Community meetings and gender based issues around witchcraft

Hi everybody,

After a big breakfast of pumpkin and porridge I'm now at the Gender Based Violence Shelter in Nebbi. Matilda, my host, is the project officer here and this afternoon I will follow her and Grace (who is a social councelor at the shelter)  when they reinstate one of the clients of the shelter back to her community. This will probably involve a mediation process with some of the members of the community and I'm really excited to go. However, in this blog post I will try to catch up with some of the stuff I have experienced since I came to Nebbi. By hanging out with Matilda and the other members of the shelter I have picked up a little on the common gender related issues here. The first thing that strikes you is how similar the basic problems are here and in Sweden. There is a lot of violence of men against women and there is an entrenched idea in society that what happens in a family is their own business. Something you should not interfere with. And off course, there is also a tendency in society to blame the woman for the violence she suffers. I think all this occurs in Sweden as well. But then there is this whole layer of stuff on top of that. For example, one common issue in Uganda is a certain type of land disputes. When a man dies the family of the man sometimes forces the widow to give up her property. This could be land and houses that the widow and her husband has acquired together. These cases are complicated further by the fact that it is sometimes hard to determined who has been married and who has not. By law you are married if you are married in a traditional way. This means a bride prize has to be paid. Often there is a contract drawn up by the parents. For a case to hold up in court you need proof of this. Copy of the contract, photos etc.

A second big gender based issue here is related to witchcraft. Now, the culture around witch craft has many sides. The way I understand it is that witchcraft is really a type of alternative medicine and the way I think about it, after digesting it for some time, is that there is a continuous scale from scientific medicine via naturopathy to witchcraft. Basically, depending on your background in terms of education, what accessibility you have to witchcraft, naturopathy and scientific medicine and how many successful experiences you had with any of them, you will put your faith in one or the other. This, of course, causes problems. For example there is a sickness known by witchdoctors as Awolla which has the exact same symptoms as malaria. Malaria causes half a million deaths in the world every year but it is also, when medicated properly, a perfectly curable disease. Here in Uganda the medicine is widely available and costs approximately 1 dollar per dose. This is (from what I have been told) less than what one consultation with a witchdoctor would cost. Still a lot of people chooses to go to the witchdoctor.

Another problem with the culture around witchcraft, a problem which I think occurs rarely but which gets a lot of attention in media, is magic rituals involving violence and kidnappings. They are the type of news that would reach Sweden. However, a much larger issue, related to the fear this causes, is that women who are vulnerable in one way or the other (for examples widows) get accused of being witches and then chased away from their communities. Technically these types of unsubstantiated accusations could target “male witches” as well but from what I’ve heard this rarely happens. Matilda briefed me on two cases. The first one is about a bipolar girl. Her father believes her problems are caused by witchcraft. He blames the widow of the girls uncle and forces her to leave the community. To prove that she is not a witch, the widow goes to three witchdoctors (this is customary). After extorting her for money they confirm that she is not a witch. However, the father of the bipolar girl don't acknowledge this and refuses to let the widow back to the community. In the second case, a widow casually tells her father in law that an owl flew over her house. Now, owls are surrounded by a lot of superstition here. The father in law finds this an indication that she is a witch and forces her to leave the community. 

During my first days her Matilda took me to two community meetings on gender related issues. The first was in Paidha, a town 50 km west of Nebbi (you can find it in google maps). The meeting was organized by the shelter and took place on a football field close to the main market in Paidha. The meeting was a bit like a panel discussion. It had people from the local council, police and other organizations and there was a lot of participation from the audience. People here are more comfortable speaking to large crowds than people in Sweden. Moreover, the communities in rural Uganda seems pretty closely knit together so it is possible to get a lot of people to attend a meeting like this. Even in a small town like Paidha there were 300 registered guests and probably more people listening.

Grace and Matilda in Paidha

A few days after the meeting in Paidha we went to a similar meeting in Atyak, a more rural place in the same region. On this meeting a big part of the discussion was about witchcraft accusations. I was surprised by the sincerity of people. My preconception was that the accusations mainly is a pretext used when you want to take somebody’s land. But for the people at the meeting it seemed very real. They would explain that when you take a child to the hospital all tests turn out negative and the drugs administered don’t help, then it has to be witch craft. People also get defensive. I don’t blame them. From their perspective somebody is criticizing the practice to banish witches is trying to take away their ability to protect themselves against something very dangerous. At times the discussion was really heated. Matilda and Grace (who was also facilitating the discussion) were accused of wanting to make witchcraft multiply.

It is hard to see how to conduct a discussion like these. You really don’t want to get into questions of belief. Like the question of whether or not magic rituals have real effect. If that happens then you will be stuck on it for the whole day. And Matilda managed to avoid questions like this pretty effectively. Instead she raised questions on the system that was used. She asked what methods they have to prove that somebody is a witch and what authority gave them permission to chase away witches. These questions, and the answers she got, somehow showed the arbitrariness of the system. I think that was the point. It illustrated that anybody can be accused of being a witch. You, your mum, your daughter, your sister. Then she moved on to tell them that there is no witchcraft recognized by the law. In other words, it doesn’t matter if somebody is a witch or not, it is still a crime to chase them away from their home. Here is a link to a video from the meeting. It is taken towards the end of the discussion and features Matilda (to the left) in English and Grace (to the right) translating to Alur. The sound is bad but if you use headphones you should be able to pick it up. It starts by Matilda telling women to acquire proof of their marriages to ensure nobody can take their property if their husbands die.   

https://vimeo.com/184346070

Afterwards Matilda has explained to me that the part about the law not recognizing any witchcraft is a bit more complicated (she is a lawyer by profession). Apparently, there is a passage on witchcraft in the law of Uganda. It is from 1957 (i.e. written under colonial rule). However, it doesn’t contain a definition of witchcraft and there is a precedential case from 1997 which renders it useless. The ruling deems the law ambiguous and calls for an explicit definition of witchcraft. Up to now no changes has been made. Moreover, there is a local law which enjoys some authority: The law of Alur kingdom. It has a passage on witchcraft. It even prescribes a method on how to determine if somebody is a witch or not. To determine if somebody is a witch, three witchdoctors should be consulted, “each one more powerful than the other”. I have tried to understand the status of this law relative to national law but it seems unclear. (Incidentally, I heard there was recently a meeting here on the problem of discrepancies between local law and national law, so I guess I am not the only one who is confused.) Matilda describes this local law on witchcraft as a recurring problem. Not only is it useless in a national court (how do you verify that one witchdoctor is more powerful than the other?) but it also gives legitimacy to these unsubstantiated witchcraft accusations.