Ugandan Women Wage a 50-Year Struggle for Equal Rights in Marriage

In March, when Susan Achen, a Ugandan lawyer and human rights activist, met leaders from a major Catholic diocese in Kampala, she expected a civil exchange of ideas on a new marriage law legislators were considering.

Since 1964, Ugandan legislators have attempted to pass a law governing marriages in the country, but it’s remained one of Uganda’s most hotly debated laws.

Achen told More to Her Story that she was confident that the women’s rights movement has gained ground over the years. Last year, lawmakers introduced the Marriage Bill 2024.

This time, she said, “we are able to say words like ‘cohabitation’ and have a conversation.”

“Back then, ‘cohabitation’ was a bad word. I thought things are changing,” said Achen, program coordinator of women’s rights and access to justice at the Uganda Women’s Network, an umbrella organization established in 1993 for non-governmental organizations focused on women’s rights.

At the meeting, Achen expressed her concerns to the religious leaders. The new law set women back, making all marriages, including Christian ones, potentially polygamous, criminalizing cohabitation and placing liability for debts contracted by one spouse on another. 

Suddenly, one of the men confronted Achen, yelling, “You should have just said you want women to have equal rights with men. Do you know the pressures men go through? How can you want women to have equal rights with men?”

Achen wasn’t surprised. She’d heard that kind of resistance to equality many times since she started fighting for women’s rights about 12 years ago. To many Ugandans, advocating for women’s rights is shameful. It’s more acceptable for women to seek only a few non-contentious rights, such as earning a basic education and health care. Even then, these basic rights are not always met and women who demand more are viewed as destabilizing society.

“I have been in a meeting where women are being blamed for cutting trees for firewood to cook for their families. These women were being told that they must replant the trees. No one talked about all the trees men cut to make charcoal for sale,” she said. “When women get money, when women grow, there is also a growing belief that they should be controlled.”

Achen said that fear of women’s power has undermined passage of a new marriage law that gives women equal rights. “People are jittery. There is a desire to check women’s supposed power. There is a feeling that there is a hidden agenda behind women’s demand for equal rights. There is a desire to put in place barriers to slow women down,” she explains.

Yet, Ugandan women across generations have remained hopeful.

“At independence, Africa inherited political ideologies and structures designed to consolidate male privilege and power, and women’s subordination,” Ugandan feminist Sylvia Tamale wrote in an analysis of African women’s contribution in parliament. “Male authority in post-independent African states was so ubiquitous that for a very long time it was taken for granted. When Europeans colonised Africa, they transplanted their ideas of male-dominated politics and ignored African women’s economic and political activities.”

Uganda’s history included dictators who harassed women for wearing miniskirts and colonialists who thought waist beads were satanic. In 1995, that trauma gave way to hope as the country voted for a new constitution that is still one of the most progressive in Africa, guaranteeing equal rights for men and women.

Ugandan women were hopeful that lawmakers would pass the Marriage and Divorce Bill, based on 1964 recommendations of the Commission on Marriage, Divorce and the Status of Women but tabled in 1994. The bill would gather dust on the shelves for decades, only emerging occasionally to be debated and reshelved for being too bold, too progressive, too empowering for Ugandan women.

Progress and setbacks in 2024

In 2024, the bill was tabled again as the Marriage Bill 2024. The “Divorce” part of the bill was long ago dropped after religious leaders argued that couples shouldn’t get married, contemplating divorce. Sarah Opendi, a member of parliament and state minister for mineral development, tabled the bill to protect the property rights of minors and reform marriage laws. 

The bill contains some progressive provisions, including clearer definitions of marital property and the recognition of women’s unpaid care work as a valuable contribution towards obtaining or maintaining marital property. It also includes a provision on prenuptial and postnuptial agreements to safeguard property rights. The law proposes recognizing marriages conducted online and presuming parenthood for children born during a marriage, protecting children from a growing practice of husbands taking DNA tests at unregulated centers and publicly disowning children.

“Some of these provisions are the boldest that we have ever seen since this law was first recommended in the 1960s,” Achen said. “But there are so many forces behind the law, and we have also seen some questionable clauses.”

Opponents of the Marriage Bill have gone from opposing the law to adding cultural and religious sentiments into the legislation. For example, the law provides for compulsory marriage counseling regardless of whether a marriage is cultural, civil or religious.

“Marriage counseling is usually about placing responsibility of maintaining a marriage on women. And placing blame for marriage failure also on women, in line with religious beliefs,” said Primah Kwagala, executive director of Women’s Pro Bono Initiative, an organization in Uganda working to ensure the law doesn’t set women’s rights back. 

The law also requires that both men and women get consent from their parents before marriage, departing from a previous court decision that held that women are protected if a church requires parental consent for just women and not men.

“The law gives with one hand and takes with two hands,” Kwagala said, noting that evangelical groups lobbied for these reforms. “There has been a group of evangelicals from the U.S. They have organized so systematically in Uganda. They see Uganda as the headquarters of the kind of family law and values that they want to promote. Uganda is their specimen. The place where they can push for morality over rights.”

Allowing polygamous marriages

Some Christian leaders have even supported legalizing polygamous marriages, where men marry more than one wife.

“We saw pastors come up to publicly support polygamy for men. The law is about protecting polygyny but not polyandry,” the practice of women marrying more than one man, said Kwagala. “Yet, we know that it is difficult for polygynous relations to be equal. Ugandan men want to have their cake and eat it.” Kwagala said she recalls how women advocates challenged the Ugandan parliament to make clear rules on polygamy and make them applicable for women and men. Noeline Kisembo, a member of parliament from the ruling party, the National Resistance Movement, rebuffed the idea of equality when it comes to polygamy.

“It is not our reality that, because men can marry more women, now women should also marry more than one man. This will create confusion, which we do not want,” Kisembo said.

Women’s advocates are debating whether to accept imperfect legislation and challenge inequalities in court.

“Some people are saying that we let the law pass and then challenge it in court,” Achen said. Fatigue with the law is palatable. It is difficult to see how the debate can go on after 50 years. “But we know that challenging it will be even more difficult. It will take years. And the system is such that the case will be assigned to the most conservative judicial officer. And women will be kept waiting for justice.”

Beyond unfair marriage laws, Ugandan women face a myriad of socio-economic challenges, including poverty, domestic violence, lack of access to land and lack of bargaining power for everyday decisions such as when to have sex or use contraception.

“People see women’s rights as something that only benefits women,” said Achen. “They forget that next to women, there are children, there are old people and families that benefit when women are empowered.”

Achen continued, “This is why we cannot stop fighting. If we let this law pass in its current form, our children will ask how we could let this happen. It may take 120 years, but one of these days we shall see the change we want. We might wake up one day and have an open-minded president. One day we shall get the change we seek.”