How Babigumira overcame low self-esteem, loss of identity

Like every child, Hope Babigumira’s parents had hopes and dreams for her – but life took a different turn. Death, poverty, confusion, struggles and fear - all led to a loss of her identity. She eventually rebelled against the idea that she was not cut out for success, or that she was not good enough.
The experience of the loss of loved ones at an early age, being spanked for wetting her bed, sexual abuse, attempted rape, clubbing, alcohol abuse and an abortion all resulted into low self-esteem that nearly destroyed her childhood and early adult life.

She was born on February 10, 1982 to Dr John William Babigumira and his wife Judith in Kabale District in western Uganda.
Dr Babigumira died in October 1988, leaving behind two widows and 12 children. The functioning medical practices both in Kampala and Kabale that her father left behind soon collapsed, plunging her family into poverty and uncertainty.

Judith, the second wife, had six children, including Joseph, Jane, Janet, Denis, Hope and Peter. Jane died a few months after birth from a cancerous growth on her leg.

Growing up without a father
Judith, a trained nurse, worked at the Kabale Nurses’ Training School. A devout Christian, she moved heaven and earth to educate her children and made sure they finished school. She worked hard, took out loans, pleaded with relatives to help her and above all, prayed for her children. She raised her children on a strong Christian foundation.

“I lost my father when I was six years old and was raised by my mother, who did everything within her means to raise a decent human being. I hardly remember my father. It is hard to make out his face in live picture but at least, I can remember his shape. I don’t remember what he smelled like. I don’t even remember hugging him or any affectionate gesture from him. I think I remember the way he talked and walked. When he entered the room, he instantly became the centre of attention,” Babigumira writes in her autobiography, No Makeup On.
Judith and her children were so poor that they could not afford food for a while. “…There are days we had no food, but beans and sorghum posho, which was got on debt (credit) from my uncle’s milling plant near our home. We had hit rock bottom,” she writes.

“Aside from work, mother opened a drug shop to make some extra money to sustain us. We were continually living in uncertainty and she needed to think of ways to make more money. Her tenacity and strength made it impossible for her to fail. I remember a couple of times when she had to borrow from a microfinance to pay fees for my brother and to invest some of it in the business,” Babigumira recalls.

Besides the competition from Indian drug shops, Babigumira says her mother’s drug business could not survive because she employed some unscrupulous workers, who kept stealing from her because her full-time job prevented her from giving the business enough attention.

“When the business finally collapsed, it left her with a loan to pay, which had to go off her small salary. She struggled through and tried other things like keeping a cow on zero grazing. That was a failure too and she lost the cow,” Babigumira adds.

Babigumira’s little brother, Peter, age six at the time, was crushed to death right in front of her by an old wall at their home in November 1990.
“He had found me sitting beside the wall and he fought for my place. I let him be since he was the younger one and a few minutes later, there was a loud bang and there he was – lifeless, lying under the debris. I could have been the one dead and buried today.”

Unscrupulous relatives and house helps abused the young Babigumira mentally, physically and sexually, contributing to her low self-esteem.
Babigumira and her siblings were beaten for wetting their beddings by their housemaid. “Growing up, I didn’t stop wetting the bed until I was about seven or eight. We had this housemaid at home who was crazy. She would wake us up early, force us to take out our urine-soaked beddings and mattresses and line us up outside with a stick ready to spank us. She chased us all over the compound with her stick, catching up with us, hitting anywhere she could, shouting in her language, calling us pigs.”

“Mother and the older people at home found this amusing and would stand by laughing, which would only encourage her more. All this because of wetting the bed. I don’t believe in this kind of parenting. It only made us fearful and taught us that it was okay to spank children and hurl insults for every crime committed. That wasn’t okay,” she adds.

“…After having my daughter in 2009, something changed in me and I desired to be a better person; a responsible mother and model for her. This search found me going back to the way I was raised. Looking for things to change and things to keep. Church was on top of the list of things to keep,” Babigumira says.

“Did I want to write this story as I write it now? No! Do I take pleasure in what I’m writing? Hell no! I would much rather have had a great story, where I had more self-control; where I said no to sex and waited for marriage, waiting for the man who would treat me as God does. As a precious person and not a sex object…,” she says.

She reveals that she only noticed that she suffered from low self-esteem when she was 30.
“When I turned 30, it downed on me that I wasn’t confident. I was the textbook case of low self-esteem. Suspicious of people, fidgety and never trusting anyone. I was sensitive to insults, afraid of confrontation, afraid of failure. I thought success wasn’t meant for people of my kind.”

“A low self-esteem will ruin your life,” she writes, adding: “You will always live in a lower version of yourself until you learn how to overcome and trust that you are good enough. You will settle for less than ideal and live a miserable life feeling sorry for yourself and for all the things you could have achieved but never tried. I don’t think I have met a perfectly confident person in my lifetime. All of us have our days. But I have met some people who are trying to overcome a low self-esteem and defy the odds.”

Babigumira says the experience of the death of her father and brother has had a lasting effect on her. “I experienced loss early in life and it left me very panicky and jumpy, always expecting the worst. I have prayed for the day when I would feel secure. Now that I have children, it is even worse. But one thing God does is give you the confidence to face uncertainty. He has not given us a spirit of fear but of power, love and a sound mind. I wake up every day assured that my saviour lives and that is enough to give me strength to be brave and go on living.”

“My identity crisis started long before my dad’s death. It started from mother’s harsh tone telling me to sit like a girl, unaware of what the house help was doing when she was away. From the impossible expectations of Christianity and the guilt that came with every failure. I was expected to be perfect, walk and talk appropriately, pray, read the Bible and be obedient always, and every failure drove me further away from a happy life. Even with these painful realities, the one thing that was constant in my life was mother’s undeniable love…,” she writes.

Babigumira says her husband, children, brothers, sister and mother are an incredible support system that make her realise there is more to be thankful for than to grumble.

Surviving sex abuse

One evening, when Babigumira was about 12, she almost got raped by a pastor in Kabale. She had just joined the choir and they had overnight rehearsals and prayers. They were four in the church that evening. When power went off, two of the choir members went out to buy fuel for the generator. She stayed behind with the pastor, who attempted to rape her. Scared to death, she wrestled him until he let go. She then ran out of church.

“This incident made me vow to myself to quit church. I really didn’t understand this faith. The pastors preached one thing and did the other... The same things that they warned would send people to hell, are the same weaknesses that seemed to have a strong hold over their personal lives,” she writes.

“Like most sexual abuse survivors, I suffered from self-blame and shame. I still struggle with personality disorder issues. For a longtime, I thought I was to blame for what happened to me as a child at the hands of househelps…

I have very clear memories of the incidences and the most traumatising part was the fact that there is no time I resisted until I was older and understood that it was wrong. There were some days I cried, wondering why I wasn’t smart enough to say no. But I was only four or five at the time,” she recalls.

“When I was older and I had started to understand the implications of being a victim of sexual abuse, I started to withdraw from people. I was angry at the world and at men...,” she adds.

The book
Synopsis. The self-published 150-page autobiography, No Makeup On, is a captivating tell-it-all memoir about a Ugandan girl’s poor choices, loss of Identity, failure and finding love and grace to overcome and to win in the end.
Availability. The book is available at major bookshops in Kampala at Shs30,000