David Cecil gets it 4

David Cecil rightly differentiates between leaders and led

On another forum, a discussion is going on following remarks attributed to David Cecil the playwright who whose play, The River and the Mountain, got him deported from Uganda.

David Cecil is quoted as saying: “Uganda is not a terrible place and most people are not homophobic but they are conservative,” said Mr Cecil. “There are pastors preaching hate, they are the problem.”

I couldn’t agree with him more on the homophobia. I tried to illustrate way back in 2010 that Ugandans then were no more homophobic than the South Africans, Americans or the French of 2013.  Attitudes towards homosexuality worldwide are deeply visceral and the difference tends to be in the lengths governments are willing to go to discourage their citizens from acting ruinously on the feelings they are perfectly entitled to.

In that light, the Scandinavian countries are years ahead of almost any place else in the world on this question. Homophobic sentiment exists in Sweden and Denmark, too. But the politicians are setting an example by leading the campaign to actively discourage the feelings from going beyond that,and perhaps even change them to acceptance and tolerance.

But it is on the issue of ‘conservatism’ that I want to dwell at this time.

My suspicion is that David Cecil is confusing ignorance and/or lack of education about homosexuality with conservatism. There is scant evidence to show that most Ugandans are conservative. What they are is unschooled about some aspects of life and sexuality, and too many of them hide their lack of knowledge in bombastic, shrill, often foolish knee-jerk throw-aways that observers mistake for conservatism.

Then there are Ugandans who are incapable of logical thought who, largely because this country’s education system focuses largely on churning out examination grades rather than critical thinking,  run to the Bible and “tradition” as their refuge.

Just like their politicians, Ugandans often yell instead of asking questions to get educated

The ignorant ones , who are not  familiar with or educated about homosexuality,  simply parrot what they heard Martin Ssempa yell out. If you try to engage them in an intellectual exploration of the issues, they are visibly at sea. Since Ugandans typically don’t want to admit that they don’t know, it is little wonder they opt for ignorant din instead.

Ssempa is of course a cynical and opportunistically homophobic pastor who knows that he is talking nonsense all the time but nonetheless tries to encourage his listeners to be homophobic because he is hoping it will get him paid. It all makes for great mindless noise – sadly – which many people mistake for “conservatism.”

Remember that more than 50% of Uganda’s population is under 25 (48% is under 15). That is precisely the age group that is demonstrably more open-minded about sex and sexuality – to Martin Ssempa’s acute frustration since it is also the age group he really wants to convert in his homophobic petri dish sermons.

See why it is a complete misunderstanding to argue think that Ugandans are homophobic or conservative?

That said, David Cecil has clearly used the years he has spent in Uganda rather well. He never met my grandmother who died at the ripe old age of 96 but he would be correct if he realized that she was not homophobic or conservative.

Having only gone to Bible school, she wasn’t the kind of woman anyone today would call educated. But she showed critical thinking and an enlightenment that a lot of schooled Ugandans would do well to emulate.

How so?

My grandmother knew David Kato. He lived down the road from her own house. She also knew that he was gay and spoke about how odd it was that a man could ‘unite’ with another man that way. But she also knew to mind her own business and made sure she never raised Kato’s homosexuality with his mother whom she also knew well. One of her step sons, my father’s brother, spoke positively of David Kato at his funeral and my grandmother would have totally approved.

My grandmother had more sense than ten Martin Ssempas and do you know how I know that? She was angrier about the wanton abuse of office by government officials than she was about  homosexuality. She recognized that homosexuality was a curiosity but would not expend energy on it because she was aware that she had known ‘odd’ people like that all her life and they had never affected her life the way lack of drugs and doctors in hospitals had robbed her of children, grandchildren and great children.

Uganda is not at all a terrible place, and the majority of Ugandans are not homophobic or conservative. The pastors and politicians preaching hate for their own opportunistic, selfish, ends are the problem.

Related articles

• What makes Pastor Martin Ssempa (PhD) tick? (sebaspace.wordpress.com)
• Uganda deports British theatre producer over play exploring gay issues (guardian.co.uk)
• I was flung into cell with killers and rapists for staging ‘gay’ play (standard.co.uk)
• Uganda ‘deports’ UK theatre producer (bbc.co.uk)
• Please stop this exaggeration! Please!!!!!! (sebaspace.wordpress.com)
• I am embarrassed to be African!

A letter to Rebecca Kadaga – from a supportive gay Ugandan 20

Madam Speaker, the right Honorable Rebecca Kadaga, Member of Parliament (MP) for the Kamuli District Women’s Constituency since 1989.

You are on a roll!

Over the last three weeks you have managed to hog the media spotlight almost exclusively, relegating Uganda’s president to a parenthesis. That makes you something of a wonder woman. It takes chutzpah to push Uganda’s president to the inside pages and you must be congratulated for stepping up in such a bold way.

First of all, Madam Speaker, welcome back from Canada.

You were absolutely right to stand up to John Baird when he upbraided you in public about the murder of David Kato. That case had

On a roll: Uganda’s Rebecca Kadaga

nothing to do with you and you were never part of the court case that eventually convicted Kato’s lover for that heinous crime. So, you did what you had to do for yourself and, indeed, for Uganda’s pride. John Baird would never speak to the Saudis or Kuwaitis in that manner – yet those countries have far more glaring gay and women’s rights abuses than Uganda.

But as with everything, Madam Speaker, please remember that hubris is a terrible vice in politics. By hubris, I mean an excess of pride, ambition or self-confidence. More often than not, it leads politicians to overreach.

Take your current involvement with failed politicians like James Nsaba-Buturo and convicted felons like Martin Ssempa and Michael Kyazze. While you have every right to listen to whoever wishes you to lend them an audience, as the Speaker of the House you represent the entire Parliament as well as the country. You thus cannot be seen to be siding with any one constituency even when their cause might further your own political ambitions. Speakers of the House have to be seen to be non-partisan, non-aligned, neutral. But of course you know this already.

Madam Speaker, this gay man wants you to encourage Uganda’s Parliament to debate and pass the bill. My reasons for this are detailed here. In short, this bill has hung over our heads like a cloud for three years now and it is time to resolve the issues surrounding it once and for all. If you support the bill because you feel it is against our culture, so be it.

But the facts don’t bear you out.

You are too smart not to be aware that Buganda’s Kabaka Mwanga was homosexual without any urging from colonialists. Uganda’s own president, the leader of your National Resistance Movement party agrees, and has admitted it publicly, that homosexuality has always been part of the African and Ugandan fabric. In fact, if you re-read

Wasn’t aware of the danger as he enjoyed himself: Damocles

your anthropology, you will find that homosexuality was tolerated before the white man came to Africa with his Bible – that foremost foreign import that our detractors love to subjectively, but liberally, quote from. I gather that you have no children of your own but it can’t be lost on you that all gay men and women in Uganda (500,000 and counting according to unofficial estimates) must have been begotten through heterosexual unions.

I thus disagree with your interpretation of the historical facts but feel that the bill should nonetheless go ahead since Uganda has a parliamentary system of making laws and the Bahati [Nazi] Bill which seeks to turn mothers, doctors, counselors into informers has already been tabled before the House.

Madam Speaker, allow me to take you back to Shakespeare and caution you against “vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself, and falls on the other side.” Given what you must surely know befell Macbeth and his over-ambitious wife, a little more circumspection, forethought, moderation before you speak might not come amiss.

Remember, too, the fable of Icarus who flew too close to the sun. Or that of Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse and his courtier named Damocles. You might be on a roll now, but there are all sorts of threats behind the glory you are seeking. A week is a very long time in politics but there are three more years to go to Uganda’s next presidential election – literally a lifetime.

Madam Speaker:

Hang on to your political ambitions. I would, however, presume to remind you that, as Speaker, you represent the entire country, including minorities – not just disgraced politicians, bigoted Parliamentarians or convicted religious prelates.

Madam Speaker:

Whether this bill is passed or not, you still have my support in your obvious quest to become the next president of Uganda – that is if I am not jailed and/or killed before 2016 by the legislation that you are so busy tying your colors to in which case my support will be moot.

From a gay Ugandan, living in Uganda, that you seek to criminalize purely on account of who he is, but who nonetheless supports your presidential ambitions because he is totally fed up to the back teeth of this uncaring, bungling, corruption-ridden, thieving, tired, rusted, putrid dish of a government.

Related articles

• Official: Uganda to Pass Anti-Gay Bill This Year (abcnews.go.com)
• Let the Bahati Nazi Anti-Gay Bill be passed! (sebaspace.wordpress.com)
• A freshly rejuvenated Ugandan homophobic lobby goes to work (sebaspace.wordpress.com)
• The case for Kadaga 2016 (sebaspace.wordpress.com)
• Kadaga (Uganda) 3 – Baird (Canada) 0 (sebaspace.wordpress.com)
• Canada’s Baird gives Ssempa and Bahati a new lease on life (sebaspace.wordpress.com)

Kadaga (Uganda) 3 – Baird (Canada) 0 12

“We are not a colony or a protectorate of Canada.” (Rebecca Kadaga)

In what is not going to hurt Rebecca Kadaga’s chances at the ballot in 2016 at all, she has taken on John Baird, Canada’s Foreign Minister and, in my mind, won hands down. Rebecca Kadaga is the current (and first female) Speaker of Uganda’s Parliament.

Invited to a conference, entitled ‘Citizenship, Identity and Linguistic and Cultural Diversity in a Globalised World’, Canada’s Baird apparently saw it as an opportunity to lecture Kadaga (and by implication, Uganda) about the death of David Kato about 20 months ago, implying that Kato’s murder was a state-inspired crime.

Kadaga would have none of it and went for him in a way that only someone of her confidence in the law (Kadaga is an accomplished lawyer) would. She was absolutely right, again in only a way someone with a good understanding of the law can be.

Please listen up Mr. Baird and all your hand-wringing friends all over the world who have elected yourselves  yes, elected yourselves, to wail louder than the bereaved:

Uganda’s legal system is not, cannot be perfect. It must be rife with miscarriages of justice, many of which will never be righted if only because Uganda lacks the resources to revisit cases that might have been decided incorrectly. But that imperfect law is what Uganda has and it passed the verdict that Kato was killed in a lover’s tiff.

Until you pay for your own superior investigation and prove otherwise, it’s game, set and match on that case. Kato was killed by an angry male lover and that is all there is to it. I have indicated before that there are many elements to the police investigation that I found disquieting but the verdict is the verdict is the verdict. Until I can prove otherwise, I, too, have to live with it.

I know all these friends of ours out there (many of them, dare one say it, making a living off of the back of gay rights issues in sub-Saharan Africa) wanted a different verdict, namely one that would advance their assumption that Kato was killed by the government of Uganda. They didn’t get it so Kadaga is absolutely right to call out their arrogance when they use their high offices to call out Uganda’s elected officials  about legal cases that have been settled in courts of law that the people being lectured to had nothing to do with.

Canada’s Foreign Minister was thus out-of-order to harangue Rebecca Kadaga in the way he did. If he has evidence that David Kato was killed by the state, he should have taken her aside and given it to her. Or better still, he could have stood up on his bully pulpit and presented it to the world. But for him to try to publicly embarrass his own guest was rude, supercilious and, frankly, boorish. Kadaga was thus absolutely right to stand up to this man.

“as a Speaker of Parliament, it is my responsibility to protect the rights of Members of Parliament; hence I cannot deny them the right to move private members’ Bills. The debate on homosexuality is not a settled matter.” (Rebecca Kadaga)

Even on the question of gay rights, which I feel Canada has a right to lobby Ugandan officials about, Baird should never have tried to talk at Kadaga the way he did. It was a breach of diplomatic etiquette if not condescending.

To put it in context, you will not find a single incident where a Canadian Foreign Minister, past or present, has talked to a Saudi Arabian or Kuwaiti official in the way Baird talked down to Kadaga. Yet those countries have far more egregious gay rights abuses than Uganda. Indeed Baird will not talk publicly down at an American official either. Yet more gay men and women have been killed in the last three years in Washington, DC (population 600,000) than have been killed in Uganda (population 33m) in the last 5 years.

So, let me turn again to our friends in the gay rights struggle. Please listen up one more time:

Much as you are ready to wail on our behalf at the drop of a hat, we, Ugandan gay men and women, are the ones who will live with the consequences of your bull-in-a-China-store recklessness. Stop acting as though this baby belongs to you – it doesn’t. You merely alienate people we shall eventually need when you embarrass our elected officials in public.  Consult before you charge.

Finally, terrible though the Bahati Bill might be, Uganda’s Parliament has a right to debate it if that’s what it decides to do. You can lobby from the sidelines, you can arm-twist whoever with threats to withdraw foreign aid, you can even lecture and give ultimatums – preferably in private.  Should the law nonetheless be passed, then you can impose sanctions and whatever other measures you consider fit. You, (well, your ancestors) introduced this parliamentary system of governance to Uganda, remember?

On a related but separate note … I must admit it’s getting very difficult for this Ugandan gay man not to like Rebecca Kadaga very, very much.

Related articles:

• Uganda Government speaks: Bahati Bill will continue
• Thirty years for “killer” of David Kato
• [Kale kayihura's] Press Statement!
• Homophobic rant at funeral sows discord and disarray

 

What has Tusapa got to do with gay rights? 9

Who are these people? Gay activists don't seem to know about them

This one has just been brought to my attention by Ugandan gay activists who should know about this group but don’t! It is a youth group calling itself Tusapa and their website is Tusapa.org.

The group claims to be fighting for gay rights and is even soliciting funds from wherever they can. The problem is that the gay angle seems conveniently tacked  on to what they do – likely in an opportunistic effort to make money. The other, more worrying, problem is that their entire photo gallery is littered with youths; young people who can’t be older than 15 or 16 who were photographed at events that clearly had nothing to do with homosexuality or gay rights.

Sadly, this kind of nefarious scheme wouldn’t be new at all in Uganda. It, however, has very serious implications that go far beyond making a quick buck and one hopes that it will be nipped in the bud quickly.

Related articles

• Uganda gay activists brave stigma to honour rights leader (vancouversun.com)
• Uganda’s Minister shuts down Gay Conference (sebaspace.wordpress.com)
• Uganda minister raids gay meeting (bbc.co.uk)

Uganda (& Africa) Caught in the gay rights headlights

Criminals or lovers?

Some years ago, a lady called Margaret Ssekajja said something at a gathering she had been invited to whose import she likely didn’t quite fathom. In speaking about her challenges as a spokesperson/chairperson for the Human Rights Commission in Uganda, she cited homosexuality as a particularly vexing subject for her organization because, to paraphrase her, she didn’t know what to do about it.

When she was handed the gay human rights case brought by Victor Mukasa/Oyo against the government in 2006, Justice Stella Arach asked one her colleagues (and again I paraphrase): “What am I going to do with this case?” The reason she asked herself this question was that it was about the making a judgment about homosexuals’ rights in a country where sex between men and women was rarely discussed. Arach, no doubt also had her mind on the implications of passing judgment against a government on a matter that she knew public opinion was ambivalent about at best. To her credit, Arach eventually ruled in favor of gay rights and awarded Victor and Oyo $7,000 in damages.

A danger to Africa? How so?

Anywhere you look, the confusion surrounding what to do about the gay issue in most parts of Africa is palpable. The politicians say one thing today and then turn around and do u-turns as Zimbabwe’s Tsvangirai did publicly only a few days ago. No one has explained what precipitated the about face that saw him supporting gay rights only a year after condemning calls for gay rights; suffice it to say that it caught the rest of his colleagues in the shabby coalition that is Zimbabwe’s government by surprise and they could only offer knee-jerk condemnation. “I know personally he doesn’t believe it. He has said so many times in the Cabinet.” was all Justice Minister ,Patrick Chinamasa, could offer. But he has recanted, one wanted to yell at Chinamasa. It would have been a waste of effort.

Lower priority than consenting gay lovers: road carnage

Such is the confusion in Africa over the issue of homosexuals in their midst and their human rights that even the churches have long since stopped pretending to speak with one voice. Bishop DesmondTutu, bless him, has been consistent in his support of human rights for all. But the Catholic Church, Uganda’s Luke Orombi, Nigeria’s Akinola  and a motley collection of pentecostal ‘pastors’ in East Africa and elsewhere have all railed vociferously against homosexuals, promised fire and brimstone and marched in the streets to try and stir up the masses. That said, the head of Uganda’s Catholics was about the only prelate who seemed to condemn that anti-gay bill in 2009 but he had few friends anywhere else in the religious hierarchy in Uganda. The dissonance couldn’t be papered over.

Uganda’s roads: where is the Parliamentary indignation?

Their confusion notwithstanding, it still came as a shock when arch anti-gay ‘pastors’ in Uganda came out a couple of days ago and said the anti-gay bill they have supported all along was unnecessary and a distraction. Anti-gay Pastor Solomon Male running for the hills? When did he realize that the bill was a needless distraction?

Criminals? Why?

By refusing to go away, gay activism has succeeded in putting opponents on the back foot. This being Africa, matters of sexual morality fall in the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ territory and it is uncharted waters to discuss any sex, let alone gay sex, openly. That is why politicians, prelates and anyone with a dais is getting caught out. The initial reaction is to condemn, again because this is Africa. But, deep down, Africans are not idiots and it doesn’t take most thinking men and women long to determine that kissing a fellow man cannot be of greater risk to a nation than the road carnage that kills scores. Or officials stealing medical supplies, thereby condemning patients to a slow painful death. None of these crimes are expressly legislated against in Uganda, meaning that a reckless driver can get behind the wheel the following day and a thieving official will continue to run his private clinic using the medication he stole from the patients he was supposed to treat in the public hospital.

A more optimistic mind might thus conclude that perhaps these anti-gay crusaders have seen the light on their way to Damascus. One thing is for sure, their intellectual confusion over why anti-gay legislation should be a priority (or not) is beginning to publicly overwhelm them.