity is as wife and mother, a nurturer, the one who generates, feeds and cares for the family.

3 Just think about the work of Signe Arnfred with his Re-thinking Sexuality in Africa, one of the first publications to challenge the Eurocentric approaches to African sexuality, or the works of McFadden, Tamale, Amadiume

Women must primarily occupy a private space, a domestic space under the control of the male relatives (the father, the brothers, the uncles of, if married, the husband). This image of submitted woman is widespread all over the country not only in the rural areas, but also in the urban context where the level of women’s education is higher than in the countryside. How can this social ideal of femininity affect the construction of female sexuality in Uganda? Which are the political and economical forces that influence women’s sexuality in the country nowadays? And which are the policies and practices that control women’s bodies and sexualities?

I would start this reflection from a previous field research I did in Kampala among Baganda women

on their ideas of sex, eroticism and pleasure. According to traditional kiganda culture, one of the

main duties for a woman is to marry with a man, provide sex upon demand and be sexually

submitted: it’s the man who must have the control of the sexual and reproductive life of the couple

(single women are considered somehow “immoral”, like prostitutes) And although both the spouses

should be faithful, it is socially accepted that the husband could have other relationships outside the

marriage, while the woman must be “stick to one man”. It seems that the pleasure of playing sex is

something reserved only to men, while for women sex is just a mechanical act. The female body is

just a mean for reproduction: sensuality and eroticism, as well as desire, freedom, and orgasm, seem

to be reserved only to men. Even in a big and westernized city like Kampala, where girls feel to be

more free from the social and cultural bounds, when a woman is approaching the age of marriage

(that, accordingly to the last Demographic and Health Survey of 2011, it’s around 25 years old) start

to reproduce the dominant model of femininity. But during in my stay in Kampala, trying to

understand more deeply the local ways of constructing female sexuality, I’ve realized that there is

something more under the surface of male domination. It is true that, since the post-colonial period,

there has been a politicization of women’s sexuality, with a precise interest from the Ugandan

government and the local institutions to consolidate male domination through men’s control of

resources, increasing their economic power and their control over the lives of women and children,

who are effectively considered a men’s property, within the domestic sphere. But it also true that

Ugandan women, in the last twenty years, didn’t just sit and complain for their condition. At the

national level, female organizations have struggled to empower the women of the country (giving

them the right to work outside the house, the right to education, to a better salary, to equality with

men, to be represented in Parliament, just to give some examples); at a local level, there is the

everyday struggle of women to obtain a space of agency in the society and to negotiate their sexual

and reproductive life. In order to deeply understand how Ugandan women try to resist to the

subordination acted by the society through governmental policies of control of female sexualities, I

will take into account two different methods, one more closed to “tradition” and the other one

linked to modernity and globalization. Among Baganda women, the first menstruation coincides with a ritual called okukyalira ensiko (that literally means “visiting the bush”). The ritual consists in a genital manipulation that should prepare pubescent girls for future sex. This is done through the elongation on the labia minora. This rite was traditionally performed in a clearing among bushes where the herbs used for the procedures, in order to reduce the pain, were found. The initiated girls would “visit the bush” with the female relatives of the family for a period of two weeks, for the first time, and then they might practice it after every period. Nowadays, although a massive migration from rural to urban areas and a “westernization” of sexual behaviors and gender roles among young men and women, the okukyalira ensiko has not disappeared. During my field research it was evident that this ritual is still alive in the urban and peri-urban areas around Kampala and it has also spread to many non-Baganda women. But what does it mean for a Muganda girl to elongate the labia?

According to my findings, also confirmed by the work of Sylvia Tamale on this issue, there are

three main reasons to still practice this rite. The first one is functional: okukyalira ensiko seem to

enhance the erotic experience of men and women. During the foreplay, they can be a source of

immense pleasure to the couple as well as during the penetration. But the elongation of the labia can

also serve as a kind of self-identifier for Baganda women: many of the girls interviewed, in fact,

have underlined that you can recognize a real Muganda woman from her genitalia. And the third

reason is merely an aesthetic one: the female genitalia elongated through the ritual are considered

more beautiful and pleasurable at sight of both men and women. The component of pleasure, of

sensuality, and of eroticism seem to be at the core of this ritual that put female orgasm at the same

level of the male orgasm. This ritual reminds us that sex is more than a reproductive act in which

women must please only men, forgetting about themselves. In a society in which the only legitimate

sexual act is the penetrative one to generate a new life, okukyalira ensiko gives women the

possibility to enjoy sex also outside the scheme of fertility and reproduction, using eroticism to

resist against oppression and male control. But if this ritual gives a way of empowerment for

women, that feel free to manipulate their bodies and using them outside the domestic virtue scheme,

governmental institutions (like the Ministry of Health) and international organizations (like the

World Health Organizations) openly discourage this practice, labeled it “useless and primitive” as

well as a risky practice that could increase the HIV/AIDS diffusion. The WHO has classified

okukyalira ensiko as type-IV female genital mutilation, a semi-permanent modification of genitalia

that can pose health hazard to women. Through such discourse, WHO writes this Ugandan practice

of enhancement (that is diffused also in other East African countries such as Rwanda) into the broad

negative rubric of harmful cultural practice that violets women’s rights. This is completely in

contrast with the lived experience of Baganda women, but national and international governmental

policies ignore it: what is important is to take control over female sexuality though the control of their bodies, reducing the possibility of experiencing a pleasurable sexual life outside reproduction.

In doing so, they re-affirm male dominance and power in the contemporary Ugandan society. But okukyalira ensiko is not the only example of how women’s bodies and sexualities are in between different forces that try to reduce their agency. Modern techniques to control reproduction, also known as family planning methods, are widespread in all Uganda since the 1980s. We can divide these methods in two types: the traditional ones (among them we find rhythm, coitus interruptus, abstinence, and long breastfeeding); and the modern ones (among them we find male and female sterilization, pill, intrauterine devices, injections, implants, male and female condoms). As we can see the majority of these methods involve only women in the process of controlling fertility and reproduction: from pills to intrauterine devices, it seems that governmental programs, as well as local and international organizations, need to put under control only the female bodies. Men are not responsible for the reproductive planning of the family. This reflects the engendered roles within the relationships between men and women, socially accepted in Ugandan society: while women are expected to guard the moral order and have greater control over their sexual impulses, male sex drive is constructing as comprising powerful, uncontrollable feelings for which men are not responsible. And in fact, the methods more frequently used in the urban area of Kampala are injections and pill that act on female bodies and compel women to be the only responsible for fertility plans. It is quite wired that in a Country that, for years, has been the symbol of HIV/AIDS contagion and in which pre-marital sex among youth, especially in urban areas, is so practiced, governmental policies don’t promote the use of male and female condoms. This is partly due to the influence of religion institutions, especially Christian Pentecostal Churches, that promote the idea of abstinence as a way of controlling child birth and the diffusion of STDs. But it’s not only that. As Michel Foucault remind us, human body is shaped by external forces: political, economical, cultural, and social forces that inscribe in the body differences and inequalities. The body becomes a mean of social representation. And the female body seems to reveal that. In contemporary Kampala women’s bodies are highly socialized and politicized: they are at the core of governmental policies that tend to control fertility and reproduction, and – in doing so – they reduce the sexual power of negotiation of women. In order to promote reproductive health, female sex is reduced to a mechanical act. As this act can be potentially dangerous, women are the main responsible for its control: governmental and international policies seem to give women freedom in the sexual arena:

but this is just an apparent freedom. Behind pills and injection, that make women part of the

decision-making as for child birth and family planning, there is a precise willing to reaffirm gender

imbalances in heterosexual relationships. Women are the main responsible for controlling sexuality

and, as reminded before, they are expected to be faithful to their men, that why there’s no need for men to use contraception, if there is someone else to do so. I have to admit that, in the last five-six years, gender policies in Uganda are sensibly changing. Even if the governmental policies in matter of fertility, reproduction and sexuality are mostly directed to women, some local organization like Y.E.A.H. (Young, Empowered and Healthy) have started a policy to change male attitudes to relationships and sexuality: the “Be a man” campaign, also supported among others by PSI, Ugandan Government, USAIDS, focus on faithfulness, women’s respect, responsibility as key elements for a “real” masculinity. But in all Uganda, the social and cultural ideal of male power within the household and the society is still too strong: things are changing, but it’s still a long journey! Ugandan women are trying to gain more space of action and negotiation of their sexuality in the everyday life, by using what De Certeau defined “tactical agency” in opposition to the

“strategical agency” acted by governmental and international policies. Creativity and resistance, as

well as pleasure, desire, and sensuality seem to be the new key words for Ugandan feminist activists

nowadays.