Abstract
The article examines how colonial and native culture(s) shaped the sexuality of mothers in colonial Uganda. Using Namasole (queen mother) Irene Druscilla Namaganda of Buganda as entry point, the article historicizes the sexuality of mothers through Namasole Namaganda’s struggles to attain sexual freedom at the cost of cultural and political privilege(s). It explores her life as she attempts to live beyond the legal and political scandal that re-shapes colonial and native influence in Buganda. I use African colonial feminist and motherhood theories to locate her within the broader framework of feminist and gender studies to answer key questions. How was the sexuality of mothers understood in Buganda? How can the events in Namasole Namaganda’s sexuality be interpreted? How do these events shape the collective logic of sexuality of mothers in Uganda? The article’s main claim is that the control of Namasole Namaganda’s maternal body lies within the broader quest for sexual freedom outside of her role(s) of mother and queen mother and more within her need to reclaim her sexual sovereignty.
Key words: sexuality, mother, culture, colonialism, native
Introduction
On 14th January1940, the widow of Kabaka (King) Chwa II of Buganda, Lady Irene Druscilla Namaganda was sworn in as Namasole (Queen Mother), an official title and office that mandated her among other things, to swear allegiance to her young son, Muteesa Fredrick, who had ascended the throne upon the death of his father Chwa II. She was supposed to protect the office of the Namasole and most importantly, to preserve the honour that came with it, as custom dictated. This office came with many traditional customs and taboos, however, the most outstanding of the taboos was that she was not to remarry, and could not have other children other than the royal children. Behind this was the belief that these acts would not only desecrate her own body and her son’s but would bring ridicule and shame to her son the Kabaka and the entire Buganda kingdom.
However, in February 1941, Namasole Irene Namaganda mother of the young Muteesa II of Buganda became pregnant by a commoner, Reverend Simon Petero Kigozi and insisted not only on keeping the child, but also marrying the commoner (Musisi 370). As a result of her actions, she was deposed from the kingdom and was stripped of her role as Namasole, which role was transferred to her elder sister Perpetua Nabaweesi (Summers 70).
The assumed rebellious actions of Namasole Namaganda against Buganda Customs were unprecedented and highly controversial for both the colonial government and Buganda kingdom. Nakanyike B. Musisi (1996) presents the legal implications of the matter, in which the young married couple were charged with, among other things, “the crime of breaking the customs of Buganda” in a case that was termed as the Case of the Abominable Act (370). Upon the conviction of the Namasole, (Queen Mother) she was officially dethroned and dispossessed of all material assets and privileges that came with the office of the Namasole (Queen Mother). Gardner Thompson (30) also acknowledges that the Namasole’s crisis was one of three issues that contributed to great wartime issues, because the Buganda riots were set-off by the protestation against the desecration of custom by the Anglican church, which had granted to the Namasole and Simon exceptional right to get married through special license; exempting the couple from church banns and also allowing them to get married during lent which contravened church doctrine (Lubega 2021). This exemption by the church was read by the native chiefs and natives as part of the larger patronage system of the colonial government, aimed at undermining social institutions as a way of promoting elite control (Summers 1996).
This article examines the socio-cultural dynamics that shaped the Namasole’s acts of defiance and locates her in the aftermath of the scandal. It is part of a larger study on Namasole Namaganda’s life, roles and choices within the logic of maternal bodies, culture and motherhood in colonial Uganda. The study positions Namasole Namaganda within the socio-cultural protestations and contestations that erupted in late colonial Uganda, against the backdrop of political palace intrigue and economic politics in Buganda. Its major claim is that Namasole Namaganda’s decision to keep both the pregnancy and go ahead to marry her lover was not an attempt to protest the colonization of her body by two conflicting cultural forces, but rather the desire to reclaim her body as a sexual being, beyond her duties and roles as a mother to the Kabaka. Beyond the biological and essential roles inscribed on the maternal body the Namasole was on a quest for sexual pleasure which lay outside her hierarchical role(s) of mother;first as biological mother and then as cultural mother to her son and the Kingdom of Buganda through the office of the Namasole (Queen mother) since her son was the reigning Kabaka (King).
Mother or Queen Mother: Hierarchies and the History of Motherhood in Buganda
Mothers were key to the political, social and economic systems of Buganda Kingdom (Rhiannon, 1). However, within motherhood as an institution, there existed hierarchies that separated mothers into two groups; commoner mothers and elite mothers who occupied important political positions and enjoyed immense power and privilege (Hanson 471). “Namasole (Queen Mother) “was the highest-ranking commoner in the kingdom, however, she became elite upon getting married into the royal family, occupying both commoner and elite status and becoming a link between the royal family and the commoner subjects of the Kingdom. Estates and subordinate officeholders, as well as the clan of her birth, supported and benefitted from her official position (Hanson 471). Past Namasoles’ responsibilities included espionage and personal defense of their sons (Medard 229). When the Kabaka was away the Namasole was regarded as the Kabaka and the argument is that whenever a man was arrested the Namasole had the power to order his release. Additionally, whenever a person was going to become a chief the Namasole would first be consulted. Even more dramatically, the Namasole shaped military decisions and was seen as a powerful ally to the Kabaka, her son (Hanson 471).
The Namasole was the most important person in the kingdom after the kabaka, and the Kabaka also respected her. This status meant that just as the Namasole protected the Kabaka from his enemies and rivals, she also protected the kingdom from the potential excesses and dangers of a young Kabaka. Perceived as structurally loyal to the king, without whom she would lack any office, she could moderate his excesses without losing her office for insufficient displays of loyalty. The Kabaka’s role could be understood as that of the chief patron and owner of Buganda. The Namasole’s complementary status as the kabaka’s equal and guardian was enough to make her potentially the single most significant check on a reckless kabaka’s actions (Medard 229).
The Namasole’s (Queen Mother) role was seen from a political perspective, positioning her in the political and economic narratives of both precolonial and colonial Uganda. However, beyond these narratives, it is important to understand that Namasole (Queen Mother) was occupying a position that was only significant because she was the mother of the Kabaka. Holly Hanson argues that this position was not private (Hanson 271). It was so important that no Kabaka (King) would rule without the presence of a Namasole or even a Lubuga King’s sister. If the Namasole (Queen Mother) died, one of the sisters of the queen mother would be appointed to become Namasole (Queen Mother) or any other woman belonging to her clan would be appointed to occupy the position (Ashe 87). This was because the position of Namasole was important in providing stability, political strategy and in creating alliances for the Kabaka, her son (New Vision 2019).
Beyond the political position of the Namasole, both commoner and elite mothers were seen as custodians of traditional beliefs, and were seen as both moralizing agents and pacifiers. To better understand the public office of the Namasole (Queen Mother), it is important to interrogate the intimate and private spaces within which the Namasole (Queen Mother)’s position, identity and power are fashioned. Before the Namasole became the Namasole, she was the mother to the Kabaka and her maternal body became a site upon which power wrote its customs, its taboos and successfully interpreted her role which formed the core of the office of the Namasole (Queen Mother).
Therefore, it is in this context as both mother and Namasole (Queen Mother) that Namasole Namaganda Irene Druscilla presents a historical figure at crossroads. She reigned as Namasole at a time when Buganda was under colonial rule. This historical period bound her as well as all the other native mothers to colonial legal and political laws. However, she was also a symbol of elite motherhood which formed part of the fabric of a proud but fading Buganda cultural legacy (Kagwa 1971) and made her an inevitable focus of both native and colonial cultural hegemonic contestation(s).
Maternal Bodies, the Re-invention of Custom and Motherhood in Colonial Buganda
Namasole Irene Druscilla Namaganda was meant to be a symbol of colonial moralist transformation and triumphs over native customs. She was educated at the prestigious Gayaza High school (Ekitibwa Kya Buganda 2012) and was the daughter of a clergyman, who traced his lineage to chiefs such as Nkalubo Sebugwawo, a one-time treasurer of Buganda (Olulyo 2025). She was also the first bearer of the title of Nabagereka (queen), which was invented in an attempt to equate her office to that of queen consort of England. She represented the best of both worlds; two cultures meeting to provide legal claim to an office and title that had been fully functional since the reign of Ssuna 1 of Buganda in 1584. She was born into a Christian family, she attended a church founded school and she was the only church wedded wife of Kabaka Chwa II, although he had other wives. It was the Christian marriage between her and Chwa II that made her son the legitimate heir to the Buganda throne, breaking with tradition where the Kabaka named his successor (Kagwa 1971). It was also colonial morality that pushed her to marry her commoner lover Simon Petero Kigozi breaking with the Buganda custom in which elite women in Buganda were allowed to take lovers as and when they needed them before colonialism (Jjuuko 2011), without actually marrying them or even having children by them. However, the moralizing culture of colonial rule while re-defining morality in the colonial laws revoked many of the sexual privileges and relative autonomy exercised by maternal bodies in relation to their sexuality. The moral policies after the declaration of Uganda as a British Protectorate brought maternal bodies under constant scrutiny of the colonial state through a systematic State- policed but missionary spearheaded campaign (Decker 2025). Namasole Namaganda existed against the backdrop of two conflicting cultures; one colonial and the other traditionally Buganda.
Yet, even as she attempted to right a Christian and traditional wrong, according to Carol Summers (70), “Namaganda’s Christian marriage with her commoner husband was powerfully scandalous, profoundly violating expectations associated with marriage and royal office. However, I do not locate the events surrounding Namasole Namaganda within purely political theorization(s) where she was fighting the colonization of her body against imperialist and traditional powers (Musisi 1996) I argue that the events surrounding her plight can be understood within the logic that shapes motherhood and the taboos and customs that conditioned mothers against enjoying sex. This is because there was a glorification of women as mothers which restricted female expression of sexual activity except for procreation (Madunagu 3). This is embedded both in the history of the control and restriction of women’s sexualities through the oppression of female bodies especially where the balance between power and pleasure did not exist among African women (Mokobocho-Mohlakoana 58).
I therefore situate Namaganda within a colonial feminist understanding of sexuality because as Carol Summers argues, colonialism in Uganda just as in the rest of Africa started in the intimate spaces, and the moral laws of the 1920s were aimed at controlling and policing women’s bodies against sexual freedom (Summers 1991). According to Summers (1991), the intimate event of the Namasole’s pregnancy spilled over to the private and public first as a sexual scandal and later turned into a political crisis that toppled Buganda’s prime minister, pushed his senior allies from power, deposed the Namasole (Queen mother), exiled her husband, and changed Buganda’s political landscape. The scandal launched a new era of public mobilization and protest that took Buganda’s politics beyond the realm of deals between the oligarchy and British elites, and into public gossip, newspapers and eventually the streets.” (Summers 2006).
The Namasole’s office only found relevance in the maternal body of the mother of the reigning Kabaka, but beyond it, it became an official site within which motherhood was politicized to negotiate identity, power and the politics of motherhood. In this sense, the Namasole’s crisis of 1941 opens up new spaces for understanding the crisis beyond its political and economic significance. Beyond the political and economic, there was the question of motherhood as experienced by an individual, a woman and mother who had to navigate their day-to-day desires against the static dictates of an unwavering culture, while still expected to remain a mother to the Kabaka. The Namasole (Queen Mother) was first a woman, with a body that demanded pleasure (MacKinnon 317) and desires that went beyond those that mandated her to secure her position as both a mother and a queen. What the Namasole’s crisis does is that it pushes motherhood and sex from the margins into the centre of public debate and scrutiny. A mother had dared to say, I am a mother, but I also want the right to have sex; to enjoy sex on my terms and not on the terms dictated by culture, the kingdom and the colonial government. This was a radical push that positioned the Namasole within a demand for gender equality and social justice, beyond a society where men dominated sex and dictated the sexual trajectories of mothers. This push helped to deconstruct the myth of pleasure as a sexual preserve of only men.
She had reclaimed her sexual sovereignty and used her maternal body upon which a symbolic, institutional and identifiable nature was written, to negotiate for sex at a time when such an act was a “kivve’ (an abomination). By doing this, the Namasole separated her maternal body from the office of ordinate mother and queen mother. This separation of roles, completed by her choice to marry her commoner husband and not bend to the defined role of queen mother, meant that she had chosen to be a sexually active mother, without sacrificing her body upon the altar of cultural sacredness, because of the demands made of her as the widowed wife of a Kabaka and the mother of the reigning Kabaka.
The Namasole’s maternal body which culture had claimed and possessed through the ordination of Namasole (Queen mother) rebelled in the face of the colonial dictation of Christian purity, and traditional exclusion; she wanted to mother on her own terms; a sexually alert and vibrant mother who attempted to re-write the cultural rules in order to free other mothers from the clutches of culture that held them captive from sexual exploration and curiosity. This sexual freedom was what the colonial government called “immoral (Summers 806)” and tradition called a “kivve” (an abomination).
Traditionally, the Namasole (Queen Mother) was objectified; seen as a symbol of morality and moral reproduction because through the control of her body, the bodies of the other mothers in the kingdom would be controlled. She was also a symbol of maternal duty, making motherhood an institution which was not only culturally sacred but also culturally conditioned and policed. Beyond this policing, the body of the Namasole (Queen Mother) had become a contested site between two cultural hegemonies; colonial moral policies and native sexual taboos. Therefore, in breaking with tradition and choosing to defy Christian moral expectations, the Namasole (Queen mother) was subverting the existing powers that were controlling her body and re-claiming her sexual sovereignty.
Beyond the liberation of her own maternal body, the Namasole revolutionized the sexuality of mothers. In the rural areas far away from the palace ‘rebel,’ women reclaimed their sexualities and sensualities by arguing that, “if the Namasole (Queen Mother) could dare to pursue pleasure, they were also allowed to do so (Obbo 1981). This is important because it created social consciousness and showed mothers that they were actors who used their maternal bodies to summon a new power; maternal power which allowed them to become agents for social change. The Namasole (Queen Mother) used her body as a space for negotiating sexual freedom and in doing so broke the silences, myths and taboos that prevented mothers from freely enjoying sex on their terms.
She revolutionized sexual encounters between mothers and their partners and ended the control of maternal bodies which gave rural and urban mothers the opportunity to explore their freedom away from the hold of culture which dictated that a mother would not leave her husband’s home, and that if she did, she would only return to her father’s home. This was borne out of the influence of Mothers’ Union’s attempt to create a balance between social morality and Christian doctrine (Prevost 2010).
However, the Namasole’s movement brought with it a labeling and name-calling that found itself embedded within social judgment. The women who left their marital homes in quest for freedom were labeled “Nakyeyombekedde” (she who has built her own home) a term synonymous with sexual freedom and the free space to enjoy sex.
The mother who built her own home or rented it without a live-in man was seen to enjoy unrestricted access to sexual experimentation and adventure, with men coming in and going out as she pleased. Nakyeyombekedde became part of how society interpreted sexual freedom among mothers and formed the core of the cultural divide that separated a good and a bad mother. The good mother buried her sexual desire and pleasure for her children while the bad mother pursued sexual pleasure and desire at the expense of her children’s well-being. This narrative of bad mother and good mother eventually fed into popular culture as artists used the phenomenon to create art that not only celebrated the idea of Nakyeyombekedde (Walukagga 2024) but also demonized it (YouTube 2013).
Most importantly, the narrative shaped part of the social logic on sexuality and became a tool of social consciousness that made the social gaze(s) focus on the individual mother through the collective power of social criticism, as part of their “casting of the first stone” not as a way of gaining justice but as a way of forming injustice through the false-condemnation of the sex- demanding and active mother. The “bad mother” or Nakyeyombekedde became a label of the mothers who choose freedom, a freedom to live with active sexual lives.
Sexual Silences or Lost Legacies: A Mother Beyond Queen Mother
The incident in Namasole Namaganda’s life can be located within the agency of a mother reclaiming her body, her narrative and her sexuality. Namasole Namaganda’s body was the space through which her narrative and sexuality were expressed. Her fate reveals the politics of the maternal body as it recentered itself to shed off the taboos, customs, and myths that were written on it. Through the Namasole’s actions, she reproduced a power borne out of birthing; using her body to birth the abominable because it was only through the birth of the abominable that she would claim her freedom, perform her freedom and attain liberty to choose who she had sex with and who had claim over her sexuality.
Caught between an ancient traditional system and a new colonial one, the Namasole’s (Queen mother’s) sexuality, while not killed and muted by power, was not without consequences. Her commoner husband Reverend Simon Kigozi was charged with trespassing on royal court and poaching the Namasole (queen mother) (Daily Monitor, 2011), and upon conviction was banished from Buganda kingdom. The priest who officiated at their wedding was forced to resign from the church and he returned to his village in Buikwe. The Katikiro (prime minister) of Buganda Kagwa Nsibirwa who had given permission to the Namasole to marry the commoner was assassinated and the Kingdom came up in riots (Thompson 30). The Namasole (Queen mother) was stripped of title, rank and property (Musisi 1996). She died in 1956 from ovarian cancer. The Namasole paid a very high price for a mother’s sexual freedom. Musisi (1996) argues that history has chosen to go silent on Namasole Namaganda, because her actions caused a fissure in Buganda. For a mother who existed in a time when both Christianity and indigenous belief systems presented a mother’s body as sacred; she used the same body to deconstruct the myth and to construct a new myth upon which her legacy is based.
However, Namasole Namaganda repeatedly mediated life and death, sacrificing her own body for the well-being of its duty to motherhood as an institution. In choosing to live her life on her terms, she shattered narratives of sexual pleasure exclusivity, navigated a gendered social justice system and through her choices helped mothers re-invent themselves, and their identities beyond motherhood to become visible as sexual beings. This was against the invisible cultural cloak that often overshadowed them, which dictated that they care for their children and consequently kill off any desires that were seen to be a threat to their maternal roles.
Conclusion
The article discussed how sex and motherhood are shaped by taboos, myths and beliefs and analyses how mothers, through the use of their maternal bodies respond to these conceptualizations. By using a historical event, I located this reclamation of mothers’ sexualities in the story of Lady Namaganda Irene Namaganda, the Namasole (Queen mother), and argued that she used her motherhood to reclaim her identity, her sensuality and her body from the control of both traditional and colonial culture. In doing this, she freed other women from the hold that motherhood had, and shaped how sex and motherhood become linked beyond life giving and birth, to become a rebirth for the body that was “sexually killed and muted by power.”
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