Seminar 2000
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The new problems: Administrative perspectives on marriage and cotton
Chief Justice Griffin's investigation showed that women were being whipped for "matrimonial offences" and that one of their principal "matrimonial offences" was refusal to cultivate cotton for their husbands. Cotton was a new crop in Uganda, becoming prominent only in the early 20th century. But both European and African men insisted that a wife's duty to cultivate, historically part of a set of marital responsibilities, was not limited to providing her children with food; it included growing the cotton that her husband and the new administration demanded. Women caused problems in a variety of ways as, in a sample of 50 cases, one woman refused to live with her husband, another killed her husband's chicken, and one husband's two wives both left him, together, to "go a-whoring". But in 37 of 50 sample cases, women were whipped for refusing to cultivate or pick cotton, and in 40 of those 50 cases, sentences were 10 or more strokes of the kiboko.16
Circulars from the Colonial office and governor had explicitly declared that no one was to be forced to grow cotton and that corporal punishment for failure to cultivate cotton was illegal. Not all administrative officers and chiefs took this prohibition seriously, however. An early acting governor had declared that forced cultivation was justifiable because "the Government stands very largely in loco parentis, and just as primary education is obligatory in England, so I consider it is also our duty to educate the native in such agricultural pursuits... it is still necessary... for the chiefs to exercise their influence over their people in the way of getting them to cultivate cotton."17 And Sir Philip Mitchell, one of Uganda's most liberal governors, explained that the circulars which ordered District officers not to use compulsion against Africans but mandated that the Africans "must yield to persuasion" effectively told officers to use whatever means necessary, but not get caught.18 Furthermore, historians have observed that the administration of the Eastern Province created a substantive pool of laborers through new taxation modeled on both British ideas of poll tax and Ganda labor taxes of kasanvu and luwalo.19 The Native Courts, in which chiefs appointed by the Protectorate government drafted and fined individuals into work which could be unpleasant, dangerous or difficult, provided the Governor a degree of deniability when forced to answer questions in parliament about forced labor. But the needs these courts served, whether cotton, railway construction, or portering, were established by the Protectorate government.20
Cotton, and the economic demands and opportunities it brought, was a key backdrop to the controversy, but women's punishments were not just governmental attempts to exact a taxable income. Instead, these court-ordered whippings arose from African men's attempts to expand a wife's duties and accountability in a context where a man's ability to acquire and hold status depended on his success with cotton. As J.M. Gray noted, "a husband who receives an official intimation that greater energy is required from him in the matter of cotton cultivation and who finds his wife insubordinate in this matter, finds that the best means of safeguarding himself is to bring the woman before Lukiko [Native Court] for punishment."21 Men's need and desire for money and status propelled them into cotton growing. But women, receiving neither money or status from their increased work load, resisted husbands' demands. The colonial officials and native courts' willingness to enforce women's labor through corporal punishment allowed men, by having their wives whipped, to reinforce their own reputation as progressive cotton farmers. Furthermore, since the court took responsibility for the whippings, husbands did not have to defend their actions to angry fathers- and brothers-in-law whose willingness to defend their daughters and sisters might once have restrained husbands' ability to enforce labor through casual wife-beating.
No one in this controversy argued that court-ordered whippings were traditional. Instead, whippings were part of colonial reforms. During the 1920s and 1930s in Eastern Uganda, cotton was at the center of nearly all government and private initiatives.22 By the 1940s, the politics of cotton was equally closely tied to that of African political and economic activism and early nationalism. Many recent studies of cotton growing in Africa have emphasized its costs in the form of famine, shift to monocrop economies, ecological damage, and social changes which restricted individuals' freedom. Cotton "has long been one of the least rewarding cash crops for the peasant cultivator," Vincent argued in her study of Teso. Other historians, working on Uganda and elsewhere in the continent, have tended to agree.23
Yet cotton did have its positive side, at least for some. Indeed, the protectorate's remarkable financial health during the late 1920s and throughout the Depression, was principally due to an expansion of cotton growing which allowed individuals to pay their poll tax, pay labourers to take their place at tribute labor, and fund an expanding system of education. By the mid 1930s, the Protectorate's cotton levy, and Ugandans' use of cotton to pay personal taxes, had produced such a large surplus in the Protectorate's reserve fund that the Governor was somewhat embarassed and in search of ways to usefully spend the money.24 Uganda lent money to the British Government during World War II, and in the aftermath of that war, its accumulated cotton reserve fund paid for a startling degree of social investment and justified a level of development loans that the Colonial Development Board considered unparalleled anywhere else in the empire.25 Cotton also provided both the economic base and the justification for the extension of the railway through the principal cotton-growing regions and the investment in transport, whether by lorry, omnibus, or motor car, which revolutionized not only Ugandans' access to urban and international markets for cotton, but the economic integration of the country as a whole. Many Ugandans, both in the early years of cotton and as its cultivation expanded, complained about the marketing arrangements associated with it, which were dominated by Indian traders and characterized by unjustifiably low producer prices. But even for those who were less than enthusiastic, cotton was the only way for the ambitious to pay for the education critical to their sons' success, and to provide consumer goods essential to prominent families.26
Grown by government appointed chiefs, big men, and peasant farmers, with labor from migrant workers and women, cotton was the crop of development and profits in the new Uganda of the late 1920s through the 1940s.27 Europeans' efforts to establish plantations, sometimes in alliance with elite Africans, failed by the late 1920s as prices fell.28 Peasant production, extending throughout Buganda and the ecologically suitable regions of the Eastern Province, therefore provided the economic backbone of the entire administrative structure of the country, as well as funding individuals' livelihoods and wealth. Family heads minded small plots for tax money. Local chiefs grew cotton with tax labor. Teachers grew and sold cotton from school plots using student and parent labor. The money thus earned bought the necessities of the new, Europeanized way of life for the men with notable positions to maintain within the local community.
The cotton crop behind women's whippings was new, and so were the courts that ordered these punishments. This was not simply a case of irate husbands beating their wives in a context of ongoing domestic abuse. The Native Courts, or lukiko, which ordered the punishments had been established by British officials and their Baganda agents and gradually taken over by a group of appointed chiefs, many trained in mission schools.29 Despite a continuing non-Christian majority in the general population, the elite of Buganda, and the would-be elite of areas such as Eastern Province, were not only heavily Christian, but mostly Protestant. At the very least, a Native Court would have its proceedings recorded by a literate clerk, probably trained in a Protestant mission school. Though Administrative officers might emphasize traditional practice as a guide for Native Courts' judgements, the Native Courts were built on Ganda and British norms, not local ideas of lineage, and were part of a new type of administration.
Courts' intervention in domestic relations was also new. Whatever the reality of women's status in pre-colonial Uganda, British officials were emphatic that in the past, elite women had wielded substantial power throughout Buganda and the areas it influenced. According to them, the need for women to be whipped in Eastern Province arose in the early 20th century not because of a traditionally low status for women, but because Eastern Province, particularly Teso, women had a dangerously high social status as members of their natal lineages, and could mobilize their own families against the their husbands' lineages in a case of dispute.30 Early anthropological observers were startled by Eastern Ugandan women's willingness to fight back, even physically, against unsatisfactory husbands.31 Native Court-sponsored judicial whippings, officials argued, were a new reform measure, ameliorating conditions for women and their families by offering official beatings rather than private violence or inter-lineage warfare. This, they insisted, was a "progressive measure in the best interests of the people concerned".32
Furthermore, in a context where British and Ganda power had overwhelmed local ways of doing things, the ideology of indirect rule demanded, according to officials, that they allow local authorities to exercise power. Custom could not hold anyone to wifely deference or familial cooperation. Christian women sought votes at mission synod meetings, female teachers pursued equal pay for equal work, and husbands pushed for a pass system for women to keep wives and daughters from leaving home.33 New institutions were necessary to shape these changes, officials argued, or families would have to resort to a bloody rule by force.34 Explicitly juxtaposing how Britons maintained family power with the changing practices of Uganda, Uganda's Attorney General argued "that in England many cases came before the Police Magistrate where a wife complains of having been beaten by her husband, and whenever the Magistrate is satisfied that the woman had been behaving badly and that the chastisement was not severe, he frequently refuses to entertain the complaint."35 Without such norms, though, the Governor worried that husbands would angrily beat their wives more severely than the court would, and then be unjustly prosecuted for their attempts to do a husband's duty.36
Without whipping or customary sanctions, the Governor insisted to a sceptical Colonial Office, there was simply no way to control Eastern Province women. The Provincial Commissioner, though unable to provide much evidence, complained of "the growing license" which he observed in the women of Bugwere and Budama after the Chief Justice's demand that courts stop whippings. Worse yet, the loss of the power to whip pitted the leading chiefs of each district, who wanted to control women through "a term of imprisonment of two weeks on wives who disobey the reasonable orders of their husbands" against local officials who objected that "this form of punishment would react on the husband, who would be deprived of his wife's services, and her absence would interfere adversely with the home life".37 Unable to control wives, local men tried to salvage their situation in other ways. In Bugisu, as the Governor had predicted, reported beatings by husbands increased. In Lango, conversely, men responded economically, working to reduce bridewealth on the grounds that women who were not reliable in carrying out marital duties of cultivation could no longer be worth as much as they had once been.38Reduced bridewealth, in turn, further destabilized marriage and undermined the position of the fathers who could have expected to benefit from their daughters' marriages.
Notably, these adaptations to female insubordination threatened men's alliances and made new tensions between Europeans and Africans, high and low level chiefs, and older and younger men. In a context where the success of his administration rested on men's cooperation, the Governor and his officials, sympathised entirely with the men, explaining with amazement that under the new rules a woman took her husband to court for "simple hurt to his wife by beating her with a stick". Monetary fines, stocks, and ostracism, alternative punishments for women suggested by critics of whippings, did not work, the Governor argued. Fines were paid by husbands eager to get their wives back. Stocks were too brutal. And ostracism "is a dangerous remedy in communities in which women are prone to suicide on slight provocation".39 Faced with the prospect of paying bridewealth, then having a wife who was uncontrollable or prone to suicide, the governor complained that men opted out of marriage and settled for irregular arrangements. Home life, he feared, would be altogether lost.40 The governor's fear for home life was not a worry about wives' or even children's quality of life. It was a concern about young men, their fathers, and the masculine connections secured through lineage and marriage contracts that wove society together into an orderly and economically functional unit.
Footnotes p. 2
16. JM Gray, 30-7-25, PRO CO536/139.Back
17. Acting Governor Boyle to Bishop Tucker, no date, CMS Archives G3 A7/O 1907-1915. Quoted in Joan Vincent, Teso in Transformation (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1982), p. 214.Back
18. Sir Philip Mitchell, quoted in Vincent, Teso in Transformation p. 214.Back
19. Vincent's discussion, Teso in Transformation, pp. 215--222.Back
20. PRO CO536/159 includes files on Governor Sir William Gowers' testimony on whippings, forced labor, and other abuses. Gowers' standard response to questions was that he did not know because it would take too much effort to keep track of what the Native Courts were doing.Back
21. "Lukiko" in Luganda can refer to a judicial or legislative body at any level. JM Gray's usage is non-standard. JM Gray to Chief Justice, 31-10-25, PRO CO 536/139.Back
22. See Vincent, Teso in Transformation, eg. 211.Back
23. Vincent, Teso in Transformation 210, and for comparative material see, for example, Isaacman and Roberts, ed.s Cotton, Colonialism and Social History in Sub-Saharan Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995); or Allen Isaacman, Cotton is the Mother of Poverty (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996).Back
24. See, for example, the Annual Report on Uganda for the Year 1946 (London: HMSO 1948)14-25. This report summarizes the economic concerns during the war and explains that during the war, cotton revenue was "extremely buoyant" and money came into the exchequer faster than it could be spent.Back
25. This can be traced through the discussion of the estimates in various CO536 files.Back
26. Note: those who controlled land were generally the ones who profited from cotton. Day and term labor, supplied by Banyarwanda and other immigrant groups underwrote these families' success. That cotton was the only game available is demonstrated by producers' response to falling cotton prices: when prices fell, they expanded production rather than shifting to other crops or developing alternative sources of income. Unlike mailo holders in Buganda, however, Eastern Province officials and chiefs lacked freehold land. Unable to sell land, they were forced to rely on cotton to get cash. For the increasing importance of education, see Vincent, Teso in Transformation pp. 242-3; and Vincent M. Battle, "Education in Eastern Uganda, 1900-1939: A Study of initiative and Response during the early colonial period" (Ph.D thesis, Columbia University, 1974).Back
27. Stephen Bunker, Peasants against the State (Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 1987) writes about the essential role of coffee, but coffee was a relative latecomer, taking over the role of centering the Ugandan economy only in the 1950s. By the mid 1980s, Bunker notes, 95% of Uganda's foreign exchange came from coffee.Back
28. See, for example, the attempt of the heir of Apolo Kagwa, Sepiria Kadumukasa, to work with a British firm to grow cotton on a large scale on his inherited lands (PRO, CO536/192), or the failure of large scale cotton marketeering which led to a massive debt judgement against I Musazi.Back
29 In Teso, for example, the new elite men reportedly received "patient teaching" from the CMS mission at Ngora, and the Mill Hill mission. Lawrance, The Iteso 32-3.Back
30. Governor to S of S for Colonies 8-3-26; Notes of a meeting at Government House 22-9-25 on flogging of women, EB Jarvis (Chief Secretary) to PCs 26-9-25, PRO CO536/138. Note: Jarvis insisted that Mr S Ormsby, collector of Bukedi, had instituted the practice of woman beatings by Native Councils in 1907 to prevent maltreatment of women by their husbands and husband's kin, and retaliation by women's families against an abusive lineage. Some support is found for this argument in Vincent's work, where she cites missionaries' observation that where they could convert some areas by simply first converting the King, in Eastern Uganda, they had to first convert the headwoman, she would take care of her husband or son, and then the rest of the people would follow.Back
31 See, for examples, J. Roscoe, The Bagesu, 49; Heald, Controlling Anger, 95-101; Lawrance, too, describes a relationship more complex than obedient as a marriage ceremony involved a bridegroom trying to drag the bride away from her friends by force, and a bride's response of refusing to eat or sleep with the husband until she has been offered gifts. The Iteso, 94-5. In Busoga, Lloyd Fallers distinguished between men's ideal of wifely behavior, and a reality of ongoing negotiation. Bantu Bureaucracy, 76-9.Back
32. CA Jeffries, note of summary of governor's position, 14-4-26, PRO CO536/139.Back
33. For example, see "Uganda Native Women's Central Conference" (translation) 2-4-19, Church Missionary Society Archives, Birmingham, UK (CMS) G3 A7/O 1919.Back
34. Perryman 5-3-26; GW Guy Eden, PC Eastern Province to Chief Sec Entebbe, 22-8-25. PRO CO536/138.Back
35. Notes of a meeting at Government House 22-9-25 on flogging of women, PRO CO536/138.Back
36. Governor to S of S for Colonies 8-3-26; C.A. Jeffries, 14-4-26, PRO CO536/138.Back
37. Governor to S of S for Colonies 16-11-27, PRO CO536/147. Local men may also have been irritated that their wives would work for big chiefs during their two weeks imprisonment, giving big chiefs an economic incentive to maximize these sentences, but depriving husbands of wives' labor when the husbands needed it the most.Back
38. Governor to S of S for Colonies 16-11-27, PRO CO536/147. The governor made this danger clear by explaining what happened in Buganda Province, where courts did not whip women. In Buganda "discontent at the complete emancipation of women under our rule is most marked... in the present generation...an extreme reluctance to contract matrimony. the young Muganda feels that if he marries a woman over whom neither he, nor the chiefs, nor the British Goverment have any control, he is courting trouble..." Governor to S of S for Colonies, 8-3-26, PRO CO536/139.Back
39. ibid. Anthropologists have also noted women's resort to suicide. See, for example, Heald, Controlling Anger, 57, 98.Back
40. Governor to S of S for Colonies, 8-3-26, PRO CO536/139. In some areas of Uganda, bridewealth might not have been a significant factor. In Teso and Bugisu areas, however, bridewealth was hefty. Lawrance reported that despite colonial attempts to limit it to five head of cattle (or three in a woman's subsequent marriages) it actually averaged ten to fifteen head, rising to twenty-five head in exceptional cases. Lawrance, The Iteso 93.Back
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