Ugandan Women Carry Everything on Their Heads, and the Country’s Future on Their Shoulders

IN IMAGES

With HeadStrong. The Women of Rural Uganda****, New Yorker Dan Nelken and Ugandan writer Beatrice Lamwaka celebrate the working women who, at the quarry and in the marketplace alike, hold up a society scarred by war and governed by a patriarchal order.

By Guénola Pellen. Photos by Dan Nelken & Adele Quartley Brown.

To photograph these women, Dan Nelken set up a portable studio at the roadside, in the middle of the market, at the entrance to the quarry, and hung behind them, whenever circumstances allowed, a length of mosquito netting that veils the setting without erasing it, letting a market stall, a heap of rubble, the outline of a mango tree show through.

The photographer claims kinship with the Northern European portraitists of the 17th and 18th centuries and with Face of Our Time, the collection of faces published by the German photographer August Sander in 1929. From them he takes the direct address to the viewer and the tool of the trade held firmly in hand, each woman presenting herself as she wishes to be seen, with the implement that best embodies her skill.

For more than twenty years, the Lord’s Resistance Army, a guerrilla movement claiming Christian inspiration and led by Joseph Kony, fought Yoweri Museveni’s government in the north of the country, abducting children from the villages to swell its ranks. Medical anthropologist Stella Nyanzi, who wrote the book’s foreword, notes that forced marriage is often the only way out for orphaned girls taken in by relatives with nothing to spare.

Aciro Vicky, 18, carries her son Michael tied to her back in a blue cloth, a jerrycan of gravel balanced on her hip and a hammer in her fist. Orphaned as a small child, raised by her maternal aunt, married at 15, she wanted to become a doctor. Of her parents she says only: “I don’t even remember their faces.”

Aloyo Nancy, 32, sells groundnut paste with Angel, 12 months, balanced on her hip. Apur Janet, 38, has been breaking stone for 10 years and feeds her eight children alone since her husband’s amputation. Acayo Margaret, 59, a retired nurse, has opened a village clinic and pays school fees for 10 children. Afiya Namazzi, 29, designs audio video games for the visually impaired.

The book draws its strength from this writing in two voices. The 66 portraits are answered by 36 accounts gathered by Beatrice Lamwaka, president of PEN Uganda, who kept following her interviewees through the two years the borders stayed closed. Stone breakers, a mechanic, a midwife, a motorcycle taxi driver, a video game designer: each portrait comes with a name, an age and a trade, and restores the sovereignty of women whom poverty has not deprived of power.