![\"This](\"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/jpg\/_95628202_punishmentisland2.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n“I remember being very hungry and cold. I was almost dying.”<\/p>\n
On the fifth day a fisherman came along and said he would take her home with him.
\n“I was a bit sceptical. I asked him whether he was tricking me and wanted to throw me into the water.<\/p>\n
“But he said: ‘No. I am taking you to be my wife.’ So he brought me here,” she reflects fondly, seated on a simple chair on the veranda of the house she shared with her husband.<\/p>\n
She lives in the village of Kashungyera, just a 10-minute boat trip across Lake Bunyonyi from Punishment Island, which is actually just a patch of waterlogged grass.<\/p>\n
At first, Ms Kyitaragabirwe was unsure how to greet me until Tyson Ndamwesiga, her grandson and a tour guide, told her that I spoke the local Rukiga language.<\/p>\n
Her face cracked into a nearly toothless smile. She held my arm from the elbow, in the tight grip that the Bakiga people usually reserve for long-lost relatives.<\/p>\n
The slender-built Ms Kyitaragabirwe walks with steady steps and estimates that she is in her eighties, but her family believes she is much older.<\/p>\n
She was born before birth certificates were common in this part of Uganda so it is impossible to be sure.<\/p>\n
“She used to have a voter’s registration card from just before Uganda’s independence [in 1962]. That is what we used to count backwards. We think she’s around 106,” says Mr Ndamwesiga.<\/p>\n
In traditional Bakiga society, a young woman could only get pregnant after marriage. Marrying off a virgin daughter meant receiving a bride price, mostly paid with livestock.<\/p>\n
An unmarried pregnant girl was seen as not only bringing shame to the family, but robbing it of much-needed wealth. Families used to rid themselves of the “shame” by dumping pregnant girls on Punishment Island, leaving them to die.<\/p>\n
Because of the remoteness of the area, the practice continued even after missionaries and colonialists arrived in Uganda in the 19th Century and outlawed it.
\nMost people at the time – especially girls – did not know how to swim. So if a young woman was dumped on the island, she had two options – jump into the water and drown, or wait to die from the cold and hunger.<\/p>\n
I asked Mrs Kyitaragabirwe if she was scared. She tilts her head to one side, frowning, and fires back:<\/p>\n
“I must have been about 12 years old. If you’re taken from your home to an island where no-one else lives, in the middle of the lake, wouldn’t you be scared?”<\/p>\n
In another part of the region, present-day Rukungiri District, pregnant girls would be thrown off a cliff at Kisiizi Falls.<\/p>\n Legend has it that it was not until one of them dragged her brother down with her that families stopped pushing their daughters to their deaths.<\/p>\n No-one ever survived Kisiizi Falls. But a number of girls are said to have survived Punishment Island, thanks to young men who could not afford to pay a bride price. After her husband took her to his home in the village of Kashungyera, Ms Kyitaragabirwe became a subject of curiosity and gossip.<\/p>\n Over the decades, she has become a tourist attraction – her home a regular stop for tourists on the trail of the history of the area.<\/p>\n While discussing her life story, she often stopped talking and starred at her hands contemplatively.<\/p>\n At other times, like when I asked how she lost her eye, she was quite evasive, instinctively raising her hand to touch it.<\/p>\n The touchiest subject seemed to be the fate of the baby she was pregnant with when she was left to die.<\/p>\n “The pregnancy was still quite young. I never had the baby. Back then you could not fight back to defend yourself. If you did, they would beat you up,” she says, lifting her head-wrap from her lap to wipe her face.<\/p>\n Even though she did not say it outright, I understood what she meant – she was beaten up and had a miscarriage.<\/p>\n Punishing girls – know in the local language as Okuhena, from which the island draws its local name Akampene – was an age-old practice. And Ms Kyitaragabirwe would have known about the consequences of a pregnancy.<\/p>\n “I had heard about other girls that had been taken to Punishment Island, although not anyone close to me. So, it seems I was also tempted by Satan,” she chuckles. Of her husband, James Kigandeire, who died in 2001, she said: “Oh, he loved me! He really looked after me.<\/p>\n “He said: ‘I picked you up from the wilderness, and I am not going to make you suffer’.<\/p>\n “We had six children together. We stayed in this home together until he died.”<\/p>\n And while it took decades, she was finally reconciled with her family.<\/p>\n She smiled and said: “After I became a Christian I forgave everyone, even my brother who had rowed me in the canoe. I would go home to visit my family, and if I met any of them I would greet them.”<\/p>\n Ms Kyitaragabirwe is believed to be the last woman who was dumped on the island, with the practice having died out after Christianity and government became stronger in the region.<\/p>\n Still, unmarried pregnant women were frowned upon for many years.<\/p>\n Condemning this attitude, Ms Kyitaragabirwe said: “I have three daughters. If any of them had got pregnant before they were married, I wouldn’t blame them or punish them.<\/p>\n “I know it can happen to any woman. If a young woman got pregnant today, she would come to her father’s house and be taken care of. The people who carried out such practices were blind.”<\/p>\n Source:BBC <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" {Unmarried girls who got pregnant used to be seen as bringing shame to their families in parts of Uganda, so they were taken to a tiny island and left to die. The lucky ones were rescued, and one of them is still alive. The BBC’s Patience Atuhaire tracked her down.} “When my family discovered that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[100],"byline":[160],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-34201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-africa","byline-theophile-niyitegeka"],"bylines":[{"id":160,"name":"Th\u00e9ophile Niyitegeka","slug":"theophile-niyitegeka","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":3}],"contributors":[{"id":160,"name":"Th\u00e9ophile Niyitegeka","slug":"theophile-niyitegeka","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":3}],"featured_image":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34201\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34201"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=34201"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=34201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/jpg\/_95628460_uganda.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n
\nMarrying girls from the island meant a dowry-free wife.<\/p>\n
\nShe never saw or heard from the man who led her down “Satan’s path”. However, she had heard, many years ago, that he had died.<\/p>\n