Goodbye Nebbi

Last week I had to say goodbye to everybody in Nebbi. I left on Saturday morning and since then I have done a safari in Tanzania. On Monday morning I will go home to Sweden. The last thing me and Carol did before I left was to set up a blog for Action Aid Nebbi. Check it out: ActionAidNebbi.blogspot.com. Carol has written about her trip to Tanzania in the Kilimanjaro initiative for women's right to property and I have written about a public open air dialogue in Paidha. I really hope Carol and the rest of the Action Aid Nebbi team keeps updating the blog so I can read about their projects when I'm back in Sweden. 

My time in Uganda has been fantastic. I have had so much nice people around me. My host family, Matilda, Kyla, Israel, Blessing, Sonja and Hafsa, made me feel absolutely at home from start to finish. I feel so lucky I got to know you guys and I hope to see you in Sweden soon so I can return some of the hospitality. Moreover, Carol, Matilda (again) and Grace have been so generous to me, letting me take part in their work and providing me with so many interesting experiences. I've also had such a good time teaching at Nyacara Primary School. The students of my class has been amazing, putting up with my Swedish accent and taken a lot of active parts in the lessons. We have had a lot of fun together. Also, my fellow teachers, especially Harold, Dennis, Collins and Stephen, have been great hosts. My fellow volunteers Jonathan and Frederik reminded me to appreciate Uganda outside Nebbi and took me to Gulu, Kampala and even into Congo. The rest of the people at the office and the shelter, Alfred, Ismael, Samuel, Faith, Roy, Beatrice and Beatrice, all these people made my stay an absolute pleasure. 

The day before I left Nyacara Primary School organised a good bye event.

Students and teachers of the school posing together. Harold, who is the class teacher of P6 (my class) is in the white and gray striped shirt to the right.

Message Collection

Most people would know what child sponsorship is. It is a form of charity where a sponsor, who provides a certain amount of money each year, is paired up with a child who lives in a challenging situation. The money from the sponsor goes to the child and typically it will ensure the child receives education and adequate health care. For the sponsor it is a rewarding way of giving since you, if you regularly communicates with the child, gets a verification that your contribution makes a concrete difference. 

Now, to make the child sponsorship format achieve its purpose you need to provide some way for the sponsor to communicate with the child. This communication doesn’t occur spontaneously. Getting letters to and from people living in rural Uganda can be difficult and demands an effort by the organization. At Action Aid this is done by organizing message writing events with the kids. Typically all the sponsored children in a group of villages are invited to a public place a certain day. There they are supplied with blank letters, pens, color crayons, colorful stickers and get to, depending on their age, either write a message to their sponsor or make a drawing for their sponsor. The younger children which only makes drawings gets help by a field worker, a person form the community who is engaged for the day, to write a message to the sponsor. Typically the message contains information about the child’s living condition, how they have improved and what problems the child faces. The messages are then collected, registered and sent off to the correct sponsors. 

The impressive thing about this is the scale of the operation. Each one of the events above would host 50-100 children and each time Action Aid collect messages in the Nebbi region there are 10-20 events like this. And this is done twice a year. I arrived in Nebbi just as the process to collect the second batch of letters for 2016 was started. It begun by a big meeting in Nebbi where all the field workers were invited (around 30 people). This meeting lasted for a full day. The message collection events where planned and potential challenges and mistakes in the process were discussed. For example, it is crucial that as many as possible of the sponsored children show up for the events. Any child that doesn’t show up for the event will have to be handled separately. So for each meeting a certain number of mobilizers are engaged. These are people whose only responsibility is to make the children come to the events. They go house to house during the week before the event and invites the children. Moreover, to keep track of the large number of children and their letters you need a database where you keep contact details, information on living conditions etc. At one of the events I helped out in collecting some of that data. Contact details is generally given by the village where the family resides together with the name of the head of the household. The data on the living conditions include the type of house (mud hut with grass thatched roof or brick house with corrugated roof) and any farmland or animals owned by the family as well as proximity to clean water, health care and schools. Moreover, each child has his or her photo taken and to be able to match each profile with the correct photo you write down exactly what the child is wearing on the day of the event. I’m writing about this because I have been sponsoring children myself. I remember enjoying the letters I received but I never realized what a great organizational effort that is behind it. 

The car is loaded up with soda to keep the blood sugar of the kids at the right level.

Working on her message.

Carol, assisting with glue, stickers and glitter

Kids queuing up at a field worker to get help with their messages

A finished message...

...with field worker's comment.

Apart from the organizational challenge, the child sponsorship format has another challenge. It has to do with the way Action Aid work. Action Aid started as child sponsorship organization. Its initial focus was to provide education. This was in 1972. Since then the world, and Action Aid, has changed. For example, primary school education is free in Uganda since 1997. But, although this has made enrollment into primary school drastically increase, problems around education persist. Still, a lot of kids don’t go to school. The reasons are many. Kids skip school to work or take care of their younger siblings while their parents work. Some kids get married before they finish school and drops out because of that. Moreover, there is a problem with the quality of schools. The classes are big. Up to 100 students in a class room. And the supply of teachers is often short. Thus, supporting education calls for other measures than just providing school fees. First of all, it is important to make people (parents and community leaders) understand the importance of education. Carol formulated it in a good way. She said that you need to make people understand that giving your children an education is not expensive. It is a lot more expensive if you don’t give your children an education because then you need to give them farm land and animals. Moreover, there is a need to teach parents and children how to demand their educational rights. If teachers don’t show up for school, then the parents should know how to talk to the school principal about this. If the school don’t have adequate housing, then the community needs to know how to demand it from the government. And this is reflected in the work that Action Aid does. They are moving away from actually providing stuff for people. Instead they try to teach people how to either provide it for themselves or demand it from their government. They have projects with the objective to teach people about their rights and how to ensure they are not violated, how to campaign for things and how to expose leaders that doesn’t do their job. 

Now, it is not entirely clear how to combine this approach with the child sponsorship model. It is in the nature of the projects above that they should not be aimed at one person. They should be aimed at the whole community. So the way it is now the main bulk of the money the sponsors provide doesn’t go to the child and its family. Instead it goes to various empowerment and education projects that benefit the whole village or the whole community of the child. The sponsors are well aware of this but it does sometimes provide a challenge when it comes to the sponsored children’s families. They might expect to receive concrete things, like money or animals but instead they can only benefit from projects aimed at the whole community. It is not obvious how to explain the advantage of this approach to the children's families. And it might also be difficult to explain why their child in particular should be the one communicating with the sponsor when the money is used for things that benefit the whole community.

Leaders of Alur Kingdom and Cultural Practices

I will try to catch up on a bit of the recent work by the Gender Based Shelter here. It involves interactions with something called the cultural leaders of Uganda. It took me a while to understand their roles.  I think a good way of contextualizing it is to say that there exist three types of leaders here. The first one are the political, or administrative, leaders. These includes both national and local government. The second type is the religious leaders. Priests (both catholic and protestant), Imams and the different leaders within the religious organizations. Although they might not have a lot of formal power their influence on people is probably big. They have a lot of soft power. The third type is the cultural leaders. They consists of village elders and chiefs. They should not be confused with the local government. The cultural leaders are not part of the official government structure of Uganda but they are an important part of society. As opposed to religious leaders they do not only have soft power, i.e. it is not only a question of the ideas and values they articulate. Their power seems to be more concrete. The way I understand it, the cultural leaders often act as a sort of local judges in disputes between individuals and for many people here, especially in the rural parts of Uganda, it is more natural to consult the cultural leaders when you have a problem than to consult representatives of the local government or the police.

Now, the main ethnic group, or tribe, that populates Nebbi and the region surrounding it is called Alur. The law of Alur kingdom, which I have written about previously, is part of the cultural power. It is not officially written down but it is a set of principles upheld and administered by this network of chiefs and village elders. Moreover, at the top of this network of chiefs and village elders, at the top of the cultural leaders of the Nebbi region, there is the cabinet of Alur Kingdom. It has a king, ministers, an executive secretary and even a parliament. The first time I met representatives of Alur Kingdom was in a meeting that Carol from the Action Aid office took me to. The meeting was organized by the Alur Kingdom and I think their purpose was to brief the NGO’s in the Nebbi region about the status of the kingdom. Apparently, the king recently disbanded his cabinet and at this meeting he outlined the plans of the kingdom for the future. Apart from setting up proper offices and performing a coronation ceremony for the new cabinet, they are drafting a strategic plan and a set of statutes. And this last bit is the interesting part. It means a lot of the laws of Alur Kingdom, i.e. the principles used by the village elders and chiefs, will finally be written down in an organized manner.

I have previously written about the Alur way of handling witch craft accusations. When a person is accused of bewitching somebody he or she should prove himself/herself innocent. This is done by consulting three witch doctors. This system is problematic in so many ways. First of all, the burden of proof is on the accused. The accuser don’t need to present any concrete evidence at all, while the accused has to go through a very costly process which he/she has no control over. As an example there is a case where a woman was accused and had to pay the witch doctors three goats and her whole cassava harvest for the consultations (by the way, she was proclaimed innocent by the witch doctors but was unable to stay in her home because of the stigma associated with the accusations). Moreover, the prizes and details of the procedure are not regulated. The accused don’t know beforehand what the cost will be and is extremely vulnerable to extortion in every step of the process. Finally, the facts that determine the outcome of the process, i.e. the statements of the witch doctors, are completely useless in court. This means a case can’t travel upward in the legal system. Now, whether or not this principle of having the accused consult three witch doctors is written down in the statutes of Alur Kingdom probably has great significance for people working with gender issues here. If it is written down, not only does it enforce and institutionalize a flawed system which is not compatible with the national justice system of Uganda, it also sends a message to chiefs and village elders, and, by extension, to the whole population of the region, that accusing somebody of witch craft without concrete proofs, and even evicting them from their home, is acceptable and lawful behavior.

During the previous two weeks Matilda organized three meetings with leaders of Alur kingdom. The first one was a meeting with religious and cultural leaders of the Nebbi region. Here, apart from the leaders of Alur Kingdom, there were representatives of the Catholic, Protestant and Muslim faiths. The second meeting consisted of leaders of Alur Kingdom together with the so called sub county coalition. The sub county coalition is a network of people which, the way I understand it, is held together by Action Aid. It consists of people with leadership positions in the municipal governments in the Nebbi region. Some of their job titles are subcounty chiefs, local council chairmen, community development officers etc. The idea is that they should all be somehow educated, vocal and interested in gender based issues. The third meeting consisted of leaders of Alur Kingdom together with the district coalition, which is a network similar to the subcounty coalition but with positions higher up in the hierarchy.

I think the original reason for Matilda to call these meetings was to address the issues with the Alur way of handling witch craft accusations, but the scope of the meetings was broader. The agenda of the meetings was to identify cultural practices that leads to gender based problems and suggest ways to deal with them. And I want to stress what a change I think these meetings caused. They covered a lot of topics, from women’s property rights to the length and form of Keny, a feast connected to the payment of bride price, but I will focus on the principles on handling witch craft accusations since they seem to be the most controversial. In the beginning of the first meeting the representative from Alur Kingdom that was most vocal, the speaker of their parliament, was very careful on this. He would suggest small changes to the policy, like having the person accusing somebody share the cost with the accused (instead of the current system where the accused bears the whole cost). But the meeting really turned around. It was inspiring to see the religious leaders, together with Matilda and Grace, unite on the message to Alur Kingdom that this policy of consulting three witch doctors should not be put in the statutes at all. In the end several of the leaders of Alur Kingdom agreed on this. Moreover, I didn’t attend the third meeting but I heard it was very successful and last Friday I talked briefly to the minister of gender in Alur kingdom while having lunch (he was involved in another Action Aid activity) and he then seemed to be pretty settled on not putting the policy of consulting three witch doctors in the statutes. Instead, he advocated a policy on witch craft close to the one articulated by the religious leaders.

 Participant in the meeting with religious leaders

A vocal police officer

Matilda, using her mobile phone to untangle different parts of the constitution

I think this is a good example of how development work should be done. The focus should be on changing the underlying structures that hold development back. And NGO’s should not act alone. Instead of acting alone they should act in broad coalitions like this. The advantage of this is that even if Alur Kingdom puts the policy of three witch doctor consultations in their statutes, i.e. institutionalizes it, the meetings will still have opened a communication channel between the Alur Kingdom leaders and the other participants in the three meetings (the religious leaders and the subcounty and district coalitions). I think this can be valuable. The leaders of Alur Kingdom are native Alur, but many of them have international experience. The minister of gender got part of his education in US, the king spent a lot of his upbringing in UK (his father was exiled during the Idi Amin years) and the executive secretary of the Kingdom has a background in humanitarian work in south Sudan. So I’m sure they are all aware of the dangers of negative cultural practices. On the other hand, they represent and govern a system of strong traditions, and this system can be very hard to change, so in their efforts to merge this system with modern values they probably need all the support (and all the pressure) they can get.

A problem with non-standard fees

Back home I would not consider myself a friend of rigid administrative systems. I often find it hard to cope if there is a lot of forms to fill out, I get unproportionally nervous by visa applications and when I was a kid I could never meet the deadlines in school. But here in Uganda I have had a couple of experiences which has made me realize the beauty of rigid systems.

One objective of people who work with gender based violence is to streamline the administrative and juridical path of victims. Basically, from the point you ask somebody for help to the point where the actual problem is solved you will pass through a number of authorities. Often you will visit both a hospital and a police station. You might contact different local administrators and if it comes to it, you will appear in court. Now, in an ideal world anybody in Uganda, regardless of economic and educational background, would be able to navigate this path. But that is rarely the case. One problem, which really shouldn’t be a problem, is that along this path the victim will be exposed to various non-standard fees. For example, after being examined at the hospital you need one of the staff to fill in a form for the police about the injuries. When this is done you usually give that person a small amount of money, just a few thousand shillings (one dollar), to compensate for the fact that they may have to testify if there will be a trial. I don’t think it is unreasonable. It is a way for people to cope when their job responsibilities are not clearly defined and when their salaries are too low for them to do extra work for free. Moreover, my impression is that one dollar, as a one-time expense, is bearable for most households here. However, for a woman who is running away from home this can be a hard obstacle to overcome. Now, the shelter covers this expense for its clients. The cost is small enough to be absorbed by the shelters budget. And technically, the shelter could set up a system where a certain amount of money is allocated to each client to cover these expenses. But this is where the problem of non-standard fees comes in. Since the cost is not part of a system it varies from person to person. Depending on your economic background, or what economic background the doctor thinks you have you will be expected to pay different amounts. Moreover, Matilda told me of a case where she had gone to a hospital with a woman who had been beaten in the head and neck with a stick. There was three medical officers in place but they all refused to fill in the form. They claimed they were not qualified to do it (a lie). Probably it was because Matilda, who is working for Action Aid, was there and that they were afraid they would get into trouble for corruption (because of the non-standard fee involved). This couldn't have been further from Matildas intentions. She just wanted to get the form filled out for her client. In the end, after a lot of hassle, they managed to get another medical officer, who was on leave, to come in to the office and fill in the form. This is just an example but I think it illustrates how something that would appear trivial, a small fee like this, becomes very complicated to deal with because things are not standardized. 

Teaching

When I'm here in Nebbi I'm part time volunteering in the Action Aid office and part time volunteering in a primary school. Today I had a really good day at the school. We have been doing volumes of different geometric objects and now we are applying it to measure the capacity in liters and milliliters of different containers. Today I brought a 1.5 liter bottle full of water and an empty 500 ml bottle and asked them how many times I could use the water in the big bottle to fill the small one. Some of the students guessed it could be done 2 times, some 3 times and some 2.5 times. We then calculated how many times it should be possible (and arrived at 3) and finally I started emptying the bigger bottle into the smaller one to confirm it. The students got really into it and the suspense had been built up while doing the calculation. By the time I was filling the smaller bottle for the third time they were actually cheering and clapping their hands. Sometimes teaching is so rewarding!

Resettlement of client

Last weekend Matilda and Grace took me with them when they reinstated one of the clients of the shelter in her community. I mentioned the client in the previous post. She recently became a widow and after her husband’s death she saw an owl on her hut. There is a lot of superstition around owls here. In particular they are associated with witchcraft. She told her father in law about it and he became worried. As a result she had to leave home. Now, it turned out the story was more complicated than that. Even now there are a lot of unanswered questions. But anyway, the plan this Saturday was to bring the client back to her home and perform a mediation between the father in law and members of the client’s family.

Before leaving Nebbi, we stocked up on some essentials for the client to bring with her (soap, detergent, blankets etc). We then drove the one hour trip to the region were her home is. When we arrived (at about 4 o’clock) the father in law was not there. We were told he was attending a funeral in Nebbi. In fact, the only ones greeting us were two of the client’s children and a relative of her. However, soon her father and brother showed up together with two other male relatives and the family of the client got the chance to tell their version of the story. Apparently the father in law wanted them to take her to a witchdoctor to confirm that, despite the owl, she was not affected by witchcraft in any manner. However, the family didn’t have money to do this. Since it didn’t seem like the father in law would show up the next hour was spent on creating a temporary solution. The client would move in with her father and we would leave a (resolute) message to the father in law that he should report to the local police station the following Monday were the discussion would be continued. A member of the local council was brought and briefed on delivering this message.

However, as this was being done the father in law arrived. He turned out to be really talkative and funny. He was wearing hat and sunglasses (nobody does that here) and joked about how surprised he was to come home and find a policeman and a mzungu (me) outside his house. It was pretty obvious that there was never any funeral and that he had been near all the time. He then delivered his version of the story. According to him, after his son died he was threatened by the family of the client. They had feared the death of his son was connected with witchcraft and said that if something would happen to the client, or her children, then they would blame him for not protecting them. This whole thing got amplified by the story of the owl. However, as I understand it, the reason the father in law sent the client away was only partly because of actual fear that the family would hurt him. Mainly it was because his pride was hurt. When a woman marry in this region, she become part of the family of the father in law. The father in law takes her in to his home. It is (generally) the father in law who pays the bride price and at this meeting, when referring to the wedding, the father in law would say “I married her for my son” instead of just “my son married her”. So there is a lot of pride involved in this and the fact that the woman’s family questioned his ability to take care of her seem to have upset him a lot. After suggestion by Matilda he actually agreed to take the client back in his home if her family apologized and assured that they trust him. 

Matilda with her 4 months baby Blessing and Grace during the mediation

Grace

Memorandum of understanding written up and signed in the light from mobile phones

It had taken us pretty long to reach this point. The discussion was carried out in Alur (the regional language) so it had to be translated. Moreover, as in all conflicts, it’s hard to get people to stick to the point. Whenever somebody get to speak they start over from the beginning and recount the whole story from their own perspective. When Grace had explained to the woman’s family that the father in law was prepared (after an apology) to take her in, then the father just stayed silent. At this point Grace was close to losing her patience. Finally, another relative of the woman stood up and said that the whole mediation was meaningless. That they would never reach an agreement. This was a mystery because it seemed that the family of the client was getting what they wanted. But I guess the conflict between the family and the father in law ran deeper than that. First of all, the main superstition and fear of witchcraft probably lied with the client and her family. They seemed to be the ones who were really afraid. For example, when we arrived on the day of the discussion and the client met her two children after being away from them for two months she didn’t touch them. Neither did they touch her. Both parties kept their distance. Probably because of fear that she was in some way affected by witchcraft and that it might transfer to the children. And this was a fear that both the children and the client seemed to support. There was also a problem with communication between the father in law and the family of the client. While the father in law was talkative and good at making himself heard, the family of the client was the opposite. The father in law was making fun of them many times and they didn’t seem to be verbal enough to defend themselves (probably because of differences in the level of education). At one point the client apologized on behalf of her family. The father in law then agreed to take her in and a contract, or a memorandum of understanding, was drawn up and signed. This was done in the light of our mobile phones because at this point it was pitch dark. However, fifteen minutes later, when we had packed the car and were leaving, the client came up to us and asked if she could move back to the shelter. Apparently she had changed her mind and didn’t want to move back with her father in law. Grace made an effort to sort out the situation and we left. But afterwards we learned that the client moved in with her father instead.

Now, this might seem like a long and confused story. But it illustrates that the cases here often don’t fit into a standard template. In this case it was hard to understand the actual intentions of the client and her family and when we left my sympathy for her was wavering. But still, there are these cultural structures and beliefs that always seem to hit the woman. There is the belief in witchcraft, which makes women targets of accusations. There is, like in this case, the problem of women’s right to property. The father in law had the power to send the client away from her home. He was the one who got to decide if she could come back or not. And this is a home which she, since her husband died, is the lawful owner of. Moreover, when discussing with Matilda and Grace afterwards I have learned of a number of possible reasons why the client, or her family, didn’t want her to move back in with the father in law. They are not all of the kind that makes you sympathize with the client, but they all seem to, one way or the other, trace back to women’s cultural status, the difficulty of women to support themselves, the perception of women as property, etc. And I think that if you want to change these things then you need to get into stories like this. You need to get your hands dirty, do mediations and deal with things in a case by case manner. 

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.