Introduction of cotton unleashes wave of terror against women in eastern Uganda

The British colonialists owed the extension of their rule in eastern Uganda to Ganda loyalists like Semei Kakungulu.
The subdued tribes, among other things, were forced to grow cotton which changed their traditional way of life. This came with repercussions on social life. One among such effects was the official use of corporal punishment against women.
The whipping of women in eastern Uganda by the native courts reached alarming proportions that in 1925 then Chief Justice, Sir Charles Griffin, said: “The beating of women is prohibited because they are women and for no other reason. A civilised government will not tolerate the beating of women.”
The establishment of the protectorate government introduced the cultivation of cotton as a cash crop. Before cotton, farming was at subsistence level while ivory and slave trade on the caravan routes were the main economic activities.
When cotton was introduced, the women who did subsistence farming were expected to also cultivate the cotton while the men were to sell and keep the proceeds.
Some local chiefs, mission leaders and protectorate administrators were united in perpetrating the violence against women who disobeyed the order.
“Women’s unruliness threatened the political, social and economic order of the region and must be stopped,” wrote Carol Summers in East Africa in Transition.
In a communication to the Chief Justice, then provincial commissioner of eastern region, J.M. Gray, wrote: “A husband who receives an official intimation that greater energy is required from him in the matter of cotton cultivation and finds his wife insubordinate in this matter, finds that the best means of safeguarding himself is to bring the woman before the native court for punishment.”
According to Summers, the native courts took over from husbands who reported their wives to the chiefs to take the responsibilities of flogging the troublesome wives.
Mission teachers and evangelists worked with male church groups to establish Christian patriarchal control over wives who rejected both their husbands and Christ.
“Both officials and missionaries understood clearly that the government and missions needed to beat women if they were to have any hope of the political support of the local men essential to their vision of order and development,” Summers writes.
“Colonial administrators and mission supporters argued that the progressive development of eastern Uganda required that dissident women be subjected to corporal punishment.”
Writing in The Iteso, Charles Dalton Lawrence says, “These people were in a state of naked barbarism, existing by a primitive system of shifting cultivation, ravaged by famine and disease. Since the beginning of this century Kakaungulu’s sniders (a type of gun) have established peace and ordered government, the missionaries have brought 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. The Iteso themselves readily and quickly accepted and assimilated these new ideas and techniques.”
When it was first introduced, forced labour of men was used in cotton plantations. However, when governor Sir William Growers banned men’s forced labour, the chiefs’ economic success, which rested on cotton growing, hang in the balance.
Women who had been seen as a source of labour become more essential for the chiefs and men who wanted to prosper from the newly introduced cash crop.
“Conservative estimates by officials in favour of whippings indicate that some courts beat four to five women a day, passing sentences that often reached as high as 20 strokes of the kiboko,” Summers writes.
The governor stated while in Bugwere District 299 women were whipped over a period of 13 months, the numbers were higher in other intensive cotton growing districts such as Busoga and Teso, with Teso reporting at least 926 women being beaten by courts in two years.
The two missionaries groups in eastern Uganda, Mill Hill Fathers and the Church Missionary Society (CMS, for Anglicans) were no different from the local administrators.
The missionaries sided with the colonial police and some chiefs in imposing corporal punishment on dissident women.

Matrimonial offense
Chief Justice Griffins was forced to investigate the violence. The probe found that women were being beaten for matrimonial offences, of which refusal to grow cotton was one of them.
Of the 50 cases investigated, 37 of them were of women who were beaten for either refusing to grow or pick cotton. The women were sentenced to a minimum of 10 strokes of the kiboko.
When Sir Philip Mitchel become governor of Uganda in 1935, he made a bad situation worse by declaring that labour recruitment must be enforced.
“Africans must yield to persuasion, officers were to use whatever means necessary to enforce labour recruitment and cash crop cultivation but not get caught,” he said.

Churches’ role
Missionaries went to eastern Uganda after Kakungulu subjugated the area. In Teso region, two Catholic Mill Hill priests, Fr Kiggen and Fr Thyssen, used extreme violence to enforce the vision of church law.
The Anglican Church, which had the allegiance of the chiefs, backed forced labour and provided for the construction of churches and the cultivation of mission and school gardens.
For the Catholic missions, labour came from those settled on mission land as they provided labour as rent. Students at mission schools and kidnapped converts were also forced to work at the mission fields as part of their punishment.
“In Teso, whenever the Ganda evangelists felt their lives in danger from the locals they called on the Ganda military for support. CMS evangelists mainly funded themselves through aggressive promotion of cotton. Cotton and Christianity became inextricably confused,” wrote Louise Pirouet in Black Evangelist: The Spread of Christianity in Uganda 1891-1914.
The abuses of the Mill Hill Fathers in eastern Uganda came to light during a bitter feud between two priests and District Commissioner Philips.
In July 1926, Capt Philips indicted Fr Kiggen for contempt of court. But Fr Kiggen’s defenders said he “could not socialise with Capt Philips, who he saw as a deeply immoral man”.
Their feud reached their superiors and Fr Kiggen was told by his superior Bishop Campling to apologise to Capt Philips, but he refused.
In return, Philips launched a police investigation into the mission’s activities in the region. Witnesses testified that for three years European representatives of the Mill Hill Mission in Teso District had beaten and imprisoned natives and intimidate them into compliance with the canonical directions.
There were also complaints of gender violence by the mission.
“Catholic women were beaten 24 or 25 strokes and imprisoned with pigs. These beatings and punishments were part of the mission’s efforts to enforce Christian marriage and block divorce,” Summers writes.
The police investigation further revealed how the mission intervened in private lives of locals.
“A Catholic Teso woman received 25 strokes for marrying a non-Catholic and thereafter imprisoned in a pigsty until she escaped. In another case, a Ganda woman was given 24 strokes in Kiggen’s presence for living with a common law husband outside of Christian marriage. The woman lost an eye in the process, was imprisoned for two months during which she was forced to do hard labour;  carrying stones for the mission road construction,” states a communication, PRO CO 536/148, from the governor to the secretary of colonies in London, the UK.
By the time Fr Kiggen was expelled from the district by the commissioner, Bishop Campling had recalled him from the eastern region.
Years later, in 1938, fearing for his arrest, Bishop Campling wrote to the Superior Father.
“In case the question of Father Kiggen’s return comes up again I should like you to write to me before, because the government will have to be asked. Fr Kiggen should not come back as long as any of the officials of that time are still in service,” Bishop Campling wrote.
After Kiggen left Teso, his deputy, Fr Thyssen, on October 23, 1927, led a group of 10 catechist teachers to a home of a woman who had run away from her husband, a catechist teacher. The couple got married in 1920 before the man converted.
After his conversion, she was on several occasions subjected to beatings at the mission, sometimes under the supervised by Fr Thyssen.
During a raid, the woman’s mother, while defending her daughter, was punched in the face and the gut by Fr Thyseen. They were saved by a local chief when he responded to their wailing in the night.
“The priest and his teachers were charged with criminal trespass, voluntarily causing hurt and riot. The priest paid a fine and also paid the fine for all the teachers he had gone with and avoided serving a prison sentence,” Summers writes.
Bishop Campling did not see any wrong in what his men had done, saying the Fathers were kind and only trying to ensure faith and progress.
“Mistakes had been made in Teso. They were the product of great zeal to overcome the vices of the natives,” Bishop Campling said.
In 1929, the governor proposed a new Native Courts Bill that removed individual’s right to appeal to the high court in favour of a system of review of major court decisions by district officers and provincial commissioners.
The Chief Justice opposed the governor’s position on the disregard for the law, insisting that “courts would be overseen by those with loyalty to justice rather than merely a desire for smooth administration.”
The governor appealed to the colonial office which decided that “the native courts would be under the tutelage of an administrative service rather than held to the strict legal standards of the Chief Justice and his courts.”