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Whips and Women: Forcing Change in Eastern Uganda during the 1920s¹

Carol Summers
lsummers@richmond.edu
Department of History
University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia

In 1925, the Chief Justice of Uganda, Sir Charles Griffin, realized that women were being whipped in the Native Courts of Eastern Uganda. But "the beating of women is prohibited because they are women and for no other reason", he asserted, arguing that "A civilized Government will not tolerate the beating of women..."² Neither Griffin nor the Colonial Office, which shared his concern, bothered to explain why civilized governments should not whip women, or even why civilization was good. Instead, they asserted a general concept that civilization was the purpose of colonialism, and that its ideals should trump the complexities of local circumstance that led Protectorate administrators, some missionaries, and many African men to insist that the government and missions whip dissident women.

This article examines the textual evidence produced by those who rejected the Colonial Office's assumption and, instead, argued that the government and missions needed to beat women. In these controversies, local administration and mission defenses of the whippings and corporal punishment of women illuminate what government officials and missionary priests saw as progress, and the sorts of coalitions and practices they considered necessary as they pursued the political changes of indirect rule and orderly administration, the economic revolution associated with cotton production, and the social changes brought by Christianity and its novel concepts of family. Despite an unthinking British rhetoric of civilization, local colonial realities in Eastern Uganda were governed by a need for the revenues cotton brought and the political support or acquiescence of local men. In Eastern Uganda until the mid 1920s, officials and missionaries bought men's support by taking on the disciplining of women. They did so openly and defended such practices logically. They abandoned such activities only reluctantly, under pressure, and went on to develop more covert ways to carry on with disciplinary practices they considered essential.

The Chief Justice's enquiry into Native Courts' whipping showed that beatings were routine and increasing in the 1920s as an important tool of Chiefs' administration of order and cotton cultivation. None of this was traditional. The chiefs, their courts, and the regional divisions they administered were all twentieth century innovations, based on Ganda models.³ Conservative estimates by officials in favor of whippings indicated that some of these new courts beat four or five women a day, passing sentences that often reached as high as 20 strokes of the kiboko, a rhinoceros-hide whip. Erratic statistics, covering a variety of time periods, made any analysis of the number of corporal sentences on women problematic, but the Governor indicated that while in Bugwere district 299 women were whipped over a period of about thirteen months, numbers were higher in other intensive cotton growing districts such as Busoga and Teso, with Teso reporting that at least 926 women had been whipped by courts over the previous two years. All of this was illegal as courts lacked statutory authority for corporal sentences on women.⁴ Nevertheless, like missionary-sponsored corporal punishments by priests desperate to enforce Christian marriages on women, Native Courts' use of corporal punishment was a part of an innovative strategic alliance between white authorities and elite local men. These allies worked together to produce--as inexpensively as possible--the economic and social changes they viewed as progress towards prosperity and civilization.

By the 1920s, the violence of conquest, which had included slave raiding and deliberate destruction of property and resources, was giving way even in "backward" Eastern Uganda to a new administrative and economic structure. The Protectorate government appointed a layer of white administrators and displaced rule by Semei Kakungulu, a Ganda warlord who had conquered under both Ganda and British sponsors at the turn of the century. These new white District Officers administered the region through appointed chiefs whose subdivisions had been established in Kakungulu's time (1896-1904), modeled on the divisions of the kingdom of Buganda.⁵ This new bureaucracy was supposed to handle the day to day business of administration in Eastern areas with no pre-conquest history of such central structures. Through these institutions of indirect rule, the Protectorate administration sought an inexpensive peace and a way of sponsoring economic transformation with a minimum of European staff. Economically, cotton cultivation provided new monetary wealth and underwrote both economic and political transformation. New chiefs and other ambitious men increased acreage of the new cash crop, cotton, with labor by their wives and children supplemented by men's labor coerced through taxes.⁶ Missions received land holdings and accepted tax labor to construct buildings, farms and enterprises, and took responsibility for what they saw as the civilizing social change connected to these political and economic developments, such as new forms of family life.⁷ Local British officials and key missionaries, the sponsors of these political, economic and social changes, understood the continued and formal use of violence against women as an essential tool in their efforts to shape the new economy and society.

This complex alliance of British officials, African chiefs, and mission teachers should, according to the local model of colonialism, have allowed development of 'civilized' institutions in an area that African elites and British observers had in pre-colonial times regarded as uncivilized and chaotic. Prior to cotton, Eastern Uganda's principal export crops had been such dangerous and socially dubious commodities as ivory and slaves. Its agriculture had been principally oriented toward subsistence rather than export, with surplusses sold occasionally as part of the provisioning trade for those lucky or unlucky enough to live near a caravan route. The introduction of widespread smallholder cultivation of cotton, therefore, represented something of an agricultural revolution, providing cash and wealth to both those men who could induce their wives to cultivate cotton , and the state that collected taxes and fees from cotton marketing. Reviewing these changes in Teso, one later administrator observed that

... these people were in a state of naked barbarism, existing by a precarious and primitive system of shifting cultivation, ravaged by famine, disease and inter-tribal warfare. [But] Since the beginning of this century, Kakunguru's Sniders have established peace and ordered government; the missionaries have brought the benefits of Christian teaching and education; and the introduction of cotton and the plough and the improvement of farming methods... have raised standards of living and resulted in rapid development of communications and trade, bringing wealth to the district... The Iteso themselves readily and quickly accepted and assimilated these new ideas and techniques... The resultant wealth has been wisely invested in further improvements by Teso's progressive local government.⁸

Government and missions alike saw cotton, and the access to money, commodities, and new state-based order that it bought, as basic to this process of change.

In the 1920s, however, these early progressive developments were threatened by a new imperial caution about intervention and forced change as British human rights activists and Labour politicians began to pay attention to the methods of colonial governance. Under Colonial Office oversight, Governor Gowers' administration restricted chiefs' use of men's forced labor.⁹ In this labor-hungry economy, where chiefs and big men's economic successes in cotton rested on their political control over agricultural laborers, this threatened administrative power and prestige. Women, always a major source of agricultural labor, thus became even more essential to would-be cash crop farmers as other types of coerced labor became harder to conceal and use. In this context, women's non-compliance, both with state-sponsored cotton-growing initiatives and with missions' efforts to redefine marriage, was a serious problem, threatening the newly powerful chiefs and cotton farmers, Christian communities, and the colonial model of development. This article examines the colonial rhetoric offered by officials and missionaries as they worked to address this crisis. The new progressive, systematic colonialism, administered by white district officials who reviewed chiefs and big men as they peacefully developed a monetized cotton economy and paid taxes to the colonial state, was threatened by those who had been left out of the formal system of control and rewards, but were nevertheless essential to its success: women, especially women as wives and agricultural workers.

To date, little historical research has explored Ugandan women's experiences under colonialism. Elsewhere in British Africa, however, colonial attempts to control women through administrative alliances with senior African men have been well documented, pointing to likely issues in colonial gender politics.¹⁰ Women have been the major agricultural labor force throughout most of Uganda, from the precolonial period to the present, maintaining families' subsistence while men concentrated on politics, warfare, hunting and, in pastoral areas, cattle. Even in Eastern areas which grew annual crops such as millet, rather than the perennial women's crop of plantains and bananas, women have been critically important agricultural workers. Colonial manuals stated this bluntly, with notes such as "Weeding is the task of women.... Harvesting is the duty of women."¹¹ And stable marriages, giving women access to the land men controlled and men access to women's labor, were key to not merely production, but also peaceful reproduction and alliances between men.¹² Cotton added tensions to earlier divisions of labor as it was grown to be sold, rather than stored away in women's granaries under women's authority for family consumption. Men ordered cotton grown, and profited from its sale, but did not provide women with cotton revenue.¹³ Women who neglected cultivation or attempted to claim profits from the cotton they cultivated could thus undermine the region's food security, its sole cash crop, and the source of men's status and tax money. Women who chose their own marriages, or changed their minds, destabilized economic relationships between men who paid and received bridewealth and relied on wives' labor to pay for children's school fees and adults' tax money. Dissident women thus threatened the region's productive and reproductive orders. As women lacked land and money of their own and had little to lose to fines or taxes, however, it was difficult for men to coerce them except through violence. The fact that men beat women therefore is not particularly surprising.

The governor and administrative officials' intense and sustained defense of Native Courts' power to whip women judicially, as a part of a formal court process, however, is unusual. And it pitted administrative officials against both Protectorate legal authorities and the Colonial Office in Britain. Within Uganda, the Administration rejected Griffin's argument, and that of the Colonial Office, that women should never be beaten. Nor was the administration alone in its acceptance of African chiefs' power to impose corporal punishments which went far beyond the law: Eastern Uganda's missionaries, frustrated by dissident women, also aligned themselves with the police and specific chiefs and imposed public, potentially life-threatening corporal penalties on women who challenged their understandings of propriety.

A close examination of the controversies over Native Court whippings and the Mill Hill Mission's whippings, kidnappings, and forced labor strategies seems to indicate that the forces of change in the region ended up identified not with abstract principles of civilization, but with the local needs of men seeking prosperity and order within the new economy. This was no accident. One official who advocated whippings argued that since neither the women nor the missions protested, illegality was irrelevant and the local ideal of indirect rule should prevail, allowing chiefs to whip as necessary.¹⁴ And a priest appointed to Teso to clean up the mission's practices in the wake of the scandal over its abuses described his new flock as the "rawest and worst" people before descending into Latin to detail their offences, noting "I can quite imagine that Father Kiggen had recourse to the stick occasionally and I have been sorely tempted to do the same..."¹⁵

Ironically, administrative reforms and mission policies, those that encouraged progressive chiefs of disciplined Christian communities and discouraged tribute labor and polygyny, increased the importance of women's cultivation and obedience. Reforms thus made official beatings and corporal punishment of women more essential to the progressive adminstrations of government and mission even as men's forced labor was replaced by less coercive recruitment.

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Footnotes p. 1

1. I am grateful for a Faculty Research Grant from the University of Richmond and a Fellowship from the Shelby Cullom Davis Center, Princeton University, for supporting the research and revision of this article. Back

2. Chief Justice, response to Eden memo, 15-2-26, Public Records Office [PRO], Kew Gardens, UK, Colonial Office Documents [CO] CO536/139.Back

3. Native Courts consisted of an appointed Chief and two local male assessors. See, for example, Suzette Heald, Controlling Anger: The Sociology of Gisu Violence (London: Manchester University Press, 1989) 25-29, 246.Back

4. The correspondence is in PRO CO536/139. The summaries in these files delete names, but the Attorney General noted that the numbers were almost certainly underestimates since only names which were unequivocally female (such as Christian baptismal names) were counted, and many local names were gender ambiguous.Back

5. For example, J.C.D. Lawrance, The Iteso (London: Oxford University Press, 1957)3, 17-21. Back

6. C.C. Wrigley, "The Economic Structure of Buganda" in L Fallers, ed., The King's Men (London: Oxford UP. 1964) 35-6. Wrigley notes the use of tribute labor in Busoga, Bukedi, Teso and Lango and quotes the governor as labeling the Eastern Province as "altogether more virile and industrious and alive" than Buganda.Back

7. For a discussion of mission privileges see Ormsby-Gore to Bishop of Uganda, 18-2-27 and CJ Jeffries note, 10-1-27, PRO CO536/145. Details of mission privileges emerged from mission protests when these privileges were withdrawn. Jeffries noted that the privileges the missions were claiming were "entirely illegal."Back

8. Lawrance, The Iteso, 3. Similar verdicts have been offered on other Eastern regions by professional anthropologists. See, for example, Lloyd A Fallers, Bantu Bureaucracy: A Century of Political Evolution among the Basoga of Uganda (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956, 1965) 50-9.Back

9. Wrigley, in Fallers, ed. The King's Men, 41-2.Back

10. Southern Rhodesia classics include E. Schmidt, Peasants, Traders and Wives (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1992) and D. Jeater, Marriage, Perversion and Power (Oxford: Oxford UP 1993). Historians of Uganda who do work on gender include Holly Hanson, "When the Miles Came" (Ph.D thesis, University of Florida, 1997) and works by Ganda historians and amateurs in which women's role in court politics, and thus in the political struggles of precolonial and colonial contexts, has been prominent. See for example Nakanyike Musisi, "Women, 'Elite Polygyny' and Buganda State Formation" Signs 16:4 (Summer 1991) 757-86.Back

11 Lawrance, The Iteso, 140-1. Or, in Bugisu, a classic early study described each wife as having her own plot of land and granary, an economic tie between women and fields that was reinforced in the ritual of marriage when the bride was accompanied to her new husband's home by girlfriends who brought their hoes with them, and stayed three days, digging fields for the new wife. J. Roscoe, The Bagesu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924) 49, 34.Back

12. In a later discussion of what allowed some farmers to emerge as successful cash crop cultivators, A. Mafeje and AI Richards noted that wives did more than just traditional food cultivation; on the bigger farms, wives worked as supervisors and managers of labour, and that wives' labor may have been even more central to the success of the more ambitious farmers than it was to the ordinary peasant cultivator. Senior male relatives, or even older siblings and kin, could not be asked to work. And youth were often at school and unavailable. Mafeje and Richards, "The Commercial Farmer and His Labour Supply" in Richards, et al. Subsistence to Commercial Farming in Present-Day Buganda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973) 184. For a discussion of the destabilizing effects marriage could have on men's social relations, see Heald, Controlling Anger, 100-1.Back

13. Roscoe observed that when women tried to sell without her husband's permission, she broke a traditional rule and "Neglect of this rule often led husbands to beat their wives but wives would stand up for themselves and fight their husbands to get their own way." The Bagesu , 49. Cotton, according to a later anthropologist, caused even more difficulties in marketing as it was sold not by women, but by men who put all their wives' cotton together and failed to provide wives with payments for what they grew. Richard T. Curley, Elders, Shades and Women: Ceremonial Change in Lango, Uganda (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973) 31-2, 49-50.Back

14. Perryman, 5-3-26, PRO CO536/139.Back

15. D. Schut to Biermans, undated [1929], Mill Hill Archives, St Joseph's College, Mill Hill, London, UK (MHA) box UGA 30 (Campling Correspondence).Back

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