Women Advance in the Arts in Uganda

KAMPALA, UGANDA – In the middle of a small street flanked by fragrant jacaranda trees blooming with purple flowers, a group of actors jostles for space with passersby and a succession of big, white government vehicles outside the Uganda Museum.

This is not a demonstration. Rather, it's a street theater rehearsal in full force in Kampala, the capital of Uganda.

Clad in bright yellow clothes, yellow heavy-duty gloves and yellow socks, some actors take a break after a week of training in the use of props, effective body language, mime, song and dance. Two men chat on a wooden bench under a pomegranate bush.

“Only a few hours left ’til the first show,” says Okuyu Prince Joel, a model and actor, while twiddling a twig.

Joel says the show is unique because there are also actresses participating in it, which is unprecedented in street theater here. He points to two women standing near the door of the main hall.

“They are really cool,” he says. “We’ve been working together for a week now.”

Women’s participation in street theater was unheard of in Uganda until the Bayimba Cultural Foundation sent out calls for the workshop. The two women standing in the doorway, Moreen Duudu Hazel and Rehema Nanfuka, showed up to attend. As the only women on a team of eight men, they didn’t realize that they had become pioneers in a challenging art form.

Because many say that art doesn’t offer financial security in life, minors have to seek permission from their parents and guardians to study art courses or do it on their own.

“I had to sponsor myself through school,” Hazel says. “People thought that I was crazy to want a career in art. Therefore, it was up to me to have faith in myself.”

Hazel breathes deeply and says that life as a performing artist is challenging.

“It has been tough, besides the street theater itself,” she says.

She had to suspend her work as a full-time jeweler before going on tour with the street theater group because her shop was broken into during the last week of rehearsals.

She says her family also doesn’t understand her passion for acting. After presenting her family a video clip of her street performances, she says they thought she was crazy.

“They were happy for me, but they didn’t understand why I was doing street theater,” she says.

For women in the performing arts, it’s common to face sexual harassment and assault. When the performance takes place on the street, the support and protection that a stage or a set would offer is nil.

Hazel and Nanfuka say the disconcerting specter of sexual harassment is always present on the streets of Kampala as well as in other towns where they have performed, such as Gulu, Arua and Jinja.

“Guys were pulling my hand, saying, ‘I want this one, and I want that one,’” Hazel says. 

The actresses say that, fortunately, the other actors in their troop have been supportive in managing these situations until the end of the performances. As the main planner of the show, Nanfuka says she and Hazel earned the men’s respect, although it was initially challenging to steer a group of diverse personalities toward a common goal.

“We’ve worked very hard to cement the idea that you need everyone in the team,” she says. “And that is how we earned our respect from the rest of the team.”

From literature to theater to music to art, women have been increasing their presence in the arts in Uganda. New workshops, programs and affirmative action policies have encouraged women’s participation. But even government officials admit that a lack of funding holds women back in the arts. Women therefore say it is up to individual artists to blaze the trail.

From the inauguration of formal education in Uganda in the late 1800s, women’s participation in the arts was mostly limited to church choirs and school drama productions. Participation in theater outside school was rare, mainly because most local plays were written for male leads and traditional social conventions encouraged women to keep a low profile in public. Even today in the countryside, where mores are still conservative, women are not supposed to attract attention to themselves outside the home.

But these days, women have risen to a formidable presence both in the national and international art scene.

One art form in which female artists are flourishing is creative writing. The Uganda Women Writers Association, a nongovernmental organization that promotes female writers, hosted various events promoting female writers last year, including the launch of an anthology of short fiction at the Uganda Museum.

Tino Roselyn, program assistant for the organization, says that the anthology aims to break new ground in writing for young adult audiences, as books by local female authors are limited.

“The theme was writing for positive change, so we decided that our main audience should be teenagers,” Roselyn says of the 2010 workshop during which the anthology was conceptualized. “All the stories chosen had themes that appealed to young adults.”

Mary Karooro Okurut, minister for information and national guidance, spoke about the progress in women’s publishing at the book launch.

“We struggled not only to get published, but also to get our books onto the national school curriculum,” she said.

The National Curriculum Development Centre, an autonomous institution affiliated with the Ministry of Education and Sports, has added “A Season of Mirth” by Ugandan writer Regina Amollo to the list of books for studying literature in English. It is still listed among the nonexaminable texts, books meant for leisure but that students are not obliged to study in school. Still, women say this was a pivotal event since male voices have long dominated Ugandan literature.

Beyond academic curricula, creative writing has also played a critical political role in advancing conversations about gender issues in Uganda. Most notable was “Beyond the Dance,” a 2009 anthology of short fiction and poetry about female genital mutilation.

Female artists have also been emerging in music. Artist Sarah Tshila fuses spoken word poetry, African traditional music and hip-hop.

In 2007, the BBC World Service’s talent search program, “The Next Big Thing,” named her as one of the 20 best unsigned artists in the world. In August of the same year, she recorded her first album, “Sipping From The Nile.”  

“This was great positive feedback,” she says. “It opened doors for me internationally.”

Tshila says that the low number of women in the performing arts is not because women have been kept out on purpose.

“Sometimes it is about the way we’ve been raised and the lack of courage to pursue our dreams,” she says.

Tshila works with youth in order to give them this courage. Tshila has served as a mentor through the Bavubuka Foundation, a nonprofit organization that aims to transform the lives of youths by connecting them with music and the arts.

“We are moving forward, but what makes us strong is our culture,” she says. “Therefore, we need to be dynamic in promoting our beautiful musical heritage and not only working with hip-hop styles from abroad.”

Adong Lucy Judith, an acclaimed Ugandan playwright and filmmaker, attributes some of the challenges to women’s participation in the arts to “a culture of impossibilities as opposed to possibilities,” which discourages young women from venturing into theater. For example, she says that a number of senior members of the industry in both Kenya and Uganda said her play, “Just Me, You and the Silence” was not directable because of the style in which she wrote it. But Broadway and West End directors took on her projects despite having been turned down several times by local directors. It showed in New York in September and is in production in the Royal Court Theatre in London.

“When I received feedback about the impossibility of my play being directable, I felt sorry for all those eager Ugandan and East African playwrights who’ve not been privileged to have the kind of exposure that I’ve been blessed to have through experiencing Broadway and the West End,” she says. “Theater is first and foremost to entertain, so we can’t afford to box ourselves up and, in effect, bore our audiences.”

Still, women are excelling in the drama field, says Judith, who currently lectures in the Makerere University Department of Performing Arts and Film. 

“I believe women playwrights and screenwriters in East Africa are doing great,” she says.

In addition to Judith’s success, Ugandan playwrights Deborah Asiimwe, Angela Emurwon and Pamela Otali won the BBC African Performance playwriting competition in recent years.

Female artists attribute their recent success in part to progressive policies in various sectors, such as education.

In 1990, Makerere University, the main academic institution situated in the capital, introduced an affirmative action plan to increase women’s access to public universities. In 1995, Article 33 of the Constitution of the Republic of Uganda stated that “women shall have the right to affirmative action for the purposes of redressing the imbalances created by history, tradition or custom.”

Twenty years later, a report on the review of the affirmative action plan noted that in the majority of humanities, females had more or less attained equality with male students, with women in the arts leading the way. At Makerere University’s January 2012 graduation, female students made up 55 percent of arts students.

Still, artists and academics say that the government needs to do more to promote and fund women in the arts.

Venny Nakazibwe, senior lecturer and dean of Makerere University’s Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts, says there isn’t any endowment for arts. He says that the government focuses on the sciences, overlooking the importance of the arts.

“Science and innovation grows from the culture of the people,” she says. “This is an expression of their reality, which includes the anthropological, historical, political and material culture of the people, and that essentially is the arts. So the argument that the sciences rather than arts must be given priority is detached from reality.”

Government representatives agree about the lack of support.

“Nothing,” says Pamela Batenga, principal culture officer at the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development. “It is not there. Not in this ministry.”

She says that all the government can do for female painters, writers and musicians is give them letters of recommendation. Artists can attain these by submitting a concept explanation to the ministry’s permanent secretary detailing their budget and justifying it. She says artists can use the letter to obtain funding elsewhere, as the ministry is one of the most underfunded government ministries.

“We don’t have any money in form of any grants,” she says.

Ultimately, female artists say it is up to them to pave the way.

Female artists at Makerere University have been asserting their voices through the Art for Advocacy project. Sculptors such as Lilian Nabulime and Amanda Tumusiime, who are also both lecturers at Makerere University, have been among those using art exhibitions as a forum to highlight women’s empowerment.

“I would love for us to borrow from Japanese philosophy,” Judith says. “‘If one can do it, I can do it. If no one can do it, I must do it.’”