https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3168-0726
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ABSTRACT
We examine ‘exposure’ as a new subjectivity among young women in Lira City in northern Uganda. Socialising with men in bars, ‘managing’ boyfriends, being a good Christian wife, are all ways of mixing experiences of formal education with the challenges of navigating a way forward in the complex and evolving context of Lira City. Young women strive to acquire skills of hustling, networking and navigating social situations, which they begin to develop during their time in school and university. They continue to cultivate these skills as they move into early adulthood. Lira City is a landscape where new government legislation, the advocacy work of NGOs, the mass expansion of Uganda’s education system, and unstable marriages, create new opportunities as well as challenges for young women.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to the people of Lira for their patience and continued support. All errors and omissions are our own. We would like to thank the support of CPAR Uganda and The Field Lab Uganda for their support at different points in the research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. Identifying material has been changed in the article.
2. As if to underline the exposed nature of exposure, ‘exposure’ was spoken of only in English by our interlocutors; the closest translation in Leblango is dano ongeo piny, meaning a person who has a ‘wider knowledge’ of society within and beyond. When speaking Leblango the English word ‘sharp’ could also be mixed in.
3. An excellent discussion of emerging subjectivities in urban East Africa can be found in Prince’s (Citation2013) account of young men and women navigating their way in Kisumu, Kenya. Prince finds young people continuing to cultivate educated identities while working in a precarious economy.
4. For earlier accounts of the influence of schooling on the formation of young lives, see Masemann’s study from Ghana (Masemann Citation1974) and Musgrove’s account from Uganda (Musgrove Citation1952). Musgrove’s paper, in particular, is interesting because it emphasises the self-conscious way students try to develop identities set apart from the formal curriculum.
5. Exposed young women also took, what they told us, was a ‘scientific’ approach to witchcraft, which were often attributed to a ‘village mindset’, of ‘suffering from jealousy’.
6. At the prompting of one of the reviewers of the article, the study team were also asked if they thought Jones (a middle-aged man from the UK) was exposed. While Jones did not himself feel particularly ‘sharp’ in navigating Lira City, the rest of the team told him that he was ‘exposed’ because he could teach new things, had travelled to many countries, and was keen ‘to learn new things’ from others. The other senior researcher, Ocen (a middle-aged man from Uganda) was regarded as exposed by younger members of the team for many reasons. Alongside his education, they spoke of his ability to mix with different sorts of people in the community (he is a clan leader), his skills in helping others settle disputes and conflicts, and the way ‘he welcomes ideas from many people’.
7. Ann Gumkit Parlaker was the researcher who spent the most time with Grace. Vicky Alum was the researcher who focused on Milly. Dorah Adoch spent more time with Prossy than the rest of the study team.
8. A male member of the team – James Opolo – said it was difficult for him to spend too long with the informant – a married woman – by himself.
9. This was not always an easy method for the team. Information – about businesses, relationships and futures plans – is jealously guarded and ‘being free’ with someone is not an automatic follow on from spending time with them. Questions on these matters could only be introduced gradually. ‘Helping out’ by doing some book-keeping, for example, or simply arrange a respondent’s goods for sale, also took time to develop, and the transition from being a ‘visitor’ to becoming a friend demanded patience and skill.
10. To calculate dollar figures in the article we took a five-year average from June 2018 to June 2023. The conversion rate was US$1: Ush3,646.
11. Concealment within marriage is nothing new in Uganda. Parikh’s work on HIV/AIDS shows how concealment within marriages has a long history (Parikh Citation2007).
12. For a discussion of the role of savings groups and microfinance in funding education – and generating debt – see the paper by Jones and Amongin (Citation2023).
13. One of the study team, already a young father, had gone through the ‘introduction’ stage of a marriage, where they had been introduced to their partner’s family. Another member of the study team had a child from a ‘come-we-stay’ relationship with the boy’s father, that later ended.
14. Sons of NGO workers and government officials could be criticised if they did not show themselves willing to struggle, and were described to us as ‘rich men in waiting’ and ‘lazy boys’.
15. There was also, at the time of writing, an inheritance law making its way through Uganda’s Parliament giving daughters equal rights in land in the case of the death of a parent.
16. All of the women in our study team – educated, from a mix of urban and rural backgrounds – were thinking about land while in school. Sharon said that in high school she began observing how women who relied on their husbands for land lost out when they were widowed. Vicky, who became a single mother in her twenties, knew that buying land for herself would be the best way of securing a future for her son. Dorah told us of a distant relation, an aunt, who was ‘getting a lot of respect’ in the community for the property portfolio she had built up after her divorce.
17. It is worth noting that none of these women were involved directly in land disputes. It was a mark of exposure that they were working their way towards rights in land in an under-the-radar way (cf. Hopwood Citation2015).
18. Whyte and Siu (Citation2014, 28) observe the practise of ‘keeping quiet’ in Uganda, and how this allows a person to keep a relationship going, even when they feel they have been wronged.
19. Anna Eisenstein in her account of young women’s lives from south-western Uganda, discusses the way they ‘pace’ their early adulthood (Eisenstein Citation2021). She finds that Christian-inflected ideas of ‘study’ and ‘discernment’ are part of the way they approach social situations.
20. In the system of inheritance in Lango society, the dominant society in Lira City, rights are not straightforward and are negotiated between the generations, typically as younger family members enter into adulthood. In the past this might mean a father favouring one son over his brothers, in terms of assets and land. In more recent year’s inheritance questions are increasingly open to daughters, particularly those who are unmarried, or separated. Milly’s position as ‘heir’ meant she should be the decisive voice in inheritance matters within the near family, after the death of her father. Though this was a status that had to be remade and worked on, rather than simply something Milly could claim for herself.
21. While the term ‘school’ might convey a sizeable establishment, the one Milly was managing was a modest structure that occupied a single building.
22. ‘Natural intelligence’ was used to refer to someone who was felt to have high levels of ‘inborn knowledge’.
23. Pork joints are eating areas that have an improvised quality. Typically composed out of some rough-hewn benches, and a bamboo screen to offer some shade from the sun. They are usually located by the place where the pig is slaughtered (pork cannot be sold in the market due to Islamic religious laws).
24. In this paper, and in the related paper on Pentecostal youth in Uganda, also in this volume, we have borrowed from Henrik Vigh’s conception of social navigation where young people seek ‘to draw and actualize their life trajectories … in [the] shifting social environment’ of urban Africa (Vigh Citation2006, 55, see also Vigh Citation2010).
25. This has a different meaning to the term ‘prostitute’ which is a general term used for women who get by through relationships. A ‘schemer’ is someone who is good at studying whether the man in question can help them move ahead.
26. For example, Dorah remembers that she did not particularly warm to Prossy and that her colleagues Sharon and Vicky did most of the talking, at the time. Over time, Dorah became interested in the way Prossy was good at reflecting critically on how she was moving on in life. It was only at a burial, in November, that Prossy explained that what had made the land purchase possible.
27. For a thoughtful account of youth, gender and navigation under conditions of uncertainty see Archambault’s account on the disguise and display in Inhambane, Mozambique (Archambault Citation2013).
28. Our case also challenges the idea, widely held, that school is where educated identities are fixed, and shows how educated identities can be worked on by young women no longer in formal education, in sites that are far from the school gate (cf. Bourdieu and Passeron Citation1990).
29. It is a massification that also takes place at the time of rapid urbanisation. In the 1970s, Lira was recorded as ‘a town council’ with 5000 residents (Dahlberg Citation1974, 171). In 2022 it was a city whose population approached 250,000.