Punishment Island Lake Bunyoni is a beautiful, serene body of water in Central Africa, studded with many islands of different shapes and sizes. The water is always calm and the atmosphere is peaceful, but somewhere in the middle of all this tranquility one finds the smallest of all the islands. A single barren tree, home to a large group of black cormorants. They are a constant reminder of the island's dark, secret past.
Mauda's fate On a dark winter night in 1954 three young women stood at the edge of the water. Two of them had already been on the island a couple of days, while eighteen year old Mauda had just arrived. None of them knew how to swim. Although they lived around the lake and made a living from it, most people in this part of Uganda still don't know how to swim.
Left to die Mauda was probably the one suffering the most. She could still feel the excruciating pain of her oversized belly even though her seven month old baby was no longer inside. She had lost it hours earlier after receiving repeated beatings from her father and her older brother. Her mistake had been conceiving this baby out of wedlock. As local custom dictated, she was abandoned on the island to die so that the family would not have to bear the shame any longer. Her only hope was that some impoverished man from another village lacking sufficient means for a dowry would rescue her and take her as his wife.
