Nankya boarded a taxi in which she coincidentally met her cousin Joseph, a soldier, who allegedly engaged in a robbery with others – leaving her as the prime suspect. She was found at the scene of crime.
She was moved from one police cell to another for some months until she was charged with armed robbery and taken to Luzira women’s prison. In 1995, she was convicted and sentenced to death although no one implicated her in any way throughout the trial.
She spent 15 years in the condemned section for death row convicts until 2009 when the death penalty was reviewed and she got transferred to Boma where other convicts stay. On July 23, 2015, Nankya officially walked out of prison.
She is still in disbelief at how her name was struck off the list of those who were meant to be hanged in 1999. The Observer recently visited Nankya at her home located in Bukoma village, about seven miles from Kyabakuza trading center off Masaka-Mbarara road to understand what has become of her since her release, her experience of women prisoners, and her thoughts about the death penalty in Uganda.
Seven years after she left Luzira prison, Justine Nankya still paces like a prisoner locked in jail as if on routine to accomplish the day’s tasks. She’s free from the hanger’s noose but the death shadow still lurks.
“I am out of prison but there are two things only God will ever explain to me. How did I end up in prison yet I was innocent and how did I survive being hanged in 1999 [at least 28 males and one female were hanged]? Don’t you think God is good to me?” Nankya asked, adding that a 23-year “wrongful death sentence” is too painful to forget. At first, she begged God for mercy to prove her innocence before the judges but “I always cried because He didn’t hear my prayers”.
She, however, said a death sentence was a blessing in disguise to regain her long-lost freedom because if she had received a life sentence, she probably would never have gotten out. It is time for breakfast and her two grandchildren are crying endlessly as she hurriedly cools their tea while attending to us. She observed their naughtiness.
“These children are crying and impatient because they are hungry. For me, I was humbled by prison life. If I don’t get something in time, I remain calm. I lost count of the times I ate beans with goat dung and stones from 1992 to 2002. The porridge and posho too used to be of poor quality.”
Nankya is living a modest life in her single-room rented house at Shs 50,000 monthly that doubles as a shop, struggling to get back some of what she lost while in prison. Outwardly, she looked perfectly normal, mingling well with neighbours and grandchildren.
But every other day, she must deal with memories of a once-promising businesswoman based in Nateete who mysteriously ended up in prison, lost her loved ones, and the never-ending pain of her two daughters – all primary school dropouts just like her.
She attended Senya primary school, Masaka for lower primary, and Nkoni primary school where she completed primary seven. Whereas her father had means of sponsoring her secondary education, Nankya got pregnant two weeks before her final examinations for her first child at 14 years – something that angered her father.
She has since learned how to speak fluent English while in prison. In 1992, her girls were aged four and two but she returned in 2015 to married women with four children each.
What perturbs her most is that she had the resources then to educate them but her shop that would have supported the children was looted clean in Nateete. They stayed under the care of grandparents in Masaka who later died. They were left under the watch of well-wishers.
LIFE ON DEATH ROW
Before Nankya entered the gates of Luzira prisons, she tasted the wrath of brutal police officers then at Nateete, Wandegeya, and Katwe, and Central police stations and filthy sleeping conditions inside women’s cells.
At Katwe police in Kibuye where she spent two and a half months, an officer who has since passed on sexually harassed her while at CPS, she was asked to pay of bribe of Shs 400,000 to secure her release or “rot” in prison.
“At Katwe, we were sleeping and eating from the same cell with buckets of urine and faeces of fellow prisoners. If the officers were not in good mood, you would spend the entire day with the buckets. There was also a male officer who occasionally took me to his office for questioning [about her case] yet it was a plot to rape me. While in Luzira prison, a woman claimed the same officer had impregnated her. She delivered from prison,” Nankya recalled.
When she finally entered Luzira, she was struck by the cleanliness inside the wards – with exception of a few isolated cases of “naturally dirty” female prisoners. The brutality of prison life dawned on her when she was sentenced to death and shifted from Boma to the heavily guarded condemned section – she spent there 16 years. Her movements were curtailed and couldn’t mingle with other prisoners besides those on death row.
Even if it meant going to the toilets, prison officers waited at every doorstep. She recalled sleeping on plain sisal with tattered blankets until around 2002 when female prisoners upgraded to four-inch mattresses. Nankya had no option but to embrace her new reality that her liberty had been taken away from her.
Meanwhile, the condemned section had at least 28 prisoners of all tribes and characters. Whenever one was caught on the wrong side of the internal rules, all inmates would suffer the same punishment. Her most trying moment came when they were confined to a cell for almost two weeks after one of them was caught with sachets of waragi.
“We were sleeping, defecating, and urinating [in buckets] in the same cell and food would reach us through the windows. The buckets filled to the brim but until the two weeks elapsed, the door remained closed. There were moments when someone was vomiting and another defecating with diarrhoea but you must continue with your food. It was my toughest moment in prison,” Nankya said, pleading not to delve much into the distressing incident. She opted for death.
Since death row inmates can’t see into other cells, it took incessant cries and yelling by all the inmates which attracted a visiting well-wisher to plead for their mercy to the authorities. The incident left some prisoners admitted due to the unhealthy conditions.
To counter the depression that had set in, she sought permission to start lunch-hour prayer sessions in the condemned section. She and her three colleagues became Born-Again Christian faithful. A three-person prayer group later grew to more than 500 people including prison staff by the time she was released.
In her 23-year incarceration, Nankya observed that some inmates [both in Boma and condemned sections] also made their stay at prison difficult. For instance, inmates were barred from using mobile phones, hard cash, wearing civilian clothes, and owning more than two uniforms – save for veteran prisoners and their heads who had up to nine uniforms – but often, female prisoners bribed officers to sneak in a few items.
She cited the times when she was appointed a katikkiro [a long-serving prisoner heading other prisoners] in Boma and renowned socialite Shanitah Namuyimbwa alias Bad Black entered the prison ward with a phone.
“She pleaded with me to remain silent but I immediately reported her to the officer in charge and she was summoned to the authorities and punished. She was taken to the cell where you are stripped and submerged in water for some time,” Nankya said.
Asked whether such punishments were called for, she added: “Of course, such punishments were harsh to prisoners but they instilled discipline in them. Some would leave the cell without toenails. If you don’t ask for forgiveness, you stay in water until you become remorseful. Be disciplined and prison life will not be hard. Some women go as far as abusing wardresses and fellow inmates. Should they walk scot-free?”
By the time she left prison, Nankya had long buried the hatchet with Bad Black. She also donated two of her nine uniforms to her though Bad Black also walked out a year later – after a four-year jail term for conning her former British lover David Greenhalgh of Shs 11bn (more than $3 million). In the second part to be published next week, Nankya reveals her views on death penalty.
nangonzi@observer.ug
This project was sponsored by The WAN-IFRA WIN Social Impact Reporting Initiative (SIRI) grant. Other series of stories profiling real life stories of women prisoners will follow in the subsequent editions of The Observer.
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