You are lying in bed at home when over 100 armed military men breach your residence.
Your children’s room is vandalised. You are stripped of your nightdress as dozens of soldiers watch — leering, jeering, and filming.
On January 22, Barbara Itungo Kyagulanyi was assaulted in her own home after weeks of illegal house arrest. Her body became a message board on which the Ugandan state wrote its contempt for dissent. Her crime was not an act. It was proximity: she is married to Robert Kyagulanyi — Bobi Wine — the man who challenged Yoweri Museveni for the presidency in this year’s election.
Ugandan constitutional lawyer Zahara Nampewo was interrogated in her bedroom and denied the dignity of dressing herself. Doreen Kaija was abducted from her shower. Sarah Bireete was accosted while asleep.
Sauda Madada and Olivia Lutaaya encountered abuse not despite detention, but as part of it. Lina Zedriga and Jolly Jackline Tukamushaba disappeared into the administrative void that authoritarian systems reserve for inconvenient women. Sexualised political violence is not excess. It is a method, and it is not confined to Uganda.
The two called their tormentors’ bluff. BBC Eye Africa last week aired State of Fear: Inside Tanzania’s Enforced Disappearances. The audience, as always, was not just the victims. It was everyone else.
Kenya is not innocent either. We remember women stripped during protests, assaulted by police, then told — by the same state — that they imagined it, invited it or exaggerated it. Rwanda’s tightly controlled political space has long been shadowed by reports of custodial sexual abuse. In Sudan, where war has raged for over two years, women routinely choose suicide over the certainty of gang rape.
The geography differs, but the logic is constant. Sexual violence is uniquely effective as a tool of terror because it attacks more than the body. It annihilates dignity. It weaponises intimacy and collapses the boundary between private and public. When the state demonstrates that even the bedroom is not beyond its reach, obedience is no longer negotiated. It is coerced.
This is why authoritarian systems return to sexual terror again and again. It fractures communities faster than bullets. It silences more efficiently than prison. It spreads fear without repetition, because the imagination finishes the work.
This week, as the African Union convenes its 39th Summit, it will speak eloquently about peace but remain mute on sexualised state violence. It will issue statements on democratic backsliding in Uganda and Tanzania while signaling — by omission — that men’s and women’s bodies remain negotiable terrain in moments of political inconvenience.
Sexualised political violence is not a failure of capacity. It is a choice — a deliberate decision to govern through fear when consent can no longer be secured.
And crucially, it thrives on silence. Silence from neighbours. Silence from regional bodies. Silence from institutions fluent in statements but mute when men and women are turned into warning signs. This silence is not neutrality. It is collaboration. Perhaps the most corrosive silence of all is the one draped in respectability — the quiet of those who claim moral authority, religious conviction, maternal concern, yet find no words when other men and women are violated to stabilise power. There is no culture, no theology, and no tradition that sanctifies such silence.
No strong state needs to humiliate individuals to survive. Only frightened ones do. No confident government rules through degradation. Only desperate ones do.
We are witnessing a regional rehearsal in which men’s and women’s bodies are used to teach populations where power ends and submission begins. The series of abuses is itself the architecture of authoritarianism. This is how democracies rot — not always with tanks in the streets, but with shrugs in neighbouring capitals. Not with coups, but with procedures.
The African Union can elect to continue laundering atrocities, or it can follow the courageous example of its election observers and those of the South African Development Community in Tanzania last year.
The pain of the men and women targeted across Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda and Sudan is not peripheral to politics. It is central to it. Their violation is not incidental. It is intentional. Every authoritarian system eventually reveals what it values by what it is willing to violate. In East Africa today, that answer is people’s dignity.
Institutions that still have a choice can break the quiet. They can name the violence. They can demand accountability. They can insist that power answer to law, not mock it. There are moments in history when speaking is not optional. This is one of them. History will remember those who understood this moment for what it was — and those who mistook silence for wisdom while terror quietly did its work.
The write is a board member of the Kenya Human Rights Commission and writes in his individual capacity. @kwamchetsi; [email protected]
