Susan Kigula: Woman who freed herself, hundred others from death row

When a young woman was convicted of murdering her partner and sentenced to death, no one could have imagined that she would study Law and free not only herself but hundreds of others from death row. Now Susan Kigula wants to go further and set up the first legal chambers staffed by lawyers behind bars.

11 years on death row What’s about to happen next in a small, wooden panelled courtroom in Kampala, will be written up by the local press as a melodramatic confession to a gruesome murder. Standing in the dock one afternoon in November 2011, Susan Kigula is about to let the weight of the past 11 years on death row get to her as she turns to her stepson. “Don’t you know that I love you so much?” she’ll cry to the 14-yearold boy who is sitting with her late partner’s family just feet away. The courtroom will be deadly silent as Kigula falls to her knees.
“You know that I do love you so much?” she’ll repeat. “I’m your mother!” And then, turning to the family of her late partner, Susan Kigula will say sorry. The local press in Uganda will write it up as if it was a scene in a soap opera. A hammy admittance of a horrifi c crime. Except that’s not what she meant, she says. “The press lied.” You didn’t confess to the murder of your partner, Constantine Sseremba? “No, dear,” Kigula’s voice is calm. She’s been asked this question too many times to be off ended. “I’ll tell you my truth.” Kigula was born in the Central Ugandan cattle-farming town of Masaka, about 134km (84 miles) south-west of Kampala.
Growing up “Growing up I was a daddy’s girl,” she says. “I used to tell him that I wanted to work in a bank because I thought that was a good job and I would be strong and independent if I had a good job. I had a lot of dreams back then because my parents made me believe they could all come true.” She and her three brothers and five sisters enjoyed a sheltered middleclass upbringing, centred around a close-knit church community.
The children played in the open fields into the evening and ate together with their parents every night. “My happy childhood didn’t prepare me for what was to come in adulthood,” she says simply. Kigula had been working for a couple of years in a small gift shop in Kampala when she met Constantine Sseremba, who, at 28, was 10 years her senior. They moved in together. The apartment was small, just two rooms, but Kigula says it was ideal for the family, which included Sseremba’s young son from a previous relationship. They soon had a daughter of their own. “We loved each very much,” says Kigula.
“We would go to the cinema and the park and people would tease us. They would call us twins because we were so in sync. We were not rich but we were happy that we had each other. “We saw the best in our situation and we didn’t dwell on the negative.” It’s an outlook that, many years later, would save her life. The 9 July 2000 could have been another forgettable evening, says Kigula. The young family ate dinner together. They laughed.
Confusion Kigula and Sseremba, his son and their daughter retired to bed. They slept all together in the only bedroom. Their housemaid, Patience Nansamba, was on a mattress in the living area next door. Kigula says that she was woken up around 2.30am by a piercing, flashing blow to the back of her neck. “There was hot blood oozing from a wound there. The sheets were wet with blood. It wasn’t just mine. “Because the main lights were off I couldn’t immediately take in the scene or see what was happening to us. I sat up dizzily on the bed in confusion.
“Then a small panel of light from the security lanterns outside came on and some of the room was lit. The children were unharmed. They were awake and distressed. “Constantine was on the floor, groaning. His neck was cut. It was all happening so quickly. “Our housemaid Patience ran into the room saying she had seen two people run out of the fl at moments earlier. “My vision was blurring and I was unsteady on my feet as I made my way outside to alert the neighbours to come help us. I saw a couple of figures running away, but they could have been anyone at this point, I can’t be sure they were my attackers.
“I made it to a restaurant outside where I was given a blanket, I hadn’t realised that I had run out of the house naked. “I was still bleeding and then my vision started blurring. I passed out.” Kigula woke up hours later in hospital, the wound to the back of her neck still throbbing, to hear that her partner had died. She was told that her family were looking after their one-year-old daughter Namata and Sseremba’s relatives, with whom she had a frosty relationship, had taken his three-year-old son into their home. It dawned on her that up until that moment she had lived a happy life; a contented childhood, a successful relationship, a good job. That was all gone now, she thought. Kigula’s father informed her that the families had arranged Sseremba’s burial for the following day. “My mind was a whirlwind. I couldn’t understand what had happened or why. Whoever had come to attack us was targeting both of us. Who wanted me and Constantine dead? I thought about it a lot. It bothers me still.” There was no obvious motive for the attack. Nothing had been stolen.
Funeral After Sseremba’s funeral, Kigula was being driven back to the hospital when she heard an announcement on the radio that made her freeze. The news reader announced that Constantine Sseremba and his 21-year-old partner, Susan Kigula, had both been murdered in a bungled burglary. “I thought, ‘Oh my god, the person who tried to kill us both had arranged a joint obituary assuming we would both be dead by now. They thought they’d get us both.’” Then, three days later, Kigula, still receiving treatment for her large neck wound, received a visit from the police. To her amazement, they charged her with murder and took her straight to a maximum security prison on the outskirts of Kampala, to await trial. Sseremba’s family said that her three-year-old stepson had seen Kigula and the housemaid kill his father.
“I was naive in that moment,” says Kigula. “I thought, ‘Obviously all of this is a mistake. The poor young boy is traumatised and confused. I’m innocent and of course people will see that.’ I had no idea how the legal system worked.” She didn’t hire a lawyer. She couldn’t aff ord one and, anyway, she was confident in the justice system. But two years later, Susan Kigula and Patience Nansamba were found guilty of the murder of Constantine Sseremba – based on the testimony of Sseremba’s now five-year-old son. Police also said that a blood-stained panga, a machete-like farming tool that was found in the doorway to the bedroom of the fl at belonged to Kigula.
The murder conviction came with a mandatory death sentence. The women were told the method would be hanging. Kigula looked at her now threeyear-old daughter, sitting with her parents, and burst into tears. It was 2005 and 20-year-old British student Alexander McLean was taking a break from his studies, after obtaining a law degree. After finishing school, a few years earlier, McLean had volunteered at Mulago Hospital in Kampala, hoping to bolster his CV for university, and had been deeply disturbed by the dire conditions there. He saw patients lying on unswept floors, often in pools of vomit and blood.
Their families were required to provide fresh sheets and towels, but when the patients were prisoners, relatives often left them to fend for themselves. A particularly gruesome, and avoidable, death of a young male prisoner in the jail prompted McLean, on his return to London, to raise money for healthcare facilities for prisoners in Uganda. He set up the African Prisons Project.
When he returned to Uganda in 2005 to oversee the refurbishing of the sick bay at Luzira Women’s Prison, Susan Kigula began to act as his translator. She made an instant impression on him. By this time Kigula had been in the prison for fi ve years. “Every day I would wake up and think, ‘Is this the day that I will be hanged?’” she says. But when asked what conditions were like her response is unemotional. “Prison is prison,” she says, without expanding. Kigula shared a cell built for one person with three other women. They used a bucket as toilet
Human Rights Watch A 2011 report into Ugandan prisons by Human Rights Watch said prisoners often slept on one shoulder, packed together so that they could only shift if an entire row agreed to roll at once. Inmates were sometimes confined in isolation cells, the report said, often naked, handcuffed, and sometimes denied food; the cells occasionally flooded with water up to ankle height. Kigula doesn’t want to talk about such things.
But she is keen to tell the story of how she obtained her freedom. For the first few weeks in prison Kigula, then aged 24, and the 50 or so women in her section would talk to each other about their impending death, about who would care for their children outside. “As I got to know the women I began to learn that many of them, like me, had been wrongly accused of crimes. Some were guilty but none of them deserved to be sentenced to death because the crimes they had committed were crimes of passion, they told me. Some of the crimes were a result of years of sexual and physical abuse by partners. I became a leader among the prisoners. I decided, ‘We have to do something. We have to change our attitudes.’ So I started by forgiving the people who put me in prison. I encouraged the other women to do the same. Then I decided to get to work.” Source:BBC

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