ABSTRACT
In December 1998, 20-year-old Yahaya Waigongolo2 of Iganga town in eastern Uganda was arrested and later convicted of having sexual intercourse with a minor, a criminal offense called “defi lement.” According to Section 123 of the Ugandan Penal Code (cap 106) as amended in 1990, a male of any age who has sexual intercourse with a female under the age of eighteen, whether she consents or not, is guilty of defi lement. It is a criminal offense carrying a maximum penalty of death by hanging.3 The victim in this case, whom I will call Lydia, was a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl living in a middle-class section of town that bordered Yahaya’s one-roomed housing row. The two young lovers had been involved in a liaison for about nine months before the arrest. They colluded to keep the affair hidden from the girl’s strict father. Her father asked Lydia’s stepmother to increase surveillance over the adolescent after he noticed her waning interest in school and in her childhood friends, as well as a decrease in her typical playfulness with her younger step-siblings. Lydia’s increasingly visible signs of pregnancy, such as loose-fi tting clothes and nausea, sent an already protective father into a state of rage, culminating in his determined efforts to fi nd out who impregnated his daughter. Afraid that her father’s anger would result in violence against her and perhaps her stepmother, Lydia easily gave up the name of her lover.
