Charles Onyango-Obbo
20 November 2007
column
Nairobi — Last week, the Uganda Parliament experienced a Great Awkward Moment during a parliamentary committee hearing.
The chairman of Umubano, an association of Ugandan Banyarwanda, told the MPs that Ugandans of Rwandan origin are subjected to special body checks to establish their citizenship when they apply for passports.
An Immigration officer who was also appearing before the committee denied what one newspaper called the "bizarre allegations."
The Umubano chairman had alleged that, "It's now a requirement for Ugandan-Banyarwanda girls and women to be subjected to physical checks of? their buttocks and legs".
If this were another country, one would be forgiven for agreeing with the Immigration officer that no such thing could possibly be happening. But Uganda is a society that's besotted with women's buttocks like few other places are - except perhaps Kenya's Nyanza province.
THIS RANGES FROM THE MORE prurient interest on the streets, to several aspects of high culture. Women's buttocks are easily the subject about which there are the most flowery and extravagant traditional songs. Some of the choicest insults are preserved for those considered to be inadequately endowed.
In the villages, female dancers with large backsides flourish, while the "flat" ones struggle on the margins.
Privately, Ugandan communities do have quite strong stereotypes of each other. When a group from one ethnic community is sure that no one among them is an "outsider," their conversation can be shocking.
Despite all this, it is still not kosher to speak of tribalism or call someone a tribalist. The acceptable word is "sectarianism," and Uganda is one of the few countries I know of that some years ago passed a law banning tribalism.
And if you want a Ugandan to become truly defensive, call him or her a tribalist.
It is interesting that these allegations were made on the day the pay-TV station MultiChoice showed Sometimes in April, a film about the Rwanda genocide by the Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck.
The film has a short historical clip of Belgian colonialists trying to create criteria to divide Rwandans into "Hutu" and "Tutsi" by measuring the size of their noses, lips and so on.
The colonialists' success in turning this myth into a reality was the foundation on which the Rwanda genocide was built.
THE RWANDA GENOCIDE HAD A GREAT impact on "tribal" politics in Uganda. While it didn't much change ancient prejudices, it heightened sensitivity about playing the ethnic card in Uganda. However, instead of social and economic programmes that would help actually put the demons of prejudice to rest, the political elite responded by erecting one of the strongest cultures of public denial of tribalism in Africa.
But there are many who know that that is not enough. In 1971, after the Idi Amin coup; in 1979, when Amin was overthrown; in July 1985, when the Milton Obote government was deposed; and in January 1986, when the military junta that had taken over was defeated by President Yoweri Museveni's rebels, there were bouts of ethnic slaughter. Nothing like Rwanda, but no less troubling.
The surprise therefore isn't that Ugandans are having their buttocks and thighs measured to determine their citizenship.
Rather, it's that in all the troubled history of the country, that has never before been official policy.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group's managing editor for convergence and new products.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2007 The East African. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
