by Danson Kahyana
The Anti-Homosexuality Act (2023), abbreviated here as AHA, is one of the most notorious laws that Uganda has enacted. It came into force on May 26, 2023, when Ugandan President, General Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, signed the bill, which the Uganda Parliament had passed, on March 21, 2023, into law. AHA imposes a life sentence on consensual same-sex conduct among adults, which is already criminalized under the Penal Code Act and the death penalty for what it calls “aggravated homosexuality” where same-sex acts involve children or people with disabilities, or where drugs or alcohol may impair judgment. There is also a penalty for up to twenty years in prison for activities that promote homosexuality. This has particularly sent shockwaves in the creative arts industry: writers, filmmakers, songwriters, publishers, producers, or distributors worry that their work could land them in prison. I have talked to many of them, and they have confessed to self-censoring as a way of keeping themselves safe. In her account, Beatrice Lamwaka, for instance, regrets writing two stories that broach queer topics because she could spend twenty years in prison for “promoting homosexuality.” For this reason, she is now self-censoring to avoid being imprisoned.
It might seem that my account of what is happening on the ground is overblown—that I am making it all up for rhetorical effect. This is not the case: a student I taught creative writing at Makerere University in 2023 had his final year project pulled down from the university library website because it had some poems on same-sex love. The library officials cited the AHA: they could be arrested, prosecuted and convicted for promoting homosexuality by indexing and hosting a project with homoerotic content. For the student to graduate, he had to purge his project of any homoerotic subject matter. This is the phrase the librarians used—purge the work of the stuff.
In this folio, Transition has done a wonderful thing—they have given a selection of Ugandan writers a chance to share their experience of being queer in Uganda with the world. This sharing serves three purposes. First, to give the reader an idea of what is going on in the country regarding the government’s torture and torment of the LGBTQIA+ community; second, to celebrate the community’s courage, resilience, and resourcefulness in negotiating their lives in a terribly stifling homophobic environment; and finally, to stand in solidarity with the victims of the law.
The stories and poems published here are heart-rending in many respects. Who could imagine, for instance, that a person born inter- sex would be subjected to myriad humiliations like the ones Tushabe describes, including being hounded from bathrooms designated for males or females, and being subjected to medical tests to determine whether they are male or female before they can be issued a national identity card and a passport? Reason? The way Tushabe looks (like a man) does not match the name they were given at birth, which, in Uganda, is considered a woman’s. I applaud Tushabe’s courage in detailing these humiliations arising from the condition with which they were born. Unfortunately, the officers at the Directorate of Immi grations learn nothing from this biological uniqueness: they do not propose the creation of gender categories that go beyond the binary male and female. This means that other people in Tushabe’s shoes will be treated the same way, if not worse, as they do not have the social and financial capital that Tushabe has (being a professor at a US university and having high-ranking people to help them navigate Uganda’s bureaucracy).
Gloria Kiconco’s poem “Ugly Androgyny” broaches a subject close to Tushabe’s: in a homophobic environment, one’s body is usually policed if it does not look like the “normal” binarized male or female one. The poem celebrates Grace Jones who “set fire to pronouns and danced in the glow.” It is chilling that because of AHA, androgynous persons are not safe as they can be attacked on the streets or subjected to myriad forms of harassment because of the way they look.
In “One Husband,” Jedidiah Mugarura depicts a panoptical society where everyone watches everyone for clues that one is queer, particularly after the anti-homosexuality bill is passed. Indeed, the narrator and the dentist he works for are arrested on suspicion that the clinic where they work is patronized by the queer community. The story shows how Ugandan law enforcement agencies go about their work— savagely—to say the least. Not only do the police officers undress the suspects for a purported medical examination to prove that they are gay, the friendlier one (a secret member of the queer community) acts as though he is physically assaulting the suspects in order to satisfy his bosses, who are following what is happening in the interrogation room on camera. This demonstrates how manhandling suspects into confessing to the crimes they have allegedly committed is the standard way that police officers work.
It is no wonder that the story entitled “Pastel Hands” captures the constant fear that lesbian girls at Ugandan secondary schools live in should their love affairs be found out. Two girls are caught in the act and are beaten by their teachers and later by their parents and then disgracefully expelled from the school. We hear the oft-repeated statement—homosexuality in Uganda is promoted by an American organization—but the fact that the narrator is herself a lesbian whose love experience is natural and not induced by American dollars ridicules the propaganda that this form of sexuality is a western donor-driven project. Undoubtedly, the author uses a pseudonym lest she be arrested, prosecuted and sentenced to twenty years in prison for “promoting sexuality.”
The fact that the narrator is herself a lesbian whose love experience is natural and not induced by American dollars ridicules the propaganda that this form of sexuality is a western donor-driven project.
The story entitled “Joyce” depicts the constant fear of assault the Ugandan queer community lives under. After an assignation so promising it might lead to a more serious relationship, the two male lovers hear a noise that makes them jump out of their skins as they fear their house is being surrounded. The extent of their fear is captured by the allusion to Salem, the village in Massachusetts Bay Colony, where people accused of being witches were burnt to death from 1692 to 1693. For Ugandan same-sex couples, the January 26, 2011 brutal murder of David Kato, a Ugandan gay rights activist, reminds them that their life is in danger all the time. Because AHA requires every person to report a homosexual act when they have reasonable suspicion that one has indeed been committed, we see—in “I’m Telling You about Omukwano Ogw’ebikukuju”—police break up a party of Ugayndans (a clever coinage referring to Ugandan gay people) after a nosy neighbor reports it.
It might sound an exaggeration to compare what is happening in post-AHA Uganda to what happened in apartheid South Africa where the Immorality Act of 1927 barred sexual intercourse between white people and other races, thereby leading to a hyper-surveillance of people’s sexuality. But this is what we see in the stories in this folio (except for Tushabe’s, which is about gender more than sexuality)— everybody is watching everyone, looking for clues that one could be queer. The mention of South Africa brings to mind Okot p’Bitek’s essay entitled “Indigenous Ills,” published in Transition 32 in 1967, in which he argued that “the most striking and frightening characteristic of all African governments is this: that without exception, all of them are dictatorships, and practice such ruthless discrimination as to make the South African apartheid look tame.” As a poet, p’Bitek was deliberately hyperbolic to make his point emphatically, but there is some truth in his words regarding what is happening in Uganda. The leader who promised that he had ushered in fundamental change, when he took over the reins of power by force of arms in 1986, has since become a big disappointment, suppressing people’s rights in myriad ways, including using legislation to stifle dissent.
The stories of the queer community in Uganda are linked to the story of Transition in several ways—both the Ugayndans and the mag-azine have been victims of tyrannical regimes that suppress people’s rights with impunity. For Transition, it was President Milton Obote’s maniacal obsession with stifling dissent; for Museveni, it is the same obsession (hence several laws like the Public Order Management Act, the Computer Misuse Act, the Stage Plays and Public Entertainments Act, and so forth), but also the obsession to control even the citizen’s private space, hence the AHA that pries into what happens in people’s bedrooms. This folio will go a long way in giving the world a picture of what is happening in Uganda. The stories of the people shared here are horrifying because of the blatant abuse of constitutionally protected human rights at play in their accounts. But we should remember that in a military government whose leader is determined to die in power or to pass power to his son, human rights are dispensable. What matters is personal and family interests, not the rule of law. Of course, the regime has the trappings of democracy, as Aili Mari Tripp has demonstrated in her book Museveni’s Uganda: Paradoxes of Power in a Hybrid Regime (2010)—hence her term “hybrid regime.” However, when all is said and done, this does not matter. What matters is that the gun, not the elections, is the key decider of the political contestation between the ruling party and the opposition parties as the award-winning feature documentary “Bobi Wine: The People’s President” (2023), featuring the popstar-turned musician, Hon. Robert Ssentamu Kyagulanyi, shows. Unfortunately, in a military regime, the law is selectively enforced, and weaponized to target people seen as enemies of the state. It is common knowledge that in Uganda, we have criminals walking scot- free even when their crimes are well known. Take the case of police and military officers who have kidnapped, tortured, or even killed people opposed to Museveni’s ruling party. So long as Museveni remains in power, these people are not prosecuted for the crimes they have committed. A well-known case is that of General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, Museveni’s son and the current Commander of the Uganda
People’s Defense Forces (UPDF), who ordered the arrest and torture of the writer Kakwenza Rukirabashaija in December 2021. In The Savage Avenger (2023), Rukirabashaija gives a harrowing account of the nearly fatal torture he was subjected to, but Kainerugaba has never been charged or investigated. The reason is clear: not only is he Museveni’s son, but he is also the head of Uganda’s defense forces. In a country where some people are considered above the law in the George Orwellian fashion of some pigs being more equal than others, it follows that the AHA can be weaponized to tame dissent.
Of course, he cares less if men sleep with fellow men and women sleep with fellow women, if these people do not stick their noses into the way he runs the country with both the carrot (patronage) and the stick (a militarized police force).
It is no wonder that when allegations of grand corruption were made against the Speaker of Uganda’s Parliament, Rt. Hon. Anita Annet Among, in mid-2024, she claimed that she was being witch-hunted by “bum-shafters” for her role in passing the AHA. In the same vein, Museveni has publicly blamed demonstrations in support of a better-governed Uganda on western elements that push for western lifestyles as opposed to African morality. Of course, he cares less if men sleep with fellow men and women sleep with fellow women, if these people do not stick their noses into the way he runs the country with both the carrot (patronage) and the stick (a militarized police force). This is where the law becomes his biopolitical weapon to stifle dissent, not just by arresting, prosecuting and incarcerating activists pushing for human rights on the pretext that they are homosexuals or promote homosexuality, but also by sentencing some of them to death on the allegation that they have engaged in aggravated homosexuality which the act defines as same-sex relations with minors or disabled people, and those carried out under threat or while someone is unconscious, as already pointed out. If we remember how Museveni’s government used the law against rape in 2006 to falsely accuse and maliciously prosecute his political opponent, the retired colonel Kizza Kifeefe Besigye, in order to kick him out of the 2006 presidential elections—he had even threatened to have him hanged—we can see how laws like the AHA play into the tyrant’s hands. The good news is that whatever law tyrants come up with, it will not stop the flow of love. This is one of the lessons the story “Joyce” teaches us—people will always find a way of loving each other and expressing this love even under draconian laws like AHA. “Joyce” reminds read- ers there is a limit to every legislation; there are places where these laws become impotent. Look at the affection the narrator shows as he expects his lover, and the detailed attention he pays to how he will host him, from ensuring that the house is clean and tidy, to what he will eat as he is quite picky. I read the story as sticking out the middle finger to the members of Parliament who enacted the bill and to President Museveni who signed it into law. Why? Here are people deeply in love and enjoying their love even as the homophobes mistakenly think they have stopped homoerotic desire in its tracks. As Okot p’Bitek’s Lawino asks in Song of Lawino (1966) to emphasize the naturalness of certain actions:
Who has discovered the medicine for thirst?
The medicines for hunger
And anger and enmity
Who has discovered them?
The story “Joyce” makes a point like Lawino’s—no law has ever stopped people from loving each other irrespective of the circumstances at play, be it race, ethnicity, or sexuality.
As poetry does, because of its private, personal nature, the poems in this folio offer the boldest dissent. Nsereko and Kincoco, in their poems “Crying at the Orgy” and “Ugly Androgyny,” enact liberatory practices that seem to have flourished under suppression. They provide unapologetic, celebratory portraits of real queerness and queer desire. It is no wonder that the stories and poems featured in this folio are defiant in intent in the sense that they ridicule the AHA lawmakers and the man they serve (Museveni). It is as if our esteemed writers are saying: see how naïve you fellows are—you think your law will dry up the love we have for each other?