Bailed out of prostitution, Nansubuga returns favour

There are stories one would never, not even in their wildest nightmare, wish on themselves or anyone.
Imagine one misogynistic man, probably 20 years your daughter’s senior, having sex with her all in exchange for peanuts.

These men buy sex from these young girls and think they are in a mutually benefitting affair.

This is the story of real-life girls forced into the age-old trade, and their struggle to move on.

Nansubuga's life story

Mariam Nansubuga, 30, was forced into prostitution as a child, turning to drugs and getting addicted to them, in order to stomach the torture of having sex with at least four men each night.

Nansubuga was orphaned at the age of six, after her father died in 1989. Her mother had died two months after Nansubuga was born. A surviving stepmother was one hell of a ruthless being. She even denied her a chance to see a blackboard beyond kindergarten’s top class.

When the stepmother’s insults intensified, Nansubuga ran away from home in Luweero in 1990, at age seven.

“I moved to Wobulenzi and slept on a veranda the first night before I set out in the morning to look for petty jobs that I could do to raise some money,” Nansubuga says.

Luckily, one woman gave her a job as a housemaid for six months before referring her to her sister in Gayaza. She received no pay for her efforts and this prompted her to leave just after six months of her transfer.

She then stayed with her childhood friend in Komamboga but had to pay rent. This was in 1992 when she was just nine. Unknown to Nansubuga, this friend was a sex worker who later introduced the nine-year-old to sex trade.

Launching into the unknown

One night with the moon high, Nansubuga joined her friend to sell their bodies. The thought of having intercourse at that tender age made Nansubuga squeamishly uncomfortable. But she had to do it; letting men old enough to be her grandfathers use her for sexual gratification.

While every girl remembers the day she lost her virginity for quite different reasons, Nansubuga remembers how much she sold hers.

“On my very first night, I earned Shs 3,000 but the experience was horrible. I bled, felt pain and did not enjoy it. How couldn’t this ‘defiler’ see that I was a child?”

Nansubuga tells me with agitation in her voice that one could cut through with a knife. Her immaturity and naivety seemed not to move her ‘professional’ friend who bought her painkillers to ease the pain.

Still she had to work in order to raise Shs 30,000 for their Shs 60,000 room. On her second day, she received three clients. 

Slowly, her fear was abated. Soon, men seemed to prefer her – the pre-puberty child – to the ‘old brooms’ which did not go down well with them because she started to make more money than them.

Together with her roommate, they moved to different places including Kalerwe, Kampala Casino, Ange Noir until they finally shifted to Bwaise’s notorious Kimombasa in 1995.
Within a month, she was making Shs 12,000 a night.

“I upgraded my skills and worked even harder because I saw it as the only alternative for income, although I did not enjoy even one session,” the mother of seven says.

“Once, a man took me to a lodge and paid me Shs 20,000. He used me for six straight hours. It clocked 5:30am and he still had energy for another one hour till 6:30am,” she says.

“When it was time to go, he escorted me to get a boda boda back home and the unthinkable happened. He grabbed me by the neck and told me to return his Shs 20,000 and also give him what I had already made. I walked home that morning, crying and in despair.”

“Another paid me Shs 10,000 for a short [engagement] and took me to his home. When I reached home, there were about four other men and they all used me in turn from 9pm to 1am. I was 11 years old then. Despite my screaming, no one intervened.”

Experimenting with drugs and alcohol

In order to withstand the cold and assaults, Nansubuga was introduced to a cocktail of drugs such as marijuana, mairungi and jet fuel.

“During day time, we would be drunk and this was meant to charge us for the night so that we could withstand all sorts of men, especially those who did not want to wear condoms,” Nansubuga said.

She surrounded herself with smokers, bandits and drunkards. Soon, she got herself a boyfriend, a former client.

Her boyfriend was no lover but a vicious pimp who left her pregnant at 13 years old. Her pregnancy was another nightmare plagued with frequent illness, vomiting and weight loss.

Then the worst part came during labour at Mulago hospital, a process that lasted five days, worrying doctors and nurses. It was later discovered that her system was clogged with drugs, which disrupted the delivery process.

“I spent three months on oxygen and it took me almost a full year to walk upright again. In fact, this birth affected me because I still limp a little,” she laments.

And to think she was only arriving at the door of adolescence, the age when most girls are only discovering their bodies and hormones. Yet here she was, a thoroughly sexually-experienced mother.

“After birth, my child was taken to the special care unit because I was still very weak.”

For six months, she remained bed-ridden and did not take to the streets until after a year.

Yet two years later, in 1998, Nansubuga was to become pregnant again. This time, she did not know the child’s father. And so it was with her third pregnancy in 1999. Bad luck struck that year too. Her friend and roommate passed away.

Lease of life

After recovering from that death, she worked herself hoarse, this time sleeping with about eight men each night to fend for her children. She always had a desire to abandon the trade but saw no way out.

Then in 2007, Reproductive Health Uganda (RHU), an NGO promoting sexual and reproductive health and rights services, identified her and many others through its scouts.

The organization was holding a one-week entrepreneurship training for ‘moonlight stars’ at Tick hotel in Kawempe.

“I initially had refused their offer because I knew it would be a waste of time. But the scouts persisted and said they would pay us and give us start-up capital for businesses,” Nansubuga says, adding that about 20 of at least 60 prostitutes turned up.

It was worthwhile. The entrepreneurship training aside, they also received counselling and volunteering skills she uses to-date. She was given Shs 100,000 as start-up capital for her new job of vending clothes and selling cassava. On average, these bring her Shs 250,000 a month.

She is also one of 90 peer educators at the RHU Moonlight Star Clinic in Bwaise where I found her counselling a youth on family planning. The clinic’s in-charge, Mariam Mugambi, told me Nansubuga is now a great resource in the clinic.

“She labours to do cross counselling and advising those still in the trade to join her because of the dangers accruing, such as unwanted pregnancies and STIs,” Mugambi said.

In her long-term plans, Nansubuga hopes to build a house. In 2008, she met and is staying with the father of her four youngest children. But the journey to quit sex work has not been a smooth one.

“I still get phone calls from some men asking to sleep with them, but I have resisted the urge and I am concentrating on my businesses.”

Her friend, Edith Nakiganda, 26, is now making a living out of baking cakes. She was trained and given start-up capital of Shs 200,000 by RHU after bailing her out of sex trade in 2007.

Each of these women admits it is only when they left that they realised that prostitution is the worst slime in the cesspool of life. But when, like Nansubuga, prostitution is what life handed you in place of a doll as a young girl, you probably don’t know any better.

Thanks to RHU, the former sex workers have a real shot at normalcy; if they can put their lost childhoods behind them permanently, that is.

ninsiima@observer.ug