In case you missed it, the army took over the running of the Miss Uganda pageant this year.
Let that bizarre idea sink in for a moment.
This was certainly a beauty pageant with a difference. The swimsuit section was cast aside for an army style boot camp, milking of cows and showing your skills at handling goats and sheep. At the awards ceremony contestants were quizzed on farming techniques.
The winner, Ms Leah Kalanguka, a former mushroom and poultry farmer, might not go on to win Miss World, but at least we know she can get the ingredients for an omelette together very quickly.
Being covered in pig faeces goes hand in hand with being gorgeous, talented and a woman
According to the host, agriculture is a Ugandan value and this should be saluted. 
Finalists will become the faces of potato flour products, mango juice, corn flakes and honey.
So how did this strange marriage of beauty and agriculture come about?
The idea, apparently, is to make the agriculture sector attractive to young people. Makes perfect sense, after all being covered in pig faeces goes hand in hand with being gorgeous, talented and a woman.
This is what happens when armies are allowed to do anything other than march during national days. In case you’re wondering what the army has to do with agriculture, the president felt the sectors had been mismanaged by civil servants, so he decided to use the army instead. I didn’t know military college covered large-scale agriculture management, but what do I know.
Leah Kalanguka, Miss Uganda 2014, with other finalists. Whichever way you look at it, beauty pageants are an idea long past retirement
Leah Kalanguka, Miss Uganda 2014, with other finalists. Whichever way you look at it, beauty pageants are an idea long past retirement
Still paraded like cattle in 2014
Beauty pageants have a long history of doing the opposite of empowering women, sometimes to the extent of being borderline misogynistic in their somewhat cruel and narrow idea of beauty. Sure, one can argue that pageants are a celebration of femininity and beauty, but they have usually just been another excuse to present a parade of women for the male gaze and judge them on a bunch of questionable attributes.
We have all seen Beyoncé’s Beauty Hurts. Pageants can open up the female psyche to some fresh hell without the addition of cow pats to the mix.

To be fair some pageant organisers have tried to sugar the pill by offering university scholarships. Miss America is crowned with a whole host of worldwide opportunities and over $50 000 in scholarships. Yes, Miss America did have to endure the indignity of the swimsuit section and may have had to mention world peace more than once. She may also not have eaten much as she progressed through the stages of the various pageants leading to the big one, and her teeth may be suspiciously white because of God knows what, but at the end of it all she will be leaving college debt-free, which is nothing to scoff at these days. The organisers really know how to sweeten that pill.
The women’s rights movement has not been steadily inching towards a woman’s right to be knee deep in manure
In Africa we have not learnt to be that mercenary yet. Miss Uganda sought to focus the pageant this year on things that made a “good woman”, which included housekeeping and digging. I personally cannot dig worth a damn, nor sow seeds, so with my masters degree and sometimes adorable smile I probably would not have stood a fighting chance. But sour grapes aside, the Ugandan pageant has managed to add a fresh circle of hell to the inferno that is judging women on their physical appearance. Now we get to judge them on how well their bodies can scoop chicken poop.
We’re told we’re hotwired to respond to a narrow range of beauty, and that even babies respond more positively to this narrow range. Okay, so why not combine that with judging a woman on her likelihood of becoming the next great literary mind or nuclear physic? Or, since the continent has the potential to feed the entire world if our leaders don’t sell off all the arable land from under our feet, and if “fair trade” ever becomes more than a token drop in the ocean of a business that still tilts the playing field in favour of western farmers with huge subsidies while hypocritical governments talk up the benefits of globalisation, how about adding a category that assesses the contestants’ ideas for making the continent the agricultural powerhouse of this still new century alongside their ability to procure milk from a cow’s udder? Hey, being a farm girl myself I cannot emphasise the calming effect of hearing a cowbell and a moo in the background on a crisp morning at the crack of dawn.
But, no, once again we are being told to be beautiful, be domesticated, be anything but not out of the box. I applaud the Ugandan army and pageant organisers for trying to think outside the box, but making women herd goats does nothing for female empowerment. The women’s rights movement has not been steadily inching towards a woman’s right to be knee deep in manure.

Written By: Kagure Mugo