Abstract
Strong extended-family fostering traditions and beliefs about “blood” as a substance that not only binds kin but also carries pathogens like HIV and certain character traits make formal adoption of unrelated children rare. Even so, there is strong public sentiment against the increasing number of foreigners seeking to adopt Ugandan children in the wake of other African countries closing adoption programs. Institutionalized orphans are thus in a double “blood bind,”—where, on one hand, they are nobody’s children but, on the other, they are Uganda’s children—rekindling Ugandan debates about orphan care against the hegemonic, international moral and political economies of adoption. This article examines how the situation is confronting Ugandan conceptions of kinship, belonging, and child protection—the moral and political economies of Ugandan “blood binds.”
While doing fieldwork at a Kampala orphanage in 2009, I fell into conversation with Vitale Mukasa (a pseudonym), the Ugandan parent of a child he and his wife had recently adopted there. He beamed with pride at the very thought of his new daughter. Given his obvious pride in her, I was surprised when he then casually volunteered, “We don’t want to tell anyone she’s adopted, so we just tell people she’s a child from an extramarital affair of mine”:
“That’s a better story!?” I gasped. He nodded resolutely, looking me straight in the eye: “That’s a better story.”
I was not prepared for the stigma that surrounded domestic adoption in Uganda. The extent to which Mukasa, for example, found it easier to claim that his adopted child had been born out of wedlock than to admit that they had formally adopted her seemed out of step with the widespread practice of informal fostering of children that I had been studying for several years. Despite a proliferation of orphans due to the AIDS pandemic, few African countries until recently have encouraged adoption, domestic or international, as a response. Although AIDS infection rates peaked in Uganda in the early 1990s, the government resisted intercountry adoption, which was becoming more popular at the time, as a means of dealing with the consequent “orphan crisis” which threatened to overwhelm extended-family care. But these same fostering traditions and beliefs about “blood” as a substance that not only binds kin but also carries pathogens like HIV and certain moral character traits make formal adoption of unrelated children rare in Uganda. Nonetheless, there are strong sentiments against foreigners adopting Ugandan children, for fear they may lose touch with their Ugandan heritage, or worse, experience abuse and maltreatment. This situation leaves abandoned and institutionalized orphans in a double “blood bind,” where, on one hand, they are nobody’s children but, on the other, they are Uganda’s children.
Based on anthropological fieldwork and media analysis conducted between 2007 and 2014 on orphanhood and adoption, 1 I consider here how intercountry adoption as a globalized mode of reproduction is challenging Ugandan “blood binds”—the moral and political economies—of orphan care. Recent debates have yielded a quagmire of tensions and contradictions as far as Ugandan attitudes about adoption. My goal here is not necessarily to resolve these but rather to inhabit these contradictions to see what they reveal about kinship, politics, and belonging where childcare and protection are concerned. To do this, I borrow Didier Fassin’s notion of moral economy. Drawing from earlier conceptualizations by E.P. Thompson and James Scott, Fassin (2005) uses the term to describe the values and norms that inform common moral worlds and “the moral evaluation of difference” (p. 366). Because, as Fassin (2005) points out, “… a bureaucracy can become ‘emotional’,” moral economy helps get at the “moral heart” of policies (p. 366) such as child care and protection. Fassin (2005) has also suggested that “The problematization of childhood in contemporary societies … has to do … with the sort of moral truth through which we construct children—not only in our familiar environment but also in far-off lands …” (p. 111). Few international policy issues thus get more “emotional” than intercountry adoption as a means of building—and sometimes tearing apart—families. I therefore wish to consider here how kinship—biological and social—enters debates about the political economy of intercountry adoption as a mode of family production.
First, I summarize the moral and political economies of intercountry adoption that have led to its recent dramatic increase in Uganda; then, I discuss the moral economy of child abandonment and institutionalization in Uganda, explaining why domestic adoption has been rare. Finally, I consider how the broader moral and political economies of intercountry adoption are confronting the moral economy of kinship and belonging within Uganda.
Intercountry adoption in global context
The moral economy of intercountry adoption
While the shifting frontier of intercountry adoption ostensibly reflects a concern with child rescue (Davies, 2011), intercountry adoption is usually spurred more by demand—amid falling fertility rates and availability of adopted children in the United States and Europe—than by supply of orphans needing homes (Cheney, 2014). Despite this, the idea that orphans need “saving” through intercountry adoption has persisted since the Korean War (Marre and Briggs, 2009: 8). Global media coverage has brought awareness of such crises to potential adopters (Cartwright, 2005; Hoffman, 2012), and the Internet has facilitated networking of potential transnational adoptive parents with agencies, orphanages, and other facilitators around the world (Marre and Briggs, 2009: 13). Demand for intercountry adoption is thus spurred by its representation in popular discourse as a corrective to disastrous social and political upheavals in sending countries (Hoffman, 2012; Marre and Briggs, 2009: 12–13).
Recently, the US evangelical movement also began a push for intercountry adoption amid their congregations (Joyce, 2013). Appropriating UNICEF’s broad definition of an orphan as a child who has lost a parent and statistics on the number of orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) which were originally meant to draw development aid’s attention toward children affected by AIDS, evangelicals set out to “save” (materially and spiritually) millions of orphans worldwide. But importantly, these numbers inflate the problem by failing to distinguish between the many children who are parentless and the very few children who are actually in need of families (Cheney, 2014).
The political economy of intercountry adoption
In Africa, the orphans who need “saving” are ostensibly those affected by war or AIDS—although most children orphaned by war and AIDS in Uganda, at least, are absorbed into extended-family networks. Nevertheless, adoptions from Africa have tripled in the last decade, despite a worldwide decline (The African Child Policy Forum [ACPF], 2012). Ethiopia became the first African country to break into the top 10 sending countries in 2004 with 1527 intercountry adoptions (nearly twice that of 2003). By 2009, Ethiopia had surpassed second-place Russia in real numbers, with 4564 intercountry adoptions. In 2011, only China was higher with 4418 intercountry adoptions to Ethiopia’s 3456—although these numbers represent 1.7/1000 live births in Ethiopia versus 0.27/1000 in China (Selman, 2013).
Following a familiar pattern previously established in Guatemala, Vietnam, Cambodia, and other sending countries, the adoption boom in Ethiopia quickly led to numerous allegations of corruption and child trafficking, until the Ethiopian government decided in 2012 to drastically reduce the number of adoptions processed. By then, the intercountry adoption community was already looking for new frontiers. Uganda was not initially seen as an ideal candidate, despite its supposed abundance of orphans: the Uganda Children Act of 1997 imposed a restrictive 3-year residency requirement for foreign adoptive parents (Government of Uganda, 1997). However, when the US Embassy issued a visa for a Ugandan child under the legal guardianship of US citizens in 2007, the intercountry adoption community discovered that applying for legal guardianship could act as a loophole that would allow them to take Ugandan children out of the country and then finalize adoption in their home countries, although technically legal guardianships are still under Ugandan jurisdiction (Namubiru Mukasa, 2013). Legal guardianship is explicitly designated as a temporary arrangement not to be used as a means to adopt, but due to legal precedent, Ugandan courts continue granting legal guardianship orders to foreigners (Alternative Care Uganda, 2014). According to the US State Department, only 311 Ugandan children were adopted by US citizens from 1999 to 2010, but in 2011 alone, 207 Ugandan children were adopted by US citizens (Schwarzschild, 2013)—a 400% increase from 2010 (Alternative Care Uganda, 2014). In 2012, 238 of 254 total Ugandan intercountry adoptions were to the United States (Australian InterCountry Adoption Network [AICAN], 2015)—95% of them, according to Alternative Care Consultant Mark Riley, through the legal guardianship loophole.
The numbers may still seem small, but at approximately US$40,000 per case, intercountry adoption is a highly lucrative business. 2 Thus, evidence is already pointing to alarming irregularities, including recruitment and inducement of birth parents to relinquish children, “child laundering” through altering and forgery of records (Smolin, 2010), and extortion of funds from prospective adoptive parents.
The high-profile case of Stuart Bukenya is emblematic of child trafficking into adoption. In May 2009, a relative approached 4-year-old Stuart’s parents to connect them with his employer, a lawyer whom he claimed to match poor children in Uganda with families in Europe and the United States for financial support. They agreed to be referred and were soon told that Stuart was chosen to go to the United States to be educated by a White, Christian, American family—the Hodges—under a legal guardianship arrangement. The parents were promised regular communication with Stuart and that he would return every 2 years until he completed his education and returned for good. Believing this to be a great opportunity, they cooperated in the entire process, which they had understood as temporary educational sponsorship rather than permanent adoption. The courts granted the Hodges legal guardianship, but once they were back in the United States, the Hodges immediately filed for adoption and changed Stuart’s name to Silas Hodge. Stuart’s parents in Uganda returned to the courts to ask how they could get their child back, only to find that they had no legal recourse (NTV Uganda, 2013).
Although Uganda has not signed the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, many government offices and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are establishing more safeguards to protect against adoption irregularities. In the meantime, child protection and alternative care specialists are trying to close the legal guardianship loophole by calling for a moratorium, but certain key figures—including the Attorney General Peter Nyombi whose signature is needed for a proposed moratorium—have vested interests in keeping the adoption pipeline open. 3
At the same time, lack of regulations (or ability to implement them) makes it easy for foreigners to set up orphanages in Uganda.
4
According to Riley,
There are a number of reasons why people would start an orphanage. One is, they actually care, but they just don’t know what the right thing to do is. The second is money. It’s become an easy way of making money in Uganda because people just love giving money to orphans. The third is ego … they can save orphans, and that makes them a hero. So it’s colonization all over again.
The establishment of orphanages encourages abandonment, especially in poor communities, but social workers I interviewed also reported that foreign donors have instructed them to fill their orphanages with children, abandoned or not, because it pleases their supporters. Such practices not only perpetuate child rescue narratives that fuel donations for the establishment and maintenance of orphanages but lead to unnecessary child institutionalization and even “manufacture” of orphans—sometimes explicitly for the purposes of intercountry adoption (Cheney and Rotabi, forthcoming). Orphanages thus become a product of the adoption industry, rather than the reverse (Briggs, 2012: 56).
The political economy of abandonment, institutionalization, and adoption in Ugandan context
It is important to note that Uganda has no significant history of institutional care. In 1992, after decades of civil war and at the height of the AIDS pandemic when 16% of Ugandan children had lost at least one parent, only 2900 children were in institutional care (Williamson and Greenberg, 2010: 7). Today, 14% of Uganda’s 17.1 million children—or 2.43 million—have lost at least one parent to death. In all, 45.6% of these children have lost their parent(s) to HIV/AIDS (Uganda Ministry of Gender Labour and Social Development, 2011: 4). Despite an “orphan crisis” threatening to overwhelm traditional extended-family care, about 90% of orphaned children are still cared for in their families and communities (The Joint Learning Initiative on Children and HIV/AIDS [JLICA], 2009: 2).
These facts both problematize the very notion of “orphan” as a salient local category and fail to explain trends in institutionalization: by 2009, the number of children in institutions had skyrocketed to 40,000, and by 2013, it had jumped to 50,000 (Walakira et al., 2015: 1). 5 Meanwhile, the number of childcare institutions increased from 212 in 2009 to over 600 in 2012 (Riley, 2012). By late 2013, Riley notes, the number had risen to over 800.
These numbers are also disproportionate to what we know about child abandonment in Uganda. While it is difficult to find reliable numbers, child protection agencies estimate that a few hundred children are abandoned annually, about half in the capital city, Kampala. They are typically left at hospitals or in semi-public places such as bus depots or pit latrines. While research is also lacking on the actual reasons why parents abandon their children, much speculation rests on the mothers’ circumstances and moral character, as they are typically presumed to be young and/or “loose” women who have given birth out of wedlock. The social workers I interviewed, however, indicated that where they were able to reunify abandoned children with their families, poverty punctuated by temporary crises tended to be an overriding consideration in abandonment (as well as an obstacle to reunification). They also surmise that child abandonment is increasing due to a breakdown in the extended-family structure that would otherwise support mothers and children. Social worker John Kasule, who has decades of experience working in babies’ homes, told me,
People are positing that the reason kids go into homes is poverty, and they’ll be better tended in the homes. But in actuality they’re making them—and their families—more vulnerable … In a country like Uganda, children are a source of support for the family. They enhance the support because their parents are poor but they get support of the children, and then they can prosper … as one unit. But now when you pull out those children from there … the support you are giving the children far away from [their parents], the families are not benefiting from it.
Nevertheless, as orphanages spring up around the country, so do orphans to fill them. So, although many people may assume that orphanages are being established to meet the increase in child abandonment, again, it is more likely the other way around.
Obstacles to domestic adoption
For children whose families cannot be traced,
6
adoption is one of a range of family-based alternatives to long-term institutionalization, which is damaging to children’s development (UNICEF, 2011). On one hand, given that Ugandans pride themselves on their strong extended-family care system and therefore tend to advocate for community-based care of orphans and other vulnerable children, it is surprising that they would hesitate to adopt abandoned children. On the other hand, most people who foster children informally do so only for their relatives or close friends. This is because they tend to distinguish between the permeability of social kin relations and the impermeability of biological kin relations. Due to limited conceptions of adoption under customary law that only take place within the adopter’s bloodline, Davel (2008) claims that
Adoption outside the African conception of children as belonging to or being affiliated to a particular family … would not make sense. In addition, it cuts across the African practice of ancestor worship. A child who is deprived of its roots would lose contact with the patrilineal ancestors. (p. 270)
Ugandans’ reservations about adoption thus revolve around a moral economy of “blood” as an essential element in the formation of these kinship bonds. Noting, following Janet Carsten (2013), that “The many possibilities that exist for inserting blood or other tissues into discourses which are politically or morally charged are suggestive of the capacities these bodily materials have for metaphorical extension …” (p. S146), I therefore examine how “blood” acts as a metaphor for the immutability of identity and belonging/exclusion in Ugandan society.
Blood is mainly operationalized in Ugandan 7 moral economies of kinship through powerful beliefs that demonstrate its significance as a tie that binds children to their patrilineage—even when paternity is not clearly established. The Luganda proverb “Blood always finds its way home” implies that children estranged from their fathers’ clans are instinctively pulled back through their shared substance/kinship. People talk about blood as having a “smell” that helps children know to whom they are related. As a central idiom of relatedness, “blood” thus acts as a basis for rejecting adoption of institutionalized children. Furthermore, “blood” is seen not only as the binder of kinship ties but also as the carrier of essential characteristics and diseases that may have been inherited from the deceased or abandoning parents of children potentially available for adoption. Roby and Shaw (2006) even claim that “In some African cultures the adoption of a child is believed to introduce alien spirits into the family …” (p. 202). 8 Ugandan prospective adoptive parents reported that, to discourage them from adopting, relatives and friends regularly said things like, “You can’t adopt because you don’t know that child’s blood! What if his father was a murder!? Then he could be a murderer, too!”
The child protection system is thus in a difficult position of having to pit moral discourses of innocent children needing adoption against the local moral economy of “blood.” To adopt in such a context means to disinvest in powerful beliefs about blood as a substance that immutably binds biological kin. Although adoption can be complicated by the immutability of “blood,” some people are willing to take the risk because of similar cultural emphases on biological reproduction; infertility is one of the biggest motivating factors for prospective adoptive parents in Uganda. In a country with a high fertility rate, where having children is a central marker of adulthood for both men and women, adoption is considered an undesirable last resort. Women especially must fulfill their reproductive imperative by providing children for their husbands’ patrilineages. Infertility is thus an extraordinary burden for Ugandan women. In fact, women will often try to adopt a child without their husbands’ knowledge to obscure their (or their husbands’) infertility.
Adoption of unrelated children can also be seen as a threat to others’ entitlements to family resources. Catherine Nganda, a babies’ home director and adoptive parent, told me,
[Many Ugandans] will still find it noble and good that an American or a British comes and adopts a child; that is noble to them. But for you, a Ugandan … they see you already have your own family.
Relatives tend to object to adoption because bringing another child into a family threatens the inheritance of “blood relatives.” Because inheritance is executed through the male line, boys in particular pose a threat to others’ inheritance claims. Boys are therefore both abandoned more often and seen as less desirable adoptees than girls.
Kasule told me that by the time most Ugandans approached babies’ homes to adopt, they had already come to terms with issues about “blood,” but even where they had come to accept adoption, the formality, bureaucracy, and cost of the lengthy legal process tended to put them off. “Ugandans wonder why they should be taken to that task …” Kasule said. “They say, ‘We have already given ourselves to the love and we are taking the child into our care. Why do we have to conform to the legal processes?’” Kasule said that in 2009, it cost about US$1500 to adopt domestically, but thanks to several government and private initiatives, it now costs about US$200—and some organizations are trying to eliminate administrative fees altogether.
These changes and a vigorous public relations campaign called Ugandans Adopt (Childs i Foundation, 2013) have helped reduce some of the stigma associated with adoption. Yet, myths still persist that Ugandans do not want to—and cannot afford to—adopt. Even babies’ home social workers at alternative care workshops I attended in 2013 were shocked to hear that there are Ugandans willing to adopt; indeed, many had not even realized it was possible (although they were aware that foreigners could adopt in Uganda). Others were amazed that it actually costs Ugandans next to nothing, as they had retained lawyers who charged US$400–500 per adoption procedure. If these professionals—whose job it is to place children in adoption—are so ill-informed, then how can the general public know? Kasule and Nganda agreed that much more publicity is needed.
After adoption
Even after persisting with adoption, there were several important reasons why people who had adopted preferred to claim their adopted children as ‘blood’. Mukasa’s decision had mainly to do with managing his own relatives. Claiming patrilineal descent for his adopted child reduced several burdens: relative’s claims on his resources, pressure to foster their children, and relatives’ concerns about him bringing “bad blood” into the family. As a middle-class Ugandan, part of Mukasa’s motivation was in avoiding family’s claims on his wealth: “Relatives who are struggling might ask, ‘Why didn’t you take my child to raise!?’” he said. “If you want to stay in peace,” you avoid taking on relative dependents. In fact, most Ugandan adoptive parents I talked with had first tried informally fostering extended-family relatives before opting for adoption, but they had found it unsatisfactory for various reasons: it opened them up to criticism by the child’s biological parents for the way they were raising the children, and biological parents could come for their children at any time, regardless of the relationship the foster parents had forged with the children. As a result, they never felt that they could fully bond with the children for whom they cared. “I wanted somebody who I feel is mine …” Mukasa said, and he felt he could achieve that through adoption. Relatives would accept the girl if they believed she was his biological daughter, even if it meant he had had her out of wedlock. In fact, it was seen as honorable that he claimed paternity. But because acknowledgment by the patrilineage is still an important factor for adopted children, Mukasa and his wife told only his father—whose responsibility it was to give the child a clan name—that they were adopting the girl. By contrast, Nganda, who openly adopted a son after having twin daughters, said, “Even now, many families will accept it, but some families … still don’t recognize your adopted child the way they recognize your biological children … they are not obligated to welcome that child into their lives.”
In sum, as Nganda notes, “Fostering is seen as noble, adoption as shameful.” Despite the cultural ethos that “it takes a village” and the liberal use of kin terms to describe carers far removed from nuclear family, fostered children are never really “yours”; their reciprocal obligations will always be to their biological parents. Caring for kin is seen as a generous act toward family and community—just as having children is seen as contributing to your family and community—but adoption is considered “cheating” on those obligations, and this incorporation of children from different “blood” could have disastrous consequences for the cohesion of the family unit.
Although Signe Howell (2006) has suggested that children who are abandoned in Africa become “non-persons” (p. 189) because their disconnection from “blood” lines means they “fall outside kinship,” Ugandan abandoned children are not considered “less human” than other children; on the contrary, regular media stories about abandoned children invoke vociferous outcry and much sympathy for the children precisely because abandonment confounds the dominant ethos of family and community care (hence the pathologization of the abandoning parent). Rather, the issue is that these children’s families and communities are unknown. Other families do not immediately adopt them because they are known to be kin of another and therefore could never truly integrate. Furthermore, it is not necessarily the things that are discoverable by testing blood, such as HIV status, that put Ugandans off adopting children. 9 Blood contains certain “truths,” but testing cannot discern the intangible qualities carried in blood that make adoption so risky to Ugandans. Indeed, tests are to some extent unnecessary; the child’s prognosis is already written in blood’s cultural scripts.
Kin making as international politics: Who should care?
Many anthropologists have challenged conventional biological definitions of kin by describing the way care defines relatedness in many cultures (Alber, 2004; Weismantel, 1995). Where “blood”-based conceptions of kin pose obstacles for domestic adoption in Uganda, the question of care as kin making is what drives debates about intercountry adoption. Although adoption can be viewed as a personally shameful acknowledgment of the failure to reproduce, opening to intercountry adoption is also sometimes seen as shameful on a national level: a failure of the nation to take care of its own (Dubinsky, 2010).
The arrival of intercountry adoption in Uganda has thus spurred competition between various moral economies of local and international orphan care, particularly who gets to be family for which Ugandan children. In a clash of kinship concepts and the geopolitics of childcare, parental fitness becomes an international issue. Foreign adoptive parents, who typically come from wealthy Western countries, will claim they can give children from poor countries “a better life”—and birth parents relinquishing children often agree: “… with the poverty level in Uganda,” says Nganda, “there are so many parents who are willing to give up their children for adoption because they feel ‘I have suffered. If my child is going to have a better life, why not?’” Even Ugandan courts are making foreign adoption rulings on the premise that children will inevitably have “a better life” in a wealthy Western nation than they will in Uganda (Namubiru Mukasa, 2013). Such moral self-discrimination among Ugandans themselves indicates an internalization of broader Western discourses of parental fitness based on both class and race (Briggs, 2012: 87). In each case, the definitions of “best interests” and “a better life” hinge overwhelmingly on immediate material considerations—although many believe that other considerations, including long-term psychological health and belonging, should be equally important. Kasule told me,
When Ugandan families do foster or adopt … [children] are going to live within the same environment and sometimes are not all that well off except that [parents] are going to provide the love and bring up these children within the Ugandan community. So these children will not see themselves as strangers anywhere, whereas if they are adopted internationally, at times they get racial discrimination…
However, adoption debates premised on who is better suited to “give children a better life” often miss the point: it is not a question of whether (overwhelmingly White) adoptive parents from the United States or Europe could raise children of color from abroad but why and how certain parents, communities, and countries lose them to begin with (Briggs, 2012: 7). The “better life” discourse is used to mask the hegemony of an intercountry adoption industry that operates on inequality (Cheney, 2014), and the right to family is used to justify intercountry adoption by anyone who wants children (Howell, 2009: 157–158). However, adoption advocates rarely invoke the right to family for impoverished birth parents and their children in sending countries. The right to family, it should be noted, is not the same as entitlement to parenthood, particularly at the expense of others’ rights to family—not least a child’s right to be cared for by his or her parents and/or his or her right to identity, nationality, and culture (United Nations, 1989).
In a country where more than 50% live below the poverty line, being poor is not considered a legitimate legal or moral reason to relinquish one’s parental rights, either. Kasule once asked me rhetorically, “What measures do you have in place that the poverty of a family not able to take care of a child is this?” He set an imaginary bar with his hand. Kasule and many other child protection professionals thus urge the government to prioritize poverty reduction and more family support to prevent child abandonment. There are in fact many such programs, but they are up against a very powerful and monied intercountry adoption industry.
Efforts to promote domestic adoption also suffer as a result of material interpretations of “best interests” because they justify institutions with intercountry adoption programs favoring foreign adoptive parents over local ones. Nganda has seen it often, including when she began her own adoption journey. “I went to one adoption office at a babies’ home,” she said, “but the treatment they gave me as a Ugandan trying to adopt was different from what they gave an American, a White.” She said she and her husband persevered despite apparent discrimination, but on top of all the negativity around adoption of unrelated children, such treatment could quickly put off other Ugandan prospective adopters. “It’s that perception in Uganda many times that… whenever you see a White person, you automatically think ‘money.’ When you see a fellow Black, you think ‘broke’.” By late 2013, 35 Ugandan adoptive families who were pre-approved for adoption by the pilot Alternative Care Panel had been waiting for nearly 2 years to be matched with a child, while during that same period, hundreds of children went abroad with foreign adoptive parents. 10
The opinions of adoptees are also conspicuously absent in these debates. While it is too early to tell how children of Ugandan origin are faring in foreign adoptions, studies of other adult adoptees show that, even where they feel well integrated in their families and communities, they often experience a loss of connection with their country of origin that is difficult to recover (Quiroz, 2012; Yngvesson, 2010). This is especially true of adoptees whose adoptions took place under suspicious circumstances. Riley thinks it will not be long before Ugandan adoptees will be returning to ask tough questions:
I keep telling people in Uganda who are processing international adoptions, “this will come back to bite them in the ass. Listen to what adoptees who have grown up are saying!” And they’re gonna come up short in Uganda. Pro-ICA [intercountry adoption] folks will say these cases [of corruption] are the exception, but they’re already becoming quite common in Uganda, and the wave isn’t even full on yet …
Confronting Ugandan moral and political economies of “blood,” belonging, and child protection
Attention to the various moral and political economies of adoption has prompted Ugandans to reconsider their attitudes toward adoption, both in policy and in practice. Part of the reason Uganda established a 3-year waiting period for adoption was that they needed to be able to monitor the progress of a child in his or her new family, and they could not do that once the child left the country. According to Kasule, they also wanted whoever parented Ugandan children to keep those children in touch with their cultural heritage. The presumption was that foreigners who stayed in the country for 3 years would have some familiarity with and appreciation for Ugandan culture. Ugandans speak less of “blood” to inevitably pull adoptees back, but cultural heritage is still seen as an integral part of a child’s identity, so keeping children adopted abroad connected to Uganda is locally considered a marker of a responsible adoptive parent.
While some Ugandans see intercountry adoption as a unique opportunity, especially for children who might otherwise spend their childhoods in an orphanage, the potential loss of heritage is still seen as a difficult trade-off with the better standard of living adopted children are likely to encounter in the global North. It also raises concerns about exploitation and even some jealousy. Nganda said,
There are people you talk to and [they] say Ugandan children are going out, and yet you will find Ugandans fighting to go abroad themselves, so there is a conflict of interest. People want to go abroad because there are “greener pastures”; it’s a better life out there. But just as many are saying that the children should stay in Uganda because out there they are going to exploit them.
The way that intercountry adoption has developed in Uganda, with scandals like the Stuart Bukenya case becoming more common, is not helping raise locals’ opinions of it. Because of noticeable increases in foreign adoptions and media attention to such cases, Nganda says, “[Ugandans] no longer look at it as noble … They are now becoming more and more suspicious …” I have heard rumors that children are being adopted abroad for purposes of slavery, organ harvesting, and even being thrown off the Empire State Building.
Ugandan attitudes about domestic adoption and “blood” are still slow to change, but with more media attention to both international and domestic adoption, people are opening up to the idea. Nganda says that, due to recent government pilot programs and awareness campaigns, more Ugandans are considering formal fostering as a first step. However, analysis of adoption discourse in the local media suggests that there is still need to demystify the practice, and the primacy of biological reproduction in building families remains largely unchallenged.
Blood binds
Anthropological studies of kinship have been predicated on the immutability of kin relations as expressed through a distinctly Western idiom of “blood,” while non-Western cultures tend to practice more mutable forms of kinship (Carsten, 2011; Howell, 2006, 2009). Although, according to Carsten (2011), anthropological studies of blood as substance have “… highlighted processes of change and transferability in kinship” (p. 19), they can also highlight immutability: the belief that, as with an incurable disease, one cannot change essential moral qualities carried in the blood. However, my discussions with Ugandans about orphan care indicate that while it may be acceptable for Westerners to adopt unrelated children from Uganda, Ugandans themselves must first overcome the immutability of “blood” and the primacy of biological reproduction if the society is to widely accept domestic adoption.
The moral and political economies of adoption are pressing Ugandans to change their thinking about kinship and belonging to more mutable forms for the sake of keeping Ugandan children in Uganda. This means that while the Ugandan moral economy of “blood” limits the social group of the family as immutably and exclusionarily bounded for adopted children, Ugandans are still able to claim abandoned children as “ours”—as bounded by the nation-state—and therefore entitled to remain in the country of their birth. “Blood” gets implicated in debates about belonging, but belonging is also a political debate, about children as resources (and burdens) in families and nations. Who should get to care for them determines which country they contribute to if their potential is realized. As a caller into a Ugandan talk show about domestic adoption put it,
I think in Uganda most people are not so convinced with the idea of adopting other people’s kids, and this is a mentality we need to change. We always adopt people who are our relatives and we are not willing to welcome outsiders to our homes. But we forget that these are kids, and they have hearts, and they need to be nurtured and to be loved. If we change that, a lot could really change for our country.
Christine Sempebwa, an adoptive parent on the show, replied,
She is right; we need to change this attitude in our people in Uganda. We need to take care of ourselves, take care of our children. They are all our children, and the more of us who take on a child here, the better our children will be and the better the future of our country will be. (Childs i Foundation, 2013)
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.