Partners and Children in Eastern Uganda: Changes and Challenges

Susan Whyte and her husband Michael have been working in Bunyole (now Butaleja District) in eastern Uganda on and off since 1969. They are thus able to trace changes in partnership patterns over a period of 50 years in this rural area. They carried out a household survey of the same village in 1970, 1993 and 2019, which documents a marked decline in bridewealth, formal marriages and polygyny. It also shows an increase in separation/divorce and in partnerships across ethnic groups. Susan has supplemented this numerical material by recent interviews with people of different generations, who tell about finding, having and leaving a mate over the years. The history of marriage must be seen in the context of changing political economy since Uganda’s independence.

Susan is undertaking another related project on child filiation. In a nominally patrilineal virilocal society, the increase in single mothers poses several questions. In what sense do children belong to their fathers and his lineage? How do fathers acknowledge children when they do not, and often never did, live with their mothers? How do mothers mobilize support for children whose fathers are not present? These are issues addressed by scholars of kinship and relatedness. And they are everyday quandaries that mothers and their children are managing in a variety of new and old ways. In a video entitled ‘My Child’s Father’, seven mothers discuss their problematic relations to the fathers of their children.