Courtship Rape Among The Karamojong of Eastern Uganda

In my article, What it takes to be a Man in Among the Karamojong, I made it clear that among the list of things that makes a young Karamojong man feel manly is the ability to successfully stock the love of his life, wrestle her down, tear off her under garments usually with a bayonet and celebrate a forceful carnal knowledge of her. This angle of the Karamojong courtship gets very dangerous sometimes. Young men stock their girls with bayonets strapped around their waists and they don’t hesitate to use these knives to slit prohibitive under garments like tight shorts they consider obstacles to their rape schemes.

Sometimes terrible accidents happen and the girls get deep cuts to their thighs while others get disabling injuries in the ensuing scuffles during courtship rape. Stories are told of boys who literally club their lovers to unconsciousness and carry them to their homes in a coma. The girls get treated by the mothers of the boys until they are well enough to start living with boys as their prospective wives pending marriage.

These sound criminal, but courtship rape among the Karamojong of Eastern Uganda is a cultural practice that is inconsistent with the constitution yet it is not criminalized by the Ugandan penal code even when rape in other parts of the country is punishable by death or life sentence. In Karamoja therefore, it does not raise any eyebrows, to find a young man pinning down a young girl in the bush, along a highway, in the garden or at a water point because society regard such acts as normal courtship behavior. Usually the girls are stocked in the bushes as they collect firewood or fetch water from the rivers. Some are followed in the gardens or in the bushes collecting building materials.

It is not an erratic, animalistic chase of any girl they meet. The truth is, the boy will have visited the girl in their home once or twice, he would have been introduced to the mother of the girl and by the time it gets to courtship rape, the two would have exchanged pleasantries signaling that they were indeed in love.

Generally speaking, the Karamojong consider it a weakness on the part of the girls to just give in to the boys’ demand for sexual gratification. Doing this would qualify such a girl for a prostitute, so the girls make things really difficult for their boy friends to prove a point that they are not just any easygoing prostitute. On the part of the boys, it is also considered weakness or even unmanliness for him to fail to subdue the resistant girl in his endeavour to have her sexually first time-this explains why courtship rape is such a violent contest-the takes are too high on both sides.

The weaker boys accept their weakness and hire peers to subdue relatively stronger girls who are difficult to wrestle down single handedly on first attempt. In this case, once the girl has been collectively pinned down by a group of boys, her legs spread wide, her arms immobilized, the boy friend will then be called to complete the simple task of carnal penetration-once he is done, the friends disappear and leave them to accomplish the rest of the sexual act.

It should also be noted that as soon as the girl feels the boy in her, she completely submits to him and immediately after the rape, they would elope happily to the boy’s home and they start living together pending marriage with many heads of cattle and goats as bride price.