Parliament’s knickers in a twist over miniskirt ban

What will happen when a foreign dignitary, a fashionista like Yvonne Chaka Chaka or Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, comes to Uganda? Will they be waiting for her in the airport arrivals lounge with a ‘busuuti’ or a ‘mushanana’ or a ‘ekyishaato/eshuuka’? Get her to take her pick of decent Ugandan women’s dress?

My favourite aunt, had she been alive, would probably have laughed the entire sorry episode of a possible miniskirt ban into a safe busuuti-clad retirement.
A teenager in the ‘Swingin’ Sixties’, we have pictures of her, with her sisters, wearing the kind of mini dress that has our fuddy-duddy old men today cringing in self-appointed moral outrage of what our womenfolk can or cannot wear.

By the time the ‘Swingin’ Sixties’ ended in Uganda, Idi Amin was in power and subsequently banned mini dresses. Poor old Idi: he did not have to, as fashion, in any case, had taken care of it with the coming in the early 1970s of the ‘maxi’ (maximum) dress on the Ugandan fashion scene. Young and old looked regal in flawless ankle-length maxis, frequently supplemented with colourful headgear.

That really is fashion: it takes care of itself, unless you are the Taliban, and I do smell some Talibanesque behaviour in the tabled Bill that proposes heavy fines or jail for minis, among other perceived misdeeds. But Uganda is more enlightened than the Taliban.

The other influence that takes care of fashion is age. My aunt, by the time she passed away, had had a total makeover, wearing matronly skirts and the national dress, the busuuti. She never went into her twilight years, let alone middle age, as a mini-clad woman. Hardly any woman does. Fashion shifts with time and age. Period!

This is what our Parliamentarians should understand. You cannot take a one-eyed view of social life and think that you are a true people’s representative. You cannot enact outrageous laws and expect them to be respected.

Who, in any case, is going to enforce this? Shall we, like Saudi Arabia, have a Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice? These, then, would be the people engaged to ensure that women’s clothes fitted the lawful dimensions? Would they be equipped with rulers and tape measures to evaluate the woman disembarking from the bus, the teenager at the beach, the worshiper at church, the professional in the bank, the waitress at the restaurant? Actually, would the morality police be men or women?

Will the vigilantes go into boutiques and shops and take down fashions deemed by the old fogeys to be offending? Will cat-walks and fashion weeks be proscribed? What will happen when a foreign dignitary, a fashionista like Yvonne Chaka Chaka or Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, comes to Uganda? Will they be waiting for her in the airport arrivals lounge with a ‘busuuti’ or a ‘mushanana’ or a ‘ekyishaato/eshuuka’? Get her to take her pick of decent Ugandan women’s dress?

Come to think of it, will the morality police be sent helter-skelter to Karamoja, where our women famously wear beads over some strips of cloth? Or will those vigilantes be manning roadblocks to prevent Karimojong women getting to Kampala, where they might offend parliamentarians?

What Parliament should worry about is if women strip naked (a few have threatened to parade in the nude if unfair laws are passed on the Marriage Bill, and if land in Northern Uganda were ‘stolen’, as some communities there are fearing). Now that would alarm all of us, even the most liberal-minded. The fuddy-duddies would probably faint. There is a precedent in Ugandan folklore, when a woman named Nambwere, in the 1950s or 1960s, was dared to strip naked by men in downtown Kampala’s taxi park. She promptly did and walked around, eventually having a song composed out of her feat: “Nambwere yakola ekyafaayo/n’ajjamu engoye nassa wali/ n’atambula nga bweyazaalibwa” (“Nambwere did the unthinkable/stripped naked, clothes aside/and walked in her birthday suit”).

Nambwere has an ideological forebear in English lore. Lady Godiva’s story is told, the way Nambwere’s used to be in Uganda, to British kids in many homes.

Lady Godiva was a noblewoman who lived in the city of Coventry about 900 years ago. She is said to have been alarmed by the terribly high taxes her rich husband imposed on their squatters. She continuously appealed to reduce them, but the man (men!) refused. Fed up with her pleas he pledged that he would cut the taxes if she rode naked in public. She stripped, climbed on a horse, and rode the city streets after all men were ordered to stay at home and shut their windows (the legend of ‘Peeping Tom’ comes from a naughty man – wasn’t an MP - who decided to look).

We are fed up of laws which do not make sense being enacted by our Parliament, and the critical ones that should propel this nation forward in stability and development being left out. Shall we protest like Madam Nambwere or Lady Godiva? Probably not, but for now I fear that if they go ahead with this ridiculous miniskirt ban, Parliament would have gotten their proverbial knickers in a twist.

dsseppuuya@yahoo.com