AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	64. Sexualities in Africa
Paper ID	413
Author(s)	Frankland, Stan
Paper	No paper submitted
Abstract	The rehabilitation and reintegration of Uganda into the global economy has led to a resurgence of the national debate about the values of tradition and the dangers of modernity. Within this discursive interaction between past and present, a series of contemporary myths are drawn upon in order to maintain the ideological cohesion of the imagined nation state. This is exemplified by the conceptualisation of Uganda as the motherland, a myth repeated across the political spectrum, in which the biological function of motherhood becomes symbolic of the birth and regeneration of the nation, with the safe upbringing of the child, the children that make the future, ascribed to the nurturing skills inherent within the tradition of maternity. As such, both the power of fertility and female virtue become valued resources within the moral discourse of national unity. The “body of woman” becomes something that needs to be protected, both metaphorically and literally, from penetration by alien forces, whether that is the physical force of an enemy, the unseen virus of disease or the incorporeal fear of globalization. Out of this need to ensure women’s security, symbolic border guards are erected around the ideal of what it is to be a “good woman”, a mother, while sanctions are drawn up against the negative corollary of the “bad woman”, typically the prostitute. Sex and sexuality become one of the key arenas in which the conflict between the past and present is battled out, with an essentialized nostalgia being the prime weapon of defence. The construction of the “good woman” as the carrier of tradition is entrenched on the frontline of this war over the relative merits of modernity, faced off against the “bad woman”, the bringer of unwanted change. Nowhere is the contrast between continuity and change more apparent than in the cosmopolitan spaces within the capital city of Kampala, the nexus for both moral certainties and the potentialities of alternate ways of being. This paper examines how this dichotomy is played out in the politics, media and literature of Uganda, with a specific focus on the symbolic character of the malaya (prostitute). What are the consequences of such social idealization? How do the myths translate down into the practices of everyday life? Through an ethnography of the sex workers of Kampala, the paper explores how individual women make their lives in the city during a time of economic rehabilitation and how they attempt to neutralize and normalize the myths that surround them.

Myths of the Malaya: the 'bad' women of Kampala