Her Story 2: Betty Bigombe, Ugandan peace negotiator

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary

4.3 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2019

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Betty Bigombe spent much of her career trying to negotiate peace with the notorious warlord Joseph Kony. She was born in northern Uganda as one of 11 children. Betty focused on her education from an early age. She won a fellowship at Harvard where she received an MA in Public Administration. On returning to Uganda, she was asked by the newly-installed president to go back to the north of the country, where she grew, up to try and stop the war raging there. The only way to do that was to convince Joseph Kony to engage in peace talks.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to her story made history on the BBC World Service with me Lee's
0:05.6	Doucette.
0:06.3	They call it the daughter of the soil. Let me go and talk to them in my own mother tongue.
0:17.0	Maybe it will make a difference. It's not necessarily that I believed in myself, but once I got there, I got the bug and I felt I could make a difference.
0:29.0	So I was having town hall meetings, I was going to stay in the camps. Every day I was going to stay in the camps.
0:33.0	Every day I was moving all of places, landmines blew up vehicles ahead of me.
0:40.0	Oh my God, I was traumatized.
0:43.0	Betty Be Gombbe, former Ugandan politician, peacemaker and World Bank official.
0:52.0	What drove her to talk to Africa's most notorious warlord Joseph Coney and his brutal
0:58.3	forces, the Lord's Resistance Army.
1:01.4	Death threats and deadly raids didn't stop her. Nor did the doubts and
1:05.8	derision of those who said it's no place for a woman. In this second episode of her story
1:12.4	made history, we meet the mediator they called
1:16.2	Mummy Begambi.
1:19.6	Let's go back to the beginnings.
1:21.2	Born and raised in Uganda from a very humble family,
1:26.0	walked miles to go to school, maybe one meal a day or twice a day if you're lucky.
1:32.0	Big family. Big. I happen to be the eighth in the family of 11. Nine survived.
1:39.8	The others died when they were still young. I didn't even know them. And I was privileged at that time to be one of the girls to go to school. Well, I must say my parents were quite good in the sense that they made sure all of us went to school.
1:54.0	When you went to school in the rural areas what the school was four miles away so you
2:00.4	had to walk four miles there, walk four miles back home?
2:04.0	Oh yes, absolutely.
	...

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