JENDA: A JOURNAL OF CULTURE AND AFRICAN WOMEN STUDIES ISSN: 1530-5686 Issue 6 (2004) AS A CITIZEN OF CIVIL SOCIETY”: PERSONAL REFLECTIONS

Doreen Lwanga

For the past several years, I have realized my part in the world through a personal voyeurism in civil society—NGOs, women and refugee issues. The year 1997 was my time for NGOism, as an intern with Uganda’s most respected indigenous NGO network—Development Network of Indigenous Voluntary Associations (DENIVA). Thanks to the Human Rights & Peace Center (HURIPEC) Internship at Makerere Faculty of Law, which offered me a paid internship placement.

On my first day at DENIVA, I wondered to myself why I had to read DENIVA mission statement, vision, strategic plan, work plan et la? Wasn’t my task to argue human rights cases at DENIVA? I have a confession to make, I barely knew what the subject of human rights meant. Incidentally, DENIVA was not the mainstream human rights organization. When Professor Kwesiga, DENIVA executive secretary told me to give a staff talk on “the role of human rights in information management”, I thought to myself that was the moment for me to prove my worth to the DENIVA staff. I doubt if during my talk I really did offer any rightly humane insight into the information age. Instead, my true learning of human rights began at DENIVA.

I also had the opportunity to meet DENIVA members and Resource Center users and became useful to them upon request. Unofficially, I became the information assistant to Resource Center users. In just a few weeks, the gracious DENIVA Secretaries/computer teachers had tirelessly transformed me into a computer wizard. In fact, I started solving their word processing puzzles, troubleshooting and tirelessly offering my secretarial services for official work. I also became a computer teacher to the other student from Makerere Department of Social Work and Social Administration who was still struggling with the process. So, I was not only learning information acquisition and usage, but also information dissemination, storage and management.

My joyous times working with people in the DENIVA Resource Center, was however not as monumental as meeting DENIVA members at workshops outside the office building. It all started when John Kakaire-Mena, then DENIVA Program Coordinator, Information Exchange and Management requested me [and Irene Balya—the other student intern] to facilitate at a three days residential workshop on Information Management and Exchange in Mukono. DENIVA members from NGOs and CBOs mainly of a rural dwelling attended the workshop. It was a time to meet and spend three days with real people and real NGO activists. Prior to that, I had never met people with little economic resource but with a huge heart to offer to work in a community. Until then, I was your stereotypical (you may read cosmopolitan) Uganda urbane ‘girl’. Through Professor Kwesiga, I later learned that there were many Ugandans who spend their entire lives without salt and or eat food without sauce. While I was obsessed with political and civil human rights of women prisoners, I realized that the people at this Mukono workshop were yearning for an economic human right to information and a right to salt and soap.

In the preceding months of my internship at DENIVA, more opportunities emerged for me to learn about NGOs involved in activities inter alia bee keeping, conservative energy methods and community radio at workshops and seminars. I facilitated at several seminars of higher magnitude on project formulation, NGO management and grant writing. What kicked off as boring work clipping news articles in the DENIVA Resource Center, evolved into a succinct personal understanding of civil society through participating and networking in DENIVA activities. DENIVA became and still is to me the powerhouse of things done right with NGO networking and information sharing. This work became part of my preceding activities and has since reflected in all my projects particularly with the HURIPEC Prisons Project.

While interning with DENIVA, I doubled as a coordinator for the HURIPEC interns Prisons Project. The HURIPEC Prisons Project grew out of a visit to Luzira women’s prison in Kampala during the students’ human rights internship orientation. As a human gesture [which we now call a human rights gesture], twelve of us offered a few shillings to the women as contribution towards their basic needs and milk for their babies in prison. Back at HURIPEC, we brainstormed on the predicament of the female inmates we met in Luzira as girls, single women, expectant mothers or with their children in detention, albeit without reliable outside support. Our experiences in prison later translated into continued visits to the prisons—to interview women in-mates, teach in-mates and staff prisoners human rights, refer cases in need of legal aid to legal offices as well as write for the press and appearing on TV and Radio to discuss conditions in Uganda’s prisons.

In September 1997, we as HURIPEC student alumni agreed to form a prisons project to extend beyond women prison inmates to male prisoners around the country. Subsequently, I was elected chair of the HURIPEC Prisons Project. While I strayed off for half-a-year between June 1998 to January 1999 to work with a university as a Deputy Registrar and Assistant Lecturer at Namasagali University, I still held my prisoners human rights activism at heart. The memories haunted me so much that in January 1999 I escaped back into civil society activism and the prison work. I met with the HURIPEC director, Sam Tindifa, and expressed my interest to revive the HURIPEC Prisons Project. Around the same time I began working with Professor Barbara Harrell-Bond as an assistant on the Refugee Rights Research Project at Makerere Institute of Social Research.

Professor Harrell-Bond and I agreed that I would work part-time with her while continuing my prison’s work. We also worked out a fruitful arrangement where HURIPEC Prisons Project would use one of her project computers in exchange for researching on refugees in detention. At least I would still do my prison work, enhance my skills in NGO networking and learn something new about refugees. I began to view refugees as people belonging to civil society except for the peculiar difference that they have lost a claim of the protection of their country of origin. We may ask the question whether the situation of Uganda’s refugees is so peculiar to Ugandan civil society given that we have historically lost the rights inter alia labor, education, health, political and physical protection from our own government? By doing so, we are not just advocating for a fair treatment of marginalized refugees and prisoners but also using such avenues as an entry point to the protection of the entire Uganda Civil Society. At this stage of my activism, I had taken the responsibility to shrewdly defend NGOs, refugees and prisoners human rights. The more marginalization I face everyday, the more I realize that it goes beyond refugees, prisoners and institutions to include women in our own society. Here is how I come to my next revelation of fighting for the place of women in civil society.

Every member of civil society is potentially womanist. If we all come from a woman’s womb, weren’t we all women first? We have to express respect for women and their talents and abilities regardless of sexual orientation, race or class.

At the eve of collective women’s movement in Uganda, many prominent Ugandan women/feminists, such as the First Lady Janet Museveni, Vice President Specioza Kazibwe, Miria Matembe [radical feminist] and Member of Parliament (MP) Winnie Byanyima trimmed their hair short and many other women followed suit. While I alienated from the Uganda feminism jive, I used my prying eye to steadily accept that the intrusion of gender and concern for women’s rights. As a young girl, I once took issue with my father for abusing my mother literally every night and in retaliation he stopped paying my school fees. In Ugandan society this behavior is construed as outrageous and unruly from a female, especially being the youngest girl child in my family!

Undeterred, I continued questioning the status quo; why do I have my father’s family name and not my mother’s? Don’t I have a right to change it? Are we, as women paying a price for living in a society that rewards people for being the “socialized natural man” and ridicules women? Abuse of women in the “domestic”, marginalization of the girl child, paying lip service to equality for women with men, are all characteristic of [Uganda] society. And here civil society organizations are not an exemption since men run almost all of them except where they are organizing specifically towards women.

Frankly, the phenomenon of women subordination is not exclusively an affair of ‘countries with developing economies’ but also occurs in ‘countries with developed economies’. Conversely, it transcends age, race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation and social status, We are aware that in the United States, very high profile males commit adultery in public office and young females become mistresses of married men. The time I have lived, traveled and worked in the “Westernized” world, often as a participant observer, has enabled me to see how media images, political regimes, civil society institutions and families in fact sustain the image of women as the weaker sex. Sometimes women are caught in the web of endorsing practices woven against them, thus becoming ‘oppressors’ of women. In Uganda a girl child may be married off to get her father cows while in South Africa or the US commercial advertisement and corporate media may romanticize female sexuality to attract consumers. For example, the picture of female model Sophie Dahl in 2000 posing nude for a Yves Saint Laurent “Opium” perfume commercial, received an applause in South Africa where I was at the time with several women claiming feelings within themselves each time they spray "opium" on their bodies”, and others endorsing its empowerment of women!

Yet women like my mother and me shrewdly object to exposing women as public sex toys. Girls and Women also manage NGOs, support families during strife, lobby, and advocate for fair legislation as well as implement policies. Drawing on a comparative internalization of social, economic, cultural and political life in South Africa and US, I could proudly say that the Uganda women’s movement has recorded admirable achievements in its struggle. However, if human rights principles spell women as equal to men, why should we settle for a thirty per cent representation in Uganda’s public life? Since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights spells equality for all we should introduce positive discriminatory quotas to override [social] meritocracy that rewards males the Presidency in all African states! It is not a favor but our right to claim. Not even physical abilities, social status, tribe, age and sexual orientation can compromise the need for equality between men and women in our society.

So far, the journey I have trodden through NGOisim, civil society, womanism, refugeeism, and prisoners has shaped me beyond thinking globally and acting locally to also work globally and think locally. For instance, why shouldn’t NGOs and women respond to each and every letter in the public press demeaning our cause? My own strategy is to express my opinion either in the media or in my people relationships whenever I have felt defamed as a “woman”. As civil society activists, human rights defenders, NGO workers, women, refugee and prisoners; we should challenge the current status quo. In conclusion, this engagement with civil society, civil society organizations, refugees, prisoners and women is like a game of high-speed courtship where strangers become friends, friends become lovers and lovers become better suicidal exes. Yet this is a relationship we as activists committed to good governance, democracy and human rights should be prepared to embrace--a relationship that I regard very passionately.

Citation Format:

Doreen Lwanga. “As a Citizen of Civiel Society: Personal Reflections,” JENDA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies: Issue 6, 2004.

Copyright © 2005 Africa Resource Center, Inc.