Punishment Island
Akampene Island on Lake Bunyonyi is better known as "Punishment Island" given its history of unmarried pregnant girls being abandoned to their fate there by scandalised family members and villagers of the local Bakiga ("people of the mountains") who lived in the area having arrived from Rwanda in the 17th and 18th centuries. In traditional Bakiga society, a young woman could only get pregnant after marriage. Unmarried pregnant girls were considered shameful, and families sought to rid themselves of this 'shame' by abandoning them on Punishment Island, though, as ever, the lads who get
the girls pregnant in the first place went unpunished themselves. The island is little more than a 215 square foot raised muddy platform that protrudes from the lake and is currently being eroded by the gentle lapping waves that float across Bunyoni. It is home to just two trees, one of which is long dead. Those expecting to see an island strewn with bones and skeletons of lost girls will find none. In reality whilst girls were ritually humiliated and left there to die from cold and hunger, many attempted to swim back to the mainland but perished in their attempts as few Ugandans can actually swim.
Others were saved by men without worldy goods looking for a wife without a "bride price" (money or property paid by the groom or his family to the parents of a woman upon the marriage of their daughter to the groom), whilst on other occasions the young man who got the girl pregnant in the first place would row out to save her and they would escape together setting up a new life far from the community that punished the girl in the first place. One girl who survived was just twelve years old when she became pregnant and was abandoned on the island by her family but, after four nights withour food, was rescued by a local fisherman who ended up marrying her, although the baby was lost. The practise ended in the mid-twentieth century as missionaries moved into the area however there are still survivors alive today to tell their stories.
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