Beyond the Anti-gay law, take refuge in Uganda

In the public debate in Uganda on the new anti-gay law, as an external viewer of this society, I isolate some principal critiques. The first is linked to the international language of human rights, which emphasises the clear violation of those of a minority in the society. Complementary to this ‘legal’ approach, there is the attention to the unconstitutionality of this law. The second critique has a ‘religious’ characteristic and insists on the lack in the Bible of a particular God’s fury against homosexuals [1]. The third one is the claim of the practice as ‘African’, and puts attention to the colonial repression as the first officially against these practices. Another critique highlights the internal political order. Museveni, in loss of credibility, needs a campaign of moralization in order to receive, now, the ovation of the religious institutions and their believers, and after their votes during the presidential election in 2016.

Something seems to be under-discussed: the way in which this decision was taken and the kind of nationalism, and national pride, implicitly proposed to Ugandans. Analyzing his discourse during the signature, the President presented his decision as an evident consequence of an attentive consultation of the ‘truth of the science’. Museveni said: ‘According to the casual observations, there are rare deviations in nature from the normal. You witness cases like albinos (nyamagoye), barren women or men (enguumba), epa (breastless women) I thought it was wrong to punish someone about being born abnormal. (...) that’s why I first disagree to sign the law’ [2]. The request of a scientific opinion from scientists of the Department of Genetics in the Faculty of Medicine of Makerere University, emphasized the space-time of science alongside the reason, very popular, of resistance to the social imperialism of the whites. The issue of the scientific truth takes account also of the relation between nature and nurture. Museveni said: ‘Can somebody be homosexual purely by nature without nurture? The answer is: ‘No’. No study has shown that. Since nurture is the main cause of homosexuality, then society can do something about it to discourage the trends. There is no gene that is responsible for this behavior. So if it can be learnt it also can be unlearnt. That is why I have agreed to sign the Bill’ [3].

In my view, it’s quite difficult to pinpoint a human being that is not shaped by nurture and is rather an example of ‘pure human nature’. A basic scientific notion is that the genotype (our genetical identity) is not isolable in order to define an organism, but it’s in interaction with the phenotype (our characteristic determined by the environment and the genetics). Clifford Geertz, an American anthropologist, in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) shows the point from another prospective. He said that every human being is born with the same equipment to live one hundred lives (this is nature), but finally he/she will lives only one (because of nurture/culture). It’s interesting to note how the President refused the science, in particular the Genetics, to justify any ‘deviance’ of human behavior, homosexuality as well as drug addiction or every other abuse. The characteristic of the Nationalism that he proposes is not only based on a supposed moral purity of Ugandans, and Africans in general, in opposition to the decadence of muzungu, but he also entrenches his position with Eugenics. This science was used by German Nazi, through social policies based on the supremacy of the Aryan race among others. They provided to find physical and moral human master traits in order to eliminate (with also euthanasia) ‘unworthy lives’ from the heredity of the German population. This dangerous link between science and morality was also inspired by a strict Nazi’s education, that informed people about how to recognize and report these ‘genetically and morally sicks’ that affected the Aryan culture. It could seem excessive to compare Nazism and the politics of Ugandan Government towards homosexuals, but there is a connection in the premises of their politics. Both suppose that there is a good human nature, based on genetics, that needs to be preserved by the State from the moral degeneration of a minority.

Sexual minorities in Uganda have now become the official scapegoat, the problem of the false conscience of the society. Most of these people are now days prisoners in their own houses, blocked inside with the fear that someone could knock unexpectedly on their door. Even if the law punishes the sexual act between people of the same sex, it’s quite unlikely that the police can catch someone in the act. Beyond the implementation of the law, there are two big enemies: the delation and the recrudescence of the popular homophobia and trans-phobia. Taken from Fascist practice, delation means the reporting of antifascists, that is people who are opposed to the status quo. It includes a neighbor who decides to take revenge, or a false friend who takes the initiative to denounce your “unnatural” sexual orientation, even if the Anti-gay law doesn’t include the duty to report homosexuals.

What is more, the day after the signing of the law, one of the most relentless national tabloids, Red Pepper, decided to publish around 60 names of LGBTI people and those who sympathize with them. If the director was surely thinking about the collection of the day, maybe he was also aware to give a public example of how to destroy someone in a few hours. This mass media butchery has continued, in other cynical tabloids (‘the Sun’ or ‘Hello’), for more than one week with other names, photos and a lot of personal details of people ‘involved’. The public idea that is sustained is of a ‘secret society’, supported by western government and organization, with also a ‘President’ and ‘Ministries’, who recruit young children and teen-agers to abuse them and to ‘initiate’ them into homosexuality. These public delations give evidence to the other enemy, in other words the possibility that someone feels justified in dispensing their own justice against a person ‘accused’ or suspected to belong to this ‘secret society’. ‘Our first government are the people in the street’, said H. a boy of 20 years old. The first victims of these street-judges are mainly trans-genders, that is who express or feel that they belong to another gender, different to the one assigned to them at birth. They become for others the clothes that they are dressed in or the voice that they have, because they don’t represent the ‘normal’ model of femininity or masculinity. Some LGBTI people were, in these days, reported for ‘suspected’ activities by neighbors and arbitrary arrested and beaten by the police.

Even if the actual situation is dramatic for everybody who risks and suffers more are, also in this case, the poorest people. Among them there are for sure LGBTI refugees, who already escaped from their torturers and they arrived in an asylum country that wants them just dead. They are the ones that live in slums, without any security measures that can protect them, nor the possibility to lock themselves in their houses. Thus they live continually exposed to their potential assaulters. ‘How I can disappear? I go to the bathroom, I cook outdoor, I take water, If someone would attack me he can do it during the day, because they know that I could not report the case to the police’, said N. a Congolese refugee. It seems that most organizations cannot protect them. Furthermore, any few protective measures that were there before the passage of the law are not there anymore. Also the associations are scared because of the possibility to be reported as ‘promoters’ of homosexuality. Moreover the tool of resettlement (the possibility to be relocated in a third western country) seems a privilege for few ‘elect’.

Now, the possibility to live in a safe country is a mirage for (almost) everyone, Ugandans or not. Anyway, not everyone is ready to flee; some think that this is the moment to resist. An activist said: “It’s not easy to start another life in another country, this is my mother-land and I belong to it. If we don’t fight now it will be worst to whom will come after us. We are ready to suffer, because only by this things can really change!’.

END NOTES
[1] For more details see the article “Museveni and Abraham Lincoln” by Andrew M. Mwenda, in Independent of 6th March 2014 . http://www.independent.co.ug/the-last-word/the-last-word/8773?task=view
[2]From The Observer, 21 February 2014 http://www.observer.ug/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=30282:anti-gay-bill-museveni-responds-to-obama&catid=74:breakingnews&Itemid=117
[3] see 2

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