By Nankwanga Eunice Kasirye
Defending the Defenders is a three-year story telling project profiling experiences of journalists who report on Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG), and other female social justice defenders across Uganda and Africa. These “Defenders” not only amplify the suffering of survivors, but also silently carry their own psychological, Social and economic wounds.
Third Story
Breaking the Blade: Spotlight on Beatrice Chelangat
A SEED PLANTED IN THE HILLS
In 1976, deep in the mist-veiled hills of the Sabiny region in Eastern Uganda — where the mountains huddle together like ancient, brooding elders — a young girl named Beatrice Chelangat first heard whispers of female circumcision.
It was a Sunday morning, and the air smelled of damp earth and wood smoke. Millet fields bowed gently to the wind, and children’s laughter floated faintly between the ridges. Inside the small Anglican Church — a modest building of sunbaked bricks and timber, worn smooth by the hands of generations — the villagers had gathered, their bare feet dusting the earthen floor.
The archdeacon, a towering man in a heavy black robe, stood before the congregation. His voice, usually firm and commanding, trembled with something raw that morning — a wound too fresh to hide. Tears clung stubbornly to the corners of his eyes as he confessed: his own daughter, despite his strict warnings, had been secretly taken and circumcised at her uncle’s home.
The silence that followed was thick and stifling. It hung in the rafters and settled in the hearts of those present. His words, sharp and unrelenting, sliced through the women gathered at the front — mothers, grandmothers, aunts — accusing them of upholding a practice that some of the men, men like him, had dared to oppose in whispered defiance.
On a rough-hewn bench near the back, five-year-old Beatrice sat barefoot between her parents, the hem of her little dress gathered nervously in her fists. She could not fully grasp the meaning of what was being said, but something in the archdeacon’s brokenness carved itself into her spirit. She felt it — a strange, unfamiliar ache, a tightness in her small chest, as if the room itself had turned colder.
“That day,” Beatrice would later recall, her voice steady but her eyes distant, “a seed was planted in my heart. A seed of questions… a seed of knowing that something about our way of life was hurting us.”
It was her first awakening — the moment she began to sense that what many called tradition was, in truth, a battleground. One not fought with spears and shields, but within homes, churches, and the quiet, anguished prayers of the faithful.
The Culture Beyond Church Walls
Yet, once outside the church’s stone walls, life carried on untouched. Among the Sabiny, FGM was more than a ritual; it was a permanent marker of honour, marriageability, and family pride.
Girls who evaded the blade were branded outcasts — whispered about in the marketplaces, their names carried by mocking songs around the evening fires where drums thudded into the night.
When Beatrice later joined Sabei College for her secondary education, the grip of tradition became even more visible. By Senior two, at about the age of 15-16 years , girls around her pledged solemn oaths: to remain virgins until their circumcision day — a prized virtue zealously guarded and verified by appointed mentors.
Virginity was a currency; it promised higher dowries and a proud place in society.
Girls who didn’t keep their virginity until the cutting ritual-carried a permanent, invisible scar of shame.
At home, however, Beatrice’s world was different. While her friends celebrated their cuts with elaborate feasts, paraded through villages as ‘brave daughters,’ her own home remained silent.
Her father, a soft-spoken church warden, made no preparations for her initiation.
“I don’t know how I was spared,“ Beatrice reflects today. “Even now, it feels like an invisible hand shielded me.“
Dancing Between Two Worlds
In 1988, when the district decreed that every girl must face the blade, Beatrice stood at the edge of a dark tradition, watching others prepare for the knife.
Her two younger brothers crossed into manhood with drums and ululations, their circumcisions celebrated with proud, public ceremony. Meanwhile, she — the eldest daughter — remained untouched, an invisible shield of silence surrounding her. Invitations flooded in for her cousins’ cutting ceremonies, and Beatrice answered them dutifully: stirring pots, leading songs, smiling for the elders. Yet beneath her bright eyes, a quiet defiance stirred.
When she left for Senior Five and Six in Mbale, the world shifted beneath her feet. Here, in this neighboring region, the blade did not hunt girls. Only boys were circumcised, and even then, it was stripped of the heavy, sacred cruelty she had known.
At the Christian Union meetings, she found a new language for the ache she had carried. What her people had baptized as “honor,” others called by its true names — “harm,” “sin,” “violence.” Her convictions against the blade hardened, forging themselves like steel in the fire of newfound belief.
But home was a harder battlefield.
Even after the district quietly rewrote the law to make FGM a choice, the invisible chains of tradition tightened cruelly. Girls who refused the knife were denied the ultimate symbol of womanhood — the “flower,” a green climber plant worn with pride, proof of courage and belonging.
“Before 2007,” Beatrice says quietly, “they never gave me the flower. I simply accepted it.”
There is no bitterness in her voice, only a deep, settled strength.
“I learned,” she says, her eyes distant but steady, “that my resilience was like a second skin — another body, covering mine, shielding me from a world that could not understand my refusal to bleed.“
Inside the Rituals of Pain
Among the Sabiny people, the ritual of female circumcision was more than a rite of passage — it was a deep, painful imprint on a girl’s body, spirit, and future.
Unlike in other regions, FGM here meant a secondary circumcision: the cutting away of the clitoris and labia, without the stitches that other practices sometimes used. The wound was left open to the mercy of the body’s own strength — and the gods’.
Each girl was entrusted to a mentor, often a traditional birth attendant, a woman revered for her knowledge of herbs, spirits, and survival. She became the girl’s shadow and guide, overseeing the initiation, the slow, aching healing, and the unseen spiritual binding that tied the girl forever to her community. These mentors held an invisible power, one whispered about around cooking fires — it was said they could bless or curse a girl’s fertility, her very fortune, by where they hid the sacred, severed parts of her body.
The first treatment after the cutting was almost as brutal as the act itself. The girl was led, trembling, to squat and urinate over her fresh wounds — a therapy of fire disguised as healing. The pain was so blinding that many screamed into the hard earth, their cries swallowed by the wind and the knowing silence of the women around them.
Traditional herbs — pungent, bitter — were packed into the wounds to fight infection and hasten the body’s repair. Healing took about thirty days. Once a week, a health worker from the government might come up the winding hills, bearing a small vial of PPF injection — a fragile thread connecting ancient ritual to the outside world.
But the true climax came not with healing, but with the Leopard Ceremony.
On that day, the entire village would gather, the air thick with the beat of drums that made the very ground pulse. The girls, now initiates, would stand bare-armed. In a final act of devotion, their skin was gashed with sharp blades — four deep cuts on the upper arm, each one a symbol of the leopard’s bite. These scars, like the leopard’s own fierce markings, would brand them for life — badges of courage and womanhood.
At the peak of the ritual, the drumming would stop — a sudden, eerie silence falling like a blanket over the crowd. In that stillness, it was said, the spirit of the leopard entered, sealing the girls’ transformation.
After the ceremony, their lives were no longer their own. Marriage awaited — often arranged long before, with dowries already exchanged. Whether their hearts agreed or not, tradition had already made the choice for them.
In the world of the Sabiny, a girl’s pain was her passport. Her scars, her new identity. Her future, no longer hers alone.
A Different Path for Beatrice
Fate had its own plans for Beatrice, carving a path that no one in her village could have foreseen.
In 1992, under the vast skies and the misty slopes of Mount Elgon, Beatrice achieved what no other Sabiny girl from the lands now known as Kapchorwa, Kween, and Bukwo districts was able to achieve that year. She passed her advanced secondary school exams, earning a coveted government sponsorship to university — the only Sabiny girl that year. `
In those days, the life of a Sabiny girl was carefully scripted. Most were steered toward teaching in local primary schools, a profession seen as dignified, safe, and close enough to home to make good wives. Others were led straight from the thresholds of their initiation ceremonies into marriage, their futures sewn tightly to tradition.
But Beatrice was different. She quietly unstitched the heavy layers of expectation, one determined step at a time.
The old ways whispered that a Sabiny woman must marry within the tribe, bound by an ancient prophecy that warned of doom for any girl who dared to love beyond the ridges and rivers of her people. Those who disobeyed — who married “outsiders” — were condemned to fail and, in shame, to be returned home.
Yet the same prophecy did not bind Sabiny men. They took wives from distant lands, although those women often walked through life under the heavy cloud of suspicion, accused of witchcraft, and held at arm’s length by the community.
Against this backdrop of strict tradition, Beatrice stood — a living contradiction. She was uncut, a powerful statement in itself. She was highly educated, with books and faith tucked close to her heart instead of the ancestral expectations. In every sense, Beatrice was both a daughter of the Sabiny soil and a quiet rebellion against the forces that sought to define her.
In her stride was the courage of a generation that had been told to stay silent. In her story, the unspoken hopes of many girls — girls who, like the maize bending in the mountain winds, longed to reach for the open sky but were rooted by the old ways — finally found a voice.
The Call to Serve
During her first university holiday, Beatrice was crouched by the fire in her family’s open-air kitchen, the smoke curling into the afternoon sky and clinging to her hair and clothes. The heavy scent of burning firewood, the bubbling stew in the pot, the faint chatter of women pounding millet in the distance — it was the familiar hum of life in the Sabiny hills.
That’s when the archdeacon arrived, the same man who had once mourned the loss of his own daughter to the knife. His face was lined with years of grief and hope. Standing at the edge of the kitchen, he cleared his throat, and Beatrice looked up, squinting through the smoke.
“You must come back,” he said, his voice carrying the weight of a prayer. “Come back and fight this battle. You are proof that a Sabiny girl can be whole — untouched — and still be honored.”
Beatrice lowered her gaze, the ladle trembling slightly in her hand. She bowed out of respect, her heart caught between two worlds.
Inside her, a quiet ache stirred — the pull of dreams shaped far beyond the hills: gleaming glass buildings, the hush of air-conditioned offices, polished floors clicking under high-heeled shoes.
“I dreamed of Kampala,” she says now, her voice soft with memory.
But fate — stubborn and patient like the mountains — was already threading her back into the fabric of her people’s story.
Quiet Beginnings of a Storm
After her final university exams, Beatrice stood at the edge of Kampala’s restless streets with a heavy heart and an empty pocket. Jobs were whispers in the wind — promises that never quite reached her. With no opportunities in sight, she made her way back to her village, where life moved to the steady rhythm of sun and soil.
Home meant mornings draped in mist, where she worked alongside her father on the family farm. Together, they planted maize and beans in the wide, open fields, the earth warm and familiar under their bare feet, the sky above a restless ocean of clouds. In those long days, bending over rows of crops, Beatrice found quiet strength — but also a restless yearning for more.
In 1995, opportunity arrived in a form so humble it nearly slipped past unnoticed. She was invited to usher at a public gathering organized by the local Member of Parliament — a day marked by the smell of roasting maize, colorful kitenge fabrics fluttering in the breeze, and the hum of elders’ conversations under the old fig trees.
What began as a small task became a turning point. Impressed by her poise and attentiveness, the Woman Member of Parliament, in collaboration with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), recruited Beatrice for a discreet assignment: to document a “Reproductive Health Workshop.” Beneath that careful title was a bold mission — confronting the deep-rooted tradition of female genital mutilation (FGM) without igniting anger or shame among the proud Sabiny.
Armed with nothing more than a pen, a notebook, and an unwavering belief in the dignity of her people, Beatrice captured every whispered concern, every cautious question, every quiet act of courage. Her report, crafted in the language of respect and understanding, blossomed into something bigger: a concept paper, and eventually, the birth of a project — Reproductive Education and Community Health (REACH).
Through storytelling circles under mango trees, quiet home visits, and community dialogues woven into market days and church gatherings, REACH began to gently peel back generations of silence. It was not a battle waged with shouting and shame, but a slow, compassionate revolution rooted in the everyday life of the Sabiny people.
Within just one year, the seemingly unmovable tradition shifted — FGM rates fell by 36%. No headlines announced it. No drums were beaten in celebration. But in the hearts of daughters and mothers alike, a new story was beginning to grow — one of hope, dignity, and change carried on the soft winds of their mountain home.
Facing the Backlash
However, resistance flared like a wildfire in the dry grasslands of Sebei.
When REACH convened a gathering of 300 elders—custodians of tradition, seated in their kanzus and cloaks, leaning on walking sticks worn smooth by time—what was meant to be a dialogue turned into a storm.
The air grew thick with anger. Beatrice and her team stood at the front, hopeful, armed only with facts and fragile hope. But soon, voices rose like thunder.
“You are here to destroy us!” someone shouted.
“Western agents!” others hissed.
The elders, pillars of the community, turned hostile. Stones of insult were hurled—some literal, most verbal.
Beatrice remembers the moment vividly:
“The chaos…” she pauses, voice tightening, “…sent us into hiding for two months. We feared for our lives.”
It felt like exile in their own land.
But they didn’t give up.
In the quiet after the storm, they changed course. No more direct confrontations. They began to work beneath the surface—like the roots of the banana plant, steady and patient.
They sponsored girls’ education silently, offered support to youth groups humming with fresh energy, and started building a small health centre—brick by brick, hope by hope. They listened more, talked less, and slowly drew in a few sympathetic elders who were willing to reimagine the future.
Bit by bit, they planted seeds of change, knowing that in Sabiny tradition, even the stubbornest millet stalk can bend when rain and sun take turns to soften it.
New Traditions, New Resistance
Beatrice kept breaking barriers, one brave step at a time.
In the heart of the Sabiny hills, where tradition runs deep like the rivers cutting through the valleys, she dared to reimagine custom itself. She staged her own modern traditional marriage — with bright tents billowing in the wind, rows of plastic chairs under the open sky, and songs rising over the village fields. It was a wedding not hidden in whispers but celebrated boldly before the entire community. That day, she didn’t just marry — she carved a new path that many would follow.
But as the drums of change grew louder, so too did the storm of resistance.
Authorities froze REACH’s bank accounts without warning, leaving her team stranded. Trolls, emboldened by anonymity, hurled insults at her family across radios and market squares. Strangers, some once friends, came pleading to her father, urging him to “bring his daughter back into line.“
Still, Beatrice stood tall, her voice steady against the winds.
“I knew,” she says, her eyes reflecting years of battles fought in silence, “that change comes with scars.”
The scars ran deep.
In 2004, while working on a documentary, whispers grew into a deadly plot: a plan to seize and forcefully circumcise her deputy and their team. Under the cover of night, they fled on foot, abandoning their vehicles among the maize fields, hearts pounding, prayers slipping from their lips.
Ten years later, in 2014, the fight hit even closer to home.
Some of Beatrice’s own relatives were arrested for carrying out illegal FGM rituals. Amid the chaos, a woman — heavy with twin pregnancy — miscarried while in detention. Grief quickly turned to fury.
The hills that once echoed with celebration now roared with violent demonstrations — and Beatrice stood once more at the center of the storm, her dream bloodied but unbroken.
Beatrice’s Quiet Revolution: A Legacy Rooted in Courage
Beatrice Chilangati and her allies moved from village to village, weaving through narrow footpaths, sitting under the shade of old fig trees, speaking in hushed yet determined tones to elders, mothers, and girls whose lives were stitched tightly to tradition.
Their mission was simple yet revolutionary: to end the centuries-old practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).
By 2009, after countless fireside conversations, sleepless nights, and moments when hope seemed just a flicker against the vast Sabiny skies, the impossible happened — Kapchorwa District passed an ordinance banning FGM.
Later that same year, with the support of Hon. Chris Baryomunsi and Hon. Dorah Byamukama, the momentum spread across Uganda, culminating in a national ban.
President Yoweri Museveni, recognizing the depth of Beatrice’s sacrifice and vision, sponsored 30 young Sabiny girls to attend university — a powerful symbol that the future of a community could be rewritten.
Even more remarkable, the traditional cutters — women once revered for ushering girls into womanhood — were not abandoned. Instead, they were retrained as reproductive health advocates, their hands once instruments of pain now offering healing and hope.
“When I look around now,” Beatrice says, her voice quivering with emotion, “I see girls in classrooms, laughter spilling from dusty playgrounds, and dreams that reach beyond early marriage. I see smiles where once there was only fear.”
Her eyes, bright as the morning sun breaking over the Kapchorwa cliffs, carry the weight of battles fought and won.
Walking Through Fire, Emerging Whole
Beatrice’s journey is a testament to the extraordinary strength one woman can summon from deep within her bones — strength rooted in resilience, grace, and unshakable faith.
She endured rejection from her own, betrayal by those she trusted, and the heavy, sometimes silent, resistance of an entire culture.
Yet she never yielded.
“Even now,” she says, tracing her memories along the ridges of her homeland, “I walk the hills knowing that the forest I crossed — though thick and dark — was not in vain.”
The dust on her feet, the songs in the air, the shy smiles of young girls fetching water at the riverbank — all whisper of a new legacy, one built on courage and compassion.
FGM in Uganda — The Broader Fight
Today, Uganda’s national FGM prevalence has dropped below 1.4% (UNICEF, 2023) — a stunning achievement.
Yet in remote corners like the Sebei and Karamoja regions, particularly among the Sabiny and Pokot communities, the old ways still linger, hidden among mountain passes and border villages.
The fight continues, through:
- Community dialogues that gather elders, mothers, and youth under the familiar shade of community trees.
- Alternative Rites of Passage that honor tradition without bloodshed.
- Strict enforcement of the 2010 FGM Act to hold offenders accountable.
- Economic empowerment programs that offer former cutters a dignified livelihood.
- Cross-border collaborations with Kenya to seal the escape routes for harmful practices.
This fight is not just about changing laws — it is about healing generations.
It is about creating a world where no girl will ever again have to trade her dreams for survival.
And thanks to defenders like Beatrice, the hills of Sebei echo not just with ancient songs, but with the laughter of girls who are free.
