I came here after seeing the story on the Guardian website just now. It’s super tragic and I hate that this is yet another women who has suffered horribly and died at the hands of someone who was once the person supposed to love her the most. Why can’t these men just leave women in peace to live our own lives after a break-up?
Anyway I honestly don’t know the details of her circumstances but I have some missionary-related connections to Uganda through family and family friends, and it’s a very different culture and social context, and I wanted to say that I think it’s really so unfair to criticise the father here.
For one thing, grieving people aren’t always great at saying the socially correct thing and various knock on impacts may suddenly occur to them etc. These aren’t likely to be savvy media-trained people. Both her parents seem completely heartbroken in the Guardian article video today. In that he is also talking about her land/property, because can you imagine the heartbreak of this happening and then yoir daughter’s murderer directly benefiting from your daughter’s death by damaging or claiming her land or property? Not because all he cares about as her father is her land (would be my interpretation). I’d like to think if the same fate befell me that my dad would be there making damn sure that my ex-partner did not gain anything from his murder of me.
I suspect the breadwinner comment was also to try and shine a light on what an awful crime has been committed and what an awful tragedy this was for the family, because sadly the fact that she was burned to death by an ex-partner maybe doesn’t come across as quite as shocking and tragic to wider society as it does here (which isn’t to say we don’t have our own issues in the U.K. with VAWG or it could never happen here etc but sadly I believe it’s way more common in Uganda, I don’t know about Kenya). But having the main breadwinner for the extended family die an untimely death, especially one who was enabling her children’s education, is one of the worst tragedies that can befall a poor Ugandan family. And could well be the difference between her children going to school or going out to work in the fields etc. Which perpetuates a cycle of poverty for future generations. So kind of a big deal, come on. It’s not like over here where the children might have to leave their fancy private school and move to the local comprehensive. They don’t have a welfare state there. When I visited there it made my cry to witness things like women walking for days with their very sick infants dying from malaria tied to their backs to get to hospital because they couldn’t afford the bus fare, that’s true poverty, not the relative poverty we see in the U.K.