The Hermaphrodite: Charles Tabu

Sixteen-year-old Charles Tabu has had to live with the agony and pain of hiding a deeply entrenched secret pertaining his sexuality.

But recently when peers at school learnt of his sexual abnormalities causing him to be branded a hermaphrodite, he could not bear it anymore. He not only kept away from school but also attempted to commit suicide. Luckily, his uncle counselled him and promised to find a solution to his problem.

Although his mother gave him male names, she knew he had both the male and female sex organs – a thing that seemed to bother her mind because Tabu was her first born. Before the mother, Rose Nabyana, thought of settling down to have other children, she abandoned Tabu with one of her brothers Jonah Musagala at a village in Wanyange, Jinja, in 2004 and she has not been seen again. By then, an 11-year-old Tabu who was in Primary Four at Katonte Primary School in Mayuge had started developing breasts.

The uncle, who’s a security guard at MM College at Wairaka in the suburbs of Jinja, was initially oblivious about Tabu’s sex disorders – it only came to his knowledge late last year when he saw Tabu’s fully grown breasts and he received his menstrual periods.



“He came to me crying in November last year. He revealed his condition to me and told me how he has been hiding it from other people and I. He said he was going to commit suicide,” said Musagala, who immediately sought help to correct Tabu’s condition.

Doctors at the Jinja Referral Hospital, who have done an ultrasound scan on Tabu’s reproductive organs as well as hormonal and sex chromosome tests, have confirmed that he has more biological male features than the female ones.

“We checked and he has no uterus,” explained Dr Benon Wanume, the Jinja Hospital medical superintendent. “What appeared like a vagina below his penis is actually his urethra that defectively opened at the bottom side of his penis and not at the end. He has testicles but they are atrophic (poorly developed).”

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