Have we now been reduced to parading and prostituting our women to tourists?

Tourists visiting Uganda have always been spoilt for choice: Parks teeming with game; idyllic landscapes that look like they were painted by the gods; lakes and rivers full of fish for anglers; bird species that fill the skies; sinfully delicious food; and people who are unfailingly polite to strangers (except when it comes to letting other cars join the road ahead of them).

But that, apparently, is not enough for the folks at the Tourism ministry. They have announced an addition to this list: The country’s curvaceous women. Yes, like seriously-announced-by-a-government-official-at-a-public-function.

Take a seat and listen to junior tourism minister Godfrey Kiwanda: “We have naturally endowed nice looking women that are amazing to look at. Why don’t we use these people as a strategy to promote our tourism industry?” As he spoke, Mr Kiwanda was flanked by “samples” – his word – of these natural endowments – a line-up of women of different shapes and sizes, each proudly flaunting their curves around the edges of a hotel swimming pool.

For a moment during the press conference, it appeared like an impromptu auction would break out with winning bidders disappearing into the distance, followed at a respectable distance by their sashaying trophies.

That Uganda has some of the most beautiful and curvaceous women in the world is not in doubt to anyone who has bothered to look. So beautiful, in fact, that your columnist has a theory: Every time young Ugandan men feel compelled to rise up and revolt against the bad governance, corruption and poor services, they look around see all these beautiful women and lose all ability to can.

But it is an insult to reduce Ugandan women to just their beauty or their curves. Space does not permit us to list all the pioneering Ugandan women in their various fields, but almost every one I know will speak to the industry, imagination and resilience of their mother and her fellow women stock.

Millions of Ugandan women – stoic and standing tall in the enforced absences of their menfolk either through war, disease or the ruinous wasting effects of alcohol abuse, ensure that the children are fed, treated, schooled and disciplined while also being sources of love, comfort and wisdom.

Yes, they are beautiful and curvaceous but these women, steadfast rocks and pillars, were never creature comforts or objects merely to be seen, admired and touched. That, then and now, is a sad and extreme manifestation of the worst bits of patriarchy and humanity. Having big bums does not take away your agency, dreams, needs and aspirations.

This is a case of us becoming that which we once despised. In 1810, a curvaceous and generously endowed young woman from the KhoiKhoi people in southern Africa was shipped off to Europe, first to London and later to Paris, where she was part of the curiosities in freak shows.

Sarah Baartman – the name she went by – was reduced to her bare anatomy, made to pose half-naked before paying crowds that marvelled at her big bum.

Artists painted pictures of her as she posed, involuntarily, while randy men with dirty sweaty paws and even dirtier minds groped her. The more sophisticated perverts among them attempted to examine her features in dark, funky laboratories.

Someone whose Khoisan people led a proud and productive life, able to keep large herds of livestock in otherwise inhospitable conditions, was stripped of her humanity and reduced to a curiosity.

Even death, at the tender age of 26 in Paris in 1815, did not end the humiliation. Her body was dissected and her remains put on display. For more than 150 years, visitors to the Musée de l’Homme in Paris could see her brain, skeleton, genitalia and a plaster cast of her body.

Are we so ignorant of our history of suffering, humiliation and dehuminisation that today we can voluntarily do to ourselves that which the depraved colonisers did to our ancestors less than two centuries ago? Have we learnt nothing and forgotten nothing from history?

Shall we expect a cage in the arrivals lounge at Entebbe International Airport – and several others at the nearby zoo – in which shapely Ugandan women will spend turns gyrating around showing off their bums to sweaty-palmed paying perverts?

What next? Do they then pay extra to lead off their wares to satisfy their urges? Do women have a say in this matter? Did all the self-righteous types in Cabinet approve this hare-brained idea? Has our love for the dollar dried up the last drops of decency we had left?
The problem, as we shall see next week, is not that we are poor; it is that in our desperation, we have lost our dignity.

Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and a poor man’s
freedom fighter. [email protected]
Twitter: @Kalinaki.