Seminar Preparation Week 3: Empire Critical Perspectives on Global Politics
4PIRS008W.2
Learning Portfolio Task 1
Complete the following reading notes for the essential reading,
Reading Title:
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Read Rahul Rao’s “Locations of Homphobia”, only until the bottom of page 184. (There is an optional recorded podcast with Rahul to listen to if you would like).
Key Words:
Research Question:
Summary of Argument:
Core Arguments:
Position:
Questions:
Learning Portfolio Task 2
Please Read Carol Cohn’s Defence Sex and Death: The Rational World of Defense Intellectuals, Signs.
1) What role do religious actors play in shaping contemporary views on LGBT rights? Please discuss various contexts and various actors.
2) What are the issues with tying humanitarian aid between the Global North and the Global South to LGBT rights?
3)
What do you think sexualised language makes war more permissible? Can you give an example from the second reading?
The locations of homophobia
Rahul Rao*
This article explores what is at stake in contemporary practices of locating
homophobia, as expressed in debates surrounding the Ugandan Anti
Homosexuality Act. Problematising both neo-Orientalist representations of
homophobia in Uganda and critical responses thereto, it draws on materialist,
postcolonial and queer approaches to offer an account of the transnational
production of homophobia that nonetheless accounts for its local resonance
and resilience.
S P A C E A N D T H E R E P R E S E N T A T I O N O F H O M O P H O B I A
The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association
(ILGA) publishes an annual report surveying the global extent of ‘State
Sponsored Homophobia’.
The report is accompanied by a series of maps,
the most comprehensive of which depicts the spread of ‘Lesbian and Gay
Rights in the World’. The map adopts a traffic light system of coding. It depicts
states judged to be spaces of ‘persecution’ on account of their punishment of
same-sex conduct with sentences of death or imprisonment in shades of red
and
orange. States in which the law is ambiguous, under challenge, or not explicitly
homophobic but amenable to misuse, are coloured yellow. States according
some degree of ‘recognition’ or ‘protection’ to same sex identities and unions
are coloured in various shades of green. The orange, crimson and maroon tones
draw the viewer’s attention towards ‘persecution’ states in the Caribbean, Africa
* Lecturer in Politics, SOAS, University of London. Email: rr18@soas.ac.uk. The research for this
article was funded by grants from SOAS, University of London, and the British Institute in Eastern
Africa. Sutapa Choudhury, Phil Clark, David Kato, Frank Mugisha, Jeff Ogwaro, Stella Nyanzi,
Jordan Osserman, Kevin Ward and Cynthia Weber offered valuable advice and support at key
stages of this project. I am also grateful for constructive criticism from audiences at Aberystwyth,
Birkbeck, Kent, Leeds, LSE, Newcastle, Oxford, SOAS and Sussex, as well as from the editors and
anonymous reviewers. I take full responsibility for the views expressed here.
1 LP Itaborahy & J Zhu, State-Sponsored Homophobia (ILGA, 2013), available at http://ilga.org/ilga/
en/article/1161 (last visited 7
November
2013).
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(with the exception of some Francophone states and South Africa), the Middle
East and parts of South and Southeast Asia.
Four features of this map are noteworthy. First, states are colour-coded
against a spectrum of progress that charts a Western—more specifically, a
northern European—temporal narrative moving from the achievement of
what Robert Wintemute has called ‘basic rights’ to ‘sex rights’ to ‘love rights’.
Besides noting the Eurocentrism of this narrative, we might also question the
presentation of these gains as cumulative: Aeyal Gross has pointed out, by way
of example, that marriage (a ‘love right’) curtails the very liberty that is the
object of ‘prior’ struggles for ‘sex rights’.
Second, although the ILGA report
does not explicitly rank states, its visual presentation and some of its prose
strongly suggests a ranking impulse.
A more explicit ranking exercise can be
found in the Pew Research Center’s 2013 survey of global attitudes towards
sexuality, which orders states (by region) in terms of the percentage of respond-
ents who reply affirmatively to the question: ‘Should Society Accept
Homosexuality?’
The survey reports ‘broad acceptance of homosexuality in
North America, the European Union, and much of Latin America, but equally
widespread rejection in predominantly Muslim nations and in Africa, as well as
in parts of Asia and in Russia’.
Presumably the ranking tenor of these reports,
whether explicit or implied, is intended to motivate states to improve their laws
on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights by applauding those
who move in the direction of progress and by shaming those who do not.
The
success of such a strategy relies on a consensus on the meaning of progress and
the desirability of reaching the goals that mark its attainment. But where value
disagreements are at issue—where one state’s ‘progress’ is another’s ‘moral
decay’—the shaming potential of such lists is less apparent. The proliferation
of shaming lists constructed around rights concerning sexual orientation and
gender identity (SOGI) despite the evident absence of value consensus on these
issues suggests a belief, on the part of the makers of such lists, in a potential to
embarrass that derives from something other than agreement on the meaning
2 A Gross, ‘Sex, Love, and Marriage: Questioning Gender and Sexuality Rights in International Law’
21 Leiden Journal of International Law (2008) 235, 243-49.
3 See, e.g., D Sanders, ‘Asia these days’, in Itaborahy & Zhu (2013) 63, 64 (‘Which country will lead
[on civil unions or marriage in Asia]? The horse race at the moment features Nepal, Taiwan,
Thailand, and Vietnam. Place your bets!’); T Adrian, ‘When Latin American “Cosmic race” starts
to lead LGBTI issues’, in Itaborahy & Zhu (2013) 84.
4 Pew Research Center, ‘The Global Divide on Homosexuality: Greater Acceptance in More Secular
and Affluent Countries’, 4 June 2013, available at http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/06/04/the-global-
divide-on-homosexuality/ (last visited 7 November 2013).
5 Ibid.
170 Rao: The locations of homophobia
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http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/06/04/the-global-divide-on-homosexuality/
http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/06/04/the-global-divide-on-homosexuality/
and value of the very categories of SOGI that are at issue here. I suggest that
these ranking exercises mobilise shame, not on the basis of the substantive
values at stake in these disputes, but through a reiteration of familiar divides
between shamers and shamed. That the novelty of SOGI issues can nonetheless
reproduce old divides between the civilised and the savage, makes these lists and
maps neo-Orientalist artefacts.
Third, the ILGA map and survey privilege formal legal provisions govern-
ing sexuality over the lived experience of queer subjects. The disjunction be-
tween these criteria becomes apparent in Kevin Ward’s comparison of South
Africa and Uganda, which notes the paradoxical combination of progressive law
with high levels of violence against queer subjects in the former, and regressive
law but lower levels of violence in the latter.
Because of its focus on formal
norms, the ILGA project cannot make sense of these contradictions, colouring
South Africa green on account of its recognition of same-sex marriage and
Uganda red for its criminalisation of same-sex sexuality. Fourth, the ILGA
(and Pew) surveys rest on state-centric ontological premises. By this I mean
not only that they take the state as the basic unit of analysis but also that each
country-specific section, in describing the norms and actors implicated in the
production of homophobia within that country, assumes that the effects of
those norms and actors are felt only locally. The very structure of the report,
divided as it is into chapters offering regional overviews and containing coun-
try-specific blurbs, reinforces the impression that homophobia can be under-
stood purely with reference to actors located within the boundaries of the
nation-state. This recalls Anne Orford’s account of the imaginative geography
of humanitarian intervention in which state failure is attributed primarily to
local factors with ‘the international community [remaining] absent from the
scene of violence and suffering until it intervenes as a heroic saviour’.
The
spatial imaginary concretised by the ILGA map is now ubiquitous.
Indeed the
Orientalism of this imaginary has shaped ‘Orientals’ themselves: activists in
6 See, e.g., J Binnie, The Globalization of Sexuality (SAGE Publications, 2004) 68, for an early recog-
nition of this.
7 K Ward, ‘Religious Institutions and Actors and Religious Attitudes to Homosexual Rights: South
Africa and Uganda’, in C Lennox & M Waites (eds), Human Rights, Sexual Orientation and Gender
Identity in the Commonwealth: Struggles for Decriminalisation and Change (Institute of
Commonwealth Studies, 2013) 409, 410.
8 A Orford, Reading Humanitarian Intervention: Human Rights and the Use of Force in International
Law (Cambridge UP, 2004) 85.
9 See, e.g., the interactive map on the home page of Human Dignity Trust, available at http://www.
humandignitytrust.org/ (last visited 8 November 2013); UNAIDS, ‘Towards a free and equal world’,
8 January 2014, available at http://www.unaids.org/en/resources/infographics/20140108freeequal/
(last visited 10 January 2014).
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India, for example, have reproduced these spatial imaginaries in advocacy ma-
terials that, piggybacking on hegemonic narratives of India’s transition to
‘rising power’ status, effectively urge the Indian state to detach itself from a
homophobic Third World and embrace the LGBT-friendly modernity repre-
sented by the West.
Visually centre-stage in these maps, and historically the repository for
European anxieties about backwardness and savagery, Africa occupies a prom-
inent place in cartographical and other depictions of homophobia. Since 2009,
Uganda has been a particularly intense focus of attention thanks to the Anti
Homosexuality Bill (AHB) that was introduced in that year, passed on 20
December 2013, and accorded presidential assent on 24 February 2014, thereby
becoming the Anti Homosexuality Act (AHA).
The Act enhances punish-
ments for same-sex conduct and criminalises any form of organisation or ad-
vocacy in support of rights for homosexuals. The original Bill earned notoriety
for its proposed introduction of the death penalty for a category of offences
named ‘aggravated homosexuality’—defined as same-sex conduct in which the
‘victim’ is a minor or disabled, or the ‘offender’ is HIV-positive or a ‘serial
offender’. In the version of the Bill that was ultimately passed, the death penalty
was amended to life imprisonment.
In the coverage of homophobia in Africa, and Uganda specifically, that has
followed these developments, narrative strategies for the consolidation of the
spatial imaginaries of which maps provide a snapshot have become visible. A
BBC documentary aired in May 2011, rhetorically titled ‘The World’s Worst
Place to Be Gay?’, is illustrative of these strategies.
Made by gay British DJ
Scott Mills, its effective characterisation of Uganda as a contemporary gay heart
of darkness is undoubtedly aided by the country’s proximity to that original
heart of darkness immortalised in Joseph Conrad’s eponymous novel, as well as
by imaginative texts revisiting more recent episodes of authoritarianism and
10 See the map in ‘Open Letters Against Sec 377’, 16 September 2006, available at http://orinam.net/
377/background-of-sec-377/ (last visited 10 January 2014).
11 Full text of the original bill available at http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/10/15/15609 (last
visited 13 November 2013). See also A Jjuuko & F Tumwesige, ‘The Implications of the
Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009 on Uganda’s Legal System’, November 2013, available at http://
www.ids.ac.uk/publication/the-implications-of-the-anti-homosexuality-bill-2009-on-uganda-s-
legal-system (last visited 12 January 2014).
12 BBC News, ‘Ugandan MPs pass life in jail anti-homosexual law’, 20 December 2013, available at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-25463942 (last visited 29 December 2013).
13 S Mills, ‘The World’s Worst Place to Be Gay?’, BBC Three, 13 May 2011, available at http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v¼fV0tS6G8NNU (last visited 12 November 2013).
172 Rao: The locations of homophobia
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http://orinam.net/377/background-of-sec-377/
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http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/10/15/15609
http://www.ids.ac.uk/publication/the-implications-of-the-anti-homosexuality-bill-2009-on-uganda-s-legal-system
http://www.ids.ac.uk/publication/the-implications-of-the-anti-homosexuality-bill-2009-on-uganda-s-legal-system
http://www.ids.ac.uk/publication/the-implications-of-the-anti-homosexuality-bill-2009-on-uganda-s-legal-system
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-25463942
VIDEO
VIDEO
VIDEO
brutality in Ugandan politics.
The documentary series Out There presented by
British writer and actor Stephen Fry and aired in November 2013, suggests that
little has changed in mainstream media reportage of these issues despite an
outpouring of critique and more nuanced representation.
Viewed together,
these documentaries suggest the ingredients of a well-established formula in the
investigative reporting of ‘non-Western homophobia’, featuring the white,
Western journalist as speaker of truth to homophobic power.
The premise for both documentaries is the visit of a well-known gay British
personality to Uganda, ostensibly to explore and understand the phenomenon
of homophobia. Both documentaries are book-ended by comparisons with
Britain, which is imagined as a space of gay freedom. While Fry’s documentary
opens with scenes from a gay civil partnership ceremony in the UK, Mills’s film
begins in a pub in London’s gay district, Soho, where, pictured in amiable
conversation with his drinking buddies, Mills vigorously denies that he has
ever encountered homophobia. After obligatory caveats about the relative nov-
elty of Britain’s gay friendliness, comes the clincher: ‘But compared to else-
where, we’re a model of tolerance’. As if to confirm Chandra Talpade
Mohanty’s critique of the gaze of white western feminism, the remark acknow-
ledges a central purpose of international comparison and concern to be the
extraction of a hierarchy in which the western self finds proof of its emancipa-
tion and worth in the shackles of its non-western other.
When a gay Ugandan
exile in Britain, John Bosco Nyombi, narrates his experience of persecution in
Uganda, Mills can only reply: ‘our experiences are completely different, ‘coz I
had a really easy time growing up, being gay. It wasn’t an issue for me at all’.
Nyombi responds incredulously: ‘It looks like we are on different planets.’
Missing in Mills’s film is the story of Nyombi’s struggles with the British
Home Office in his long and arduous quest for asylum in the UK from perse-
cution on the basis of sexual orientation.
The film ends with Mills’s observa-
tion, once again, after obligatory caveats about the vibrancy and colour of life in
Uganda, that ‘if it stayed like it is, I couldn’t see myself ever wanting to come
back’. Expressing pessimism about the prospects for change, he reflects that
‘what [the trip] has done is made me realise how lucky I am’.
14 The Last King of Scotland, dir. Kevin Macdonald (2006); Kony 2012, dir. Invisible Children (
2012).
15 Out There (episode 1), BBC Two, 14 October 2013, available at http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v¼HCp_5-CsYuM (last visited 13 November 2013).
16 CT Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Duke UP, 2006)
ch. 1.
17 See Getting Out, dir. D Neumann (2011).
London Review of International Law Volume 2, Issue 2, 2014 173
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCp_5-CsYuM
Both films feature some of the same people from amongst Kampala’s out
kuchu community.
Prominent among them is Stosh Mugisha, a trans man,
who narrates his experience of being raped as a 14-year-old-girl, and, as a result,
becoming pregnant, HIV positive and suicidal. Fry follows this harrowing ac-
count with the comment ‘[y]our life encapsulates almost every detail of the gay
experience in Uganda’, implying that Stosh’s story is in some way typical of
Ugandan kuchu life. The effects of this elevation of individual biography to
national narrative are exacerbated when the same individual is profiled as rep-
resentative of a community in multiple media narratives. Doubtless part of the
reason some biographies are frequently reiterated is that few people are willing
to run the risks inherent in speaking out publically; the effect, however, is to
make Stosh representative of Uganda, in the same way that Mills and Fry
become metonyms for Britain.
At the heart of this article is the question of what is at stake in contem-
porary practices of locating homophobia. Central to the maps and films I have
been discussing here is a spatial imaginary in which certain places are imagined
as locations of homosexual freedom and others as locations of homophobia.
Ironically, the imaginative geography of neo-Orientalist LGBT activists is
shared by the very conservatives who are their chief antagonists: the claim
that homosexuality is Western and therefore culturally inauthentic, is fre-
quently at the centre of non-Western discourses of homophobia.
Inherent
in this shared geographical imaginary is a tight linkage between sexuality, place
and legitimacy, in which particular attitudes towards sexuality (and indeed
particular sexualities) become markers of belonging to particular places.
Neville Hoad complicates this analysis by drawing our attention to the spatial-
isation of time and the temporalisation of space in this imaginary, whereby
non-Western places are imagined as contemporary re-enactments of Western
pasts: ‘we were like them, but have developed, they are like we were and have yet
to develop’.
These tropes are particularly visible in West/non-West compara-
tive moments that masquerade as gestures of solidarity in a shared struggle.
18 The term ‘kuchu’ has become the preferred identity description of choice for many Ugandan lesbian,
gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) individuals. It is not used in either of the films I
discuss here, but supplies the title of Call Me Kuchu, dirs KF Wright & M Zouhali-Worrall (2012).
19 The original Anti Homosexuality Bill clarified its aims as including the protection of ‘the cherished
culture of the people of Uganda, legal, religious, and traditional family values of the people of
Uganda against the attempts of sexual rights activists seeking to impose their values of sexual
promiscuity on the people of Uganda’ (§ 1.1). For evidence of the ubiquity of this claim in discourses
of state, church and media in Uganda, see S Tamale (ed.), Homosexuality: Perspectives from Uganda
(Sexual Minorities Uganda, 2007).
20 N Hoad, ‘Arrested Development or the Queerness of Savages: Resisting Evolutionary Narratives of
Difference’ 3 Postcolonial Studies (2000) 133, 148.
174 Rao: The locations of homophobia
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In what follows, I turn to alternative—and differently problematic—loca-
tions of homophobia to understand what is at stake in the practice of location.
In the next section, I examine narratives that attribute the apparent upsurge of
homophobia in Uganda to its importation from the West. Here I diagnose a
different problem: in turning their critical gaze towards the West, such narra-
tives obscure the agency of Africans in the production of homophobia, or
reduce accounts of such agency to one of manipulation by Western actors,
begging questions about the values and beliefs of African elites and subalterns
alike. Drawing on postcolonial theory and historical materialist geography for
an understanding of ‘place’ as constituted by transnational flows but also as
resistant to easy reconstitution, the following section offers a modified account
of the transnational production of homophobia in Uganda that underscores the
indispensable agency of Ugandan elites. The final section offers some conclud-
ing observations on the relationship between place and sexuality and makes two
suggestions about the contours of a progressive politics: first, that such a politics
might seek a dispersion—rather than location—of homophobia; and second,
that rather than abandoning the notion of progress, such a politics might be
attentive to the ways in which no place has a monopoly on the ideational
construction of progress.
T H E ‘ I M P O R T A T I O N ’ O F H O M O P H O B I A
One response to the claim that homosexuality is a Western import has been the
assertion that most postcolonial states with homophobic laws inherited them
from their Western colonial predecessors. In this regard, the legacy of British
colonialism has become a particular focus of attention.
French colonies were
largely spared the anti-sodomy provision because it had been dropped from the
Napoleonic code in 1806 before many of them were conquered; this code also
influenced France’s European neighbours and their colonies.
One recent
study notes that ‘the Commonwealth includes 42 (53.8%) of the 78 states
which continue to criminalise same-sex sexual behaviour, and only 12
(10.6%) of 113 where it is legal’, concluding that ‘the criminalisation of
21 Human Rights Watch, This Alien Legacy: The Origins of ‘Sodomy’ Laws in British Colonialism
(Human Rights Watch, 2008); Kaleidoscope Trust, ‘Speaking Out: The rights of LGBTI citizens
from across the Commonwealth’, available at http://kaleidoscopetrust.com/news/53 (last visited 21
November 2013).
22 M Kirby, ‘The Sodomy Offence: England’s Least Lovely Criminal Law Export?’, in Lennox & Waites
(eds) (2013) 61, 64.
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same-sex sexual behaviour by the British Empire, and associated colonial cul-
ture, have had a lasting negative impact’.
Michael Kirby, former Justice of the
High Court of Australia, speaks of sexual minorities being ‘kept in legal chains
by the enduring penal code provisions of the British Empire’.
British LGBT
activist Peter Tatchell goes further in declaring that these provisions ‘are not
authentic national laws that were freely legislated by the indigenous
populations’.
In one sense, claims that both homosexuality and homophobia are imports
from the West are historically plausible. Central to contemporary scholarship
on sexuality is a distinction between sexual behaviour/practice and identity. As
akshay khanna explains, the very notion of ‘having’ a sexual identity is premised
on the idea that ‘who I fuck or am attracted to says something about the type of
person I am’.
This distinction has made it possible to assert both the univer-
sality of homosexual behaviour and the cultural specificity of sexual minority
identities. Michel Foucault located the emergence of sexuality as identity in
modern European discourses of religion, law, medicine and literature.
John
D’Emilio’s materialist account does not dispute the timing of this emergence,
but explains these new discursive formations as responses to the effects of
capitalism and urbanisation on the family.
Under the influence of one or
both of these dual logics, more recent scholarship has attributed the diffusion
of Western-originated sexual minority identities to the non-Western world to
a range of vectors including capitalism,
human rights activism,
and
23 C Lennox & M Waites, ‘Human Rights, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in the
Commonwealth: From History and Law to Developing Activism and Transnational Dialogues’, in
Lennox & Waites (eds) (2013) 1, 24.
24 Kirby (2013) 75.
25 P Tatchell, ‘David Cameron Urged: Apologise for Anti-Gay Laws Imposed by UK’, 27 October 2011,
available at http://www.petertatchellfoundation.org/commonwealth/david-cameron-urged-apolo-
gise-anti-gay-laws-imposed-uk (last visited
21 November 2013).
26 a khanna, ‘Us “Sexuality Types”: A Critical Engagement with the Postcoloniality of Sexuality’, in B
Bose & S Bhattacharyya (eds), The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary
India (Seagull, 2007) 159, 167.
27 M Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. R Hurley (Penguin, 1981)
[1976] 43.
28 J D’Emilio, ‘Capitalism and Gay Identity’, in A Snitow, C Stansell & S Thompson (eds), Powers of
Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (Monthly Review Press, 1983) 100.
29 D Altman, Global Sex (University of Chicago Press, 2001).
30 J Massad, ‘Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World’ 14 Public Culture (2002)
361.
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HIV/AIDS funding.
If the affects that are typically grouped under the sign of
‘homophobia’ are themselves premised on the cultural intelligibility of ‘homo-
sexuality’, then it may be historically plausible to think of homophobia as also
being a cultural import.
Yet while the import narrative may be historically accurate as an originary
account of law and affect—and has a certain tactical utility in contexts where
homosexuality is alleged to be culturally inauthentic—it fails to account for the
embrace and resignification of these laws by postcolonial elites, and the per-
sistence or emergence of homophobia in many postcolonial societies decades
after the end of colonialism. Former colonies have taken ownership of sodomy
laws in a variety of ways: some have decriminalised sodomy or are in the process
of doing so (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Bahamas, Cyprus,
South Africa, Vanuatu, Fiji); others have widened the ambit of anti-sodomy
laws to criminalise sex between women (Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Malawi), to en-
hance already existing punishments (Uganda), or to introduce new offences
(Nigeria); and still others have introduced anti-sodomy legislation after decol-
onisation (Cameroon, Benin, Senegal). Moreover, if ‘homophobia’ is historic-
ally tied to an imported sexual ontology, it may be too narrow a term to
encompass locally-rooted affects that express hatred of the queer. The claim
that ‘homophobia’ is Western may therefore be true but trivial, if it cannot take
cognisance of this wider realm of indigenous phobic affect.
Analytical failures apart, there is something politically troubling about the
way in which the historical reminder of sodomy laws as an inheritance from
British colonialism is turned into an argument for Britain to play a leading role
in their removal, particularly in the institutional arena of the Commonwealth.
In the run-up to the 2011 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting
(CHOGM) in Perth, Tatchell called on British Prime Minister David
Cameron to apologise for Britain’s imposition of the sodomy law on its colo-
nies.
Under pressure from activists, Cameron responded with an ill-advised
comment suggesting that British aid would be linked to respect for LGBT rights
in recipient countries.
Confronted with the spectre of a renewed civilising
mission in which the erstwhile imperial power and its white dominions berated
the black and brown Commonwealth for their backwardness, the statement
31 H Seckinelgin, ‘Global Activism and Sexualities in the Time of HIV/AIDS’ 15 Contemporary Politics
(2009) 103.
32 Tatchell (2011).
33 D Cameron, ‘Transcript Philip Hammond Interview: The Andrew Marr Show’, 30 October 2011,
available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/andrew_marr_show/9627898.stm (last visited
21 November 2013).
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aroused hostile reactions from political and religious leaders in Tanzania,
Uganda,
Ghana
and elsewhere. More significantly, a number of African
activists publically dissociated themselves from this articulation of ‘gay condi-
tionality’, warning that the refusal of aid on sexual rights grounds would result
in the scapegoating of queers in recipient countries potentially provoking a
backlash against them, besides reinforcing perceptions of the ‘westernness’ of
homosexuality and further entrenching imperial relationships between donor
and recipient countries.
The claim that homophobia is an import from the West has also been
prominent in discussion of Uganda’s AHA, which has widely been attributed to
the malign influence of US Christian evangelical missionaries in Africa. The
genesis of the AHA has, in many accounts, been traced to the visit to Kampala in
March 2009 of US anti-gay evangelicals Scott Lively, Don Schmierer and Caleb
Brundidge, to speak at a ‘Seminar on Exposing the Homosexual Agenda’ during
which they elaborated on the putative evils of
homosexuality.
38
A number of the
themes discussed at that seminar, including the threat that homosexuality sup-
posedly posed to marriage and the family, and the propensity of homosexuals to
recruit children into their ‘lifestyle’, were reiterated in the text of the AHB
tabled seven months later in the Ugandan Parliament by MP David Bahati,
who reportedly has close links with The Family, a powerful and secretive US-
based political Christian organisation.
Kapya Kaoma, a Zambian priest and scholar currently based in the US,
has argued in two influential reports that the homophobia underpinning
34 R Mbuthia, ‘Tanzania: Africa, Want Aid? Recognise Gay Rights!’, 26 December 2011, available at
http://allafrica.com/stories/201112271071.html (last visited 21 November 2013).
35 BBC News, ‘Uganda fury at David Cameron aid threat over gay rights’, 31 October 2011, available at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15524013 (last visited 21 November 2013).
36 BBC News, ‘Ghana refuses to grant gays’ rights despite aid threat’, 2 November 2011, available at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15558769 (last visited 21 November 2013).
37 AMSHeR, ‘Statement of African social justice activists on the threats of the British government to
“cut aid” to African countries that violate the rights of LGBTI people in Africa’, 27 October 2011,
available at http://www.amsher.net/news/ViewArticle.aspx?id¼1200 (last visited 21 November
2013).
38 V Mukasa, ‘Spreading Lies in Kampala’, 5 March 2009, available at http://iglhrc.wordpress.com/
2009/03/05/spreading-lies-in-kampala/ (last visited 22 November 2013); J Gettleman, ‘Americans’
Role Seen in Uganda Anti-Gay Push’, New York Times, 3 January 2010, available at http://www.
nytimes.com/2010/01/04/world/africa/04uganda.html (last visited 22 November 2013). Audio
recordings of the seminar are available at http://publiceye.org/multimedia/public/kapya-audio-
files.zip (last visited 22
April 2014).
39 J Sharlet, ‘Straight Man’s Burden: The American roots of Uganda’s anti-gay persecutions’, Harper’s
Magazine, September 2010, available at http://harpers.org/archive/2010/09/straight-mans-burden/
(last visited 22 November 2013).
178 Rao: The locations of homophobia
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,
http://allafrica.com/stories/201112271071.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15524013
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15558769
http://www.amsher.net/news/ViewArticle.aspx?id=1200
http://www.amsher.net/news/ViewArticle.aspx?id=1200
Spreading Lies in Kampala
Spreading Lies in Kampala
http://publiceye.org/multimedia/public/kapya-audio-files.zip
http://publiceye.org/multimedia/public/kapya-audio-files.zip
Straight Man’s Burden
legislative initiatives such as the AHA is ‘collateral damage’ from the US culture
wars exported to Africa.
In Kaoma’s argument, finding themselves on the
losing side of key debates around the ordination of women and homosexuals
as bishops or the blessing of same-sex unions, conservatives within mainline
Episcopal, Methodist and Presbyterian churches in the US have begun to forge
global alliances with the more socially conservative branches of their denom-
inations, principally in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia.
Forged through the medium of money distributed through evangelical devel-
opment and humanitarian charities, these alliances serve two purposes from the
point of view of their US participants. First, they empower conservatives to
dominate the governing bodies of these denominations, enabling them to block
progressive moves towards the consecration of women and/or queer bishops,
the recognition of same-sex marriage, etc. The decennial Lambeth conference, a
key deliberative forum for the worldwide Anglican Communion, has been a
prominent arena of struggle in this regard (in ways that I will revisit in the next
section). Second, they also provide spiritual refuge for dissident conservative
evangelical Christians in the US. This has become particularly evident in a
series of moves visible within the Anglican Communion, the constitutionality
of which remains unclear. Dissatisfied with the liberal drift of their ‘province’
(as branches of the Anglican Communion are called) and provoked, in particu-
lar, by the consecration of the gay and openly non-celibate Gene Robinson as
Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003, some conservative parishes in the US have
broken with the Episcopal Church and placed themselves under the ‘spiritual
oversight’ of bishops in countries like Nigeria, Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda.
Simultaneously, some African churches severed their relationship with the
Episcopal Church and announced themselves to be in communion with its
rival province—the newly-formed Anglican Mission in the Americas. Central
to these complex constitutional moves has been the decision of conservatives
not to leave the Communion (which would effectively concede defeat to the
liberals) but to legitimate their dissidence with the blessing of conservative
bishops in global South provinces.
What emerges from Kaoma’s meticulous research is a transactional rela-
tionship in which the Americans supply money in return for the political sup-
port and ‘spiritual protection’ of the Africans. Homophobia, in this analysis, is
imported into Uganda from the US and foisted onto materially needy clergy
40 K Kaoma, ‘Globalizing the Culture Wars: US Conservatives, African Churches, & Homophobia’,
2009, available at http://www.publiceye.org/publications/globalizing-the-culture-wars/ (last visited
22 November 2013); K Kaoma, ‘Colonizing African Values: How the US Christian Right is
Transforming Sexual Politics in Africa’, 2012, available at http://www.politicalresearch.org/re-
sources/reports/full-reports/colonizing-african-values/ (last visited 22 November 2013).
London Review of International Law Volume 2, Issue 2, 2014 179
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http://www.publiceye.org/publications/globalizing-the-culture-wars/
http://www.politicalresearch.org/resources/reports/full-reports/colonizing-african-values/
http://www.politicalresearch.org/resources/reports/full-reports/colonizing-african-values/
and congregations through the lure of conservative money. (Incidentally, this
argument neatly mirrors the discourse of Ugandan conservatives, who insist
that homosexuals and LGBT organisations use Western donor funds to ‘recruit’
vulnerable individuals into homosexuality.
) While providing a valuable cor-
rective to the neo-Orientalist view of an essential and irredeemable ‘African
homophobia’, Kaoma’s relentless pursuit of the money trail nonetheless begs
questions about the values and beliefs of the African clergy who are central to
the relationships that underpin the ongoing institutionalisation of homophobia
in Uganda. Indeed, liberal critiques such as those offered by Kaoma have eli-
cited the conservative retort that they are racist in their insinuation that African
clergy are pliable instruments of American will, prepared to sell their allegiance
and reshape their moral and theological worldviews in deference to the wishes
of their funders.
The recent film God Loves Uganda, with which Kaoma is associated, re-
inforces this problematic image.
The film explores the relationship between
evangelical Christians in Uganda and the US, principally by following a cohort
of young missionaries from the International House of Prayer, a Pentecostal
Christian mission organisation based in Missouri, in their first evangelical ven-
tures in Uganda. Purporting to cast a non-judgmental eye on the organisation
through candid glimpses of worship and a series of rather self-incriminating
interviews with key figures, the film offers a chilling portrait of the missionaries
as earnest and well-meaning but delusional and oblivious to the havoc they are
wreaking in Uganda through the propagation of a homophobic gospel. While
the film features prominent exponents of homophobia as well as LGBT activists
and allies, I am particularly interested in its portrayal of ‘ordinary’ ‘Africans’. In
one interview Kaoma, speaking of the activities of the US missionaries explains:
‘when they start demonising another person, the poor African thinks that’s how
things should be’. The publicity material and visual branding of the film prom-
inently features a photograph that exemplifies its overall message.
In it, a
bearded white missionary in a black shirt holds a black African child wearing
a soiled white vest. The man has one hand clasped over the child’s head and his
eyes are closed as if to suggest someone deep in prayer. The child looks straight
at the camera, wary but still. The message is clear: Africa is an innocent,
damaged child, America the powerful and manipulative adult.
41 J Sadgrove, R Vanderbeck, J Andersson, G Valentine & K Ward, ‘Morality Plays and Money Matters:
Towards a Situated Understanding of the Politics of Homosexuality in Uganda’ 50 The Journal of
Modern African Studies (2012) 103.
42 God Loves Uganda, dir. RR Williams (2013).
43 ‘God Loves Uganda’, available at http://www.godlovesuganda.com/ (last visited 23 November 2013).
180 Rao: The locations of homophobia
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http://www.godlovesuganda.com/
While Ugandan LGBT activists have been complicit in co-producing this
narrative of homophobia as a Western import, not least because of its tactical
utility in rebutting the charge of homosexuality as Western, some have begun to
express disquiet about the way in which such a narrative minimises the agency
of Ugandans in their own politics. Expressing scepticism of the import narra-
tive, legal academic and activist Sylvia Tamale quotes a proverb in Luganda
‘Kyewayagaliza embazzi kibuyaga asude’, meaning literally ‘the tree you wanted
to chop down has been uprooted by a thunderstorm’. She translates this as
‘[c]hance favours a prepared mind’.
This effectively reframes the question that
needs to be asked: what has prepared Ugandan audiences to be receptive to the
gospel of homophobia, whether imported or indigenous?
P L A C I N G H O M O P H O B I A : A Q U E E R P O S T C O L O N I A L
M A T E R I A L I S T V I E W
Underlying the troubling representations of homophobia that I have surveyed
in the previous two sections is a tight linkage between sexuality, place and
legitimacy, in which particular attitudes towards sexuality (and particular sex-
ualities) become markers of belonging to particular places. At issue in these
representations are not only problematic understandings of sexuality, but also
simplistic deployments of the very notion of ‘place’. In a survey of the literature
on place, Marxist geographer David Harvey identifies an important tension
between views that value the closedness of place as enabling the incubation of
genuine alternatives to capitalism and imperialism, and those that worry that
this very closedness can engender an exclusionary politics of fascism. Relational
accounts, seeking to escape the logic of closed territories, understand place as
defined not by the content its boundaries enclose but by the specific mix of links
between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ that constitute it. Ultimately, Harvey finds most
useful Alfred Whitehead’s understanding of places as entities that achieve rela-
tive stability in their bounding and internal ordering for a time, occupying a
piece of space in an exclusive way for that time. Describing such entities as
‘permanences’, Whitehead understood place-formation as the process of ‘car-
ving out “permanences” from a flow of processes’.
Such a view mediates the
tensions described above by insisting on the role of flows in the constitution of
place, while also resisting the insinuation that places can be easily reconstituted
44 S Tamale, ‘Confronting the Politics of Nonconforming Sexualities in Africa’ 56 African Studies
Review (2013) 31, 34.
45 D Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (Columbia UP, 2009) 189-90.
London Review of International Law Volume 2, Issue 2, 2014 181
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by new flows once they have achieved a certain stability in their bounding and
internal ordering.
Postcolonial theory productively complicates this view of place. Edward
Said offers a powerful alternative to the imaginative geography of Orientalism.
Pioneering a technique that he calls ‘contrapuntal reading’ in which cultural
identities are conceived, not as essentialisms, but as contrapuntal ensembles in
which identities cannot exist without an array of opposites, Said reads a number
of ostensibly metropolitan texts in ways that reveal the constitutive role of
colonial peripheries in their production, reconceiving the imperial encounter
as one of ‘overlapping territories, intertwined histories’. We are reminded, for
example, that it is Australian wealth that enables the Great Expectations that Pip
entertains, that the order and civility of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park are
enabled by surpluses from slave plantations in Antigua, and that Giuseppe
Verdi’s Aida was commissioned by the Khedive of Egypt to celebrate the in-
auguration of his new opera house in Cairo—itself intended as a symbol of a
modernising Egypt’s entry into international society.
Core and periphery are
constituted by flows of people, commodities, money and ideas, but import-
antly, the flows take place in both directions with consequences for both places,
allowing for a recognition of the agency of the periphery in constituting the
modern world.
Bearing in mind these more complicated ways of understanding ‘place’, we
can return to the question of how homosexuality and homophobia come to be
associated with particular places. Consideration of this question in queer and
postcolonial theory, particularly insofar as Africa is concerned, has long been
vexed by the figure of Frantz Fanon. Fanon’s account of what Kobena Mercer
calls the ‘libidinal economy of Negrophobia’ is shot through with homophobia
as a result of its tendency to explain racism as a concomitant of sexual perver-
sion (it is not clear which triggers the other).
Fanon describes the racist white
imaginary as reducing the Negro to the sexual and the biological: ‘In relation to
the Negro, everything takes place on the genital level.’
In this imaginary,
Negrophobia is an expression of both fear of, and desire for, rape by the
Negro: ‘the Negrophobic woman is in fact nothing but a putative sexual
46 Ibid.
47 E Said, Culture and Imperialism (Vintage, 1994).
48 T Barkawi & M Laffey, ‘The Postcolonial Moment in Security Studies’ 32 Review of International
Studies (2006) 329.
49 K Mercer, ‘Decolonisation and Disappointment: Reading Fanon’s Sexual Politics’, in A Read (ed.),
Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation (Bay Press, 1996) 114, 124.
50 F Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. CL Markmann (Pluto Press, 1986) [1952] 157.
182 Rao: The locations of homophobia
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partner—just as the Negrophobic man is a repressed homosexual’.
We must
contextualise Fanon’s claims, as Diana Fuss does, as responses to a colonial
sexual economy that exploited the sexual services of black people, used sexual
humiliation and torture as instruments of subjugation,
and endlessly repro-
duced the myth of the violent, lawless, oversexed black rapist. Fanon would also
have been aware of, and reacting to, the then common equation of the homo-
sexual/‘invert’ and the primitive in Freudian sexology.
These discursive contexts notwithstanding, two features of Fanon’s argu-
ment remain troubling. The first is the association of homosexuality with white-
ness. In a footnote, Fanon remarks that he has not observed ‘homosexuality’ in
his native Martinique, although he concedes the presence of gender-transitive
individuals while nonetheless insisting that ‘they lead normal sex lives’. The
only Martinicans who become homosexuals are those who travel to Europe, but
only as a means of earning their living in a society that will offer them few other
opportunities: homosexuality here is a function of white exploitation.
Second,
the inability to imagine a same-sex encounter that is not cross-racial rape means
that ‘homosexuality’ is inserted in a violent cultural relation where ‘homopho-
bia’ properly belongs. As Lee Edelman has pointed out: ‘where it is “given” that
white racism equals castration and “given” that homosexuality equals castra-
tion, then it is proper to conclude that white racism equals (or expresses
through displacement) homosexuality and, by the same token, in a reversal
of devastating import for lesbians and gay men of color, homosexuality
equals white racism’.
Scholars of African sexualities have traced the misogyn-
istic and homophobic afterlives of this Fanonian argument in the politics of
African liberation movements. Thus, having experienced colonialism as emas-
culation, movements such as the Zimbabwe African National Union sought to
recuperate a putatively lost African male virility through violence against
women and against men who were regarded as having betrayed the dignity of
African masculinity by having sex with other men.
51 Ibid 156.
52 To cite only one illustration from the African colonial context, survivors of the brutal repression of
the Kenyan Mau Mau uprising report having been raped and castrated as punishment for their
alleged participation in the rebellion. Ndiku Mutua and others v Foreign and Commonwealth Office
[2011] EWHC 1913 (QB).
53 D Fuss, ‘Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification’ 24 Diacritics (1994) 19,
31-32.
54 Fanon (1986) 180, note 44.
55 L Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (Routledge, 1994) 55.
56 M Epprecht, ‘Black skin, “cowboy” masculinity: A genealogy of homophobia in the African nation-
alist movement in Zimbabwe to 1983’ 7 Culture, Health & Sexuality (2005) 253, 259-60. For an
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Rather than consolidating the linkage between homophobia and postco-
lonial nationalism, I want to make a different argument here. Perhaps the most
profound contribution of Jasbir Puar’s work has been her account of the split-
ting of queerness in its encounter with imperial US nationalism, resulting in the
selective incorporation of queerness sanctioned through gender/race/class sani-
tising, and the quarantining of other forms of queerness in the production of a
monster-terrorist-fag that is the nation’s Other.
I want to suggest that the
converse of this insight has not been adequately recognised. In struggles against
empire, homophobia has had a plasticity and versatility analogous to that
attributed to queerness in Puar’s argument, enabling its conjunction with
both imperial collaboration and anticolonial nationalism. I make this argument
for a number of reasons. First, understanding the range of audiences and
contradictory political interests that homophobia serves can alert us to the
sources of its hegemony. Second, undermining the exclusive linkage of homo-
phobia with postcolonial nationalism might begin to erode this hegemony.
Third, I take seriously the cautions that scholars of African sexualities have
expressed against continental generalisations.
The view I offer here of a
shape-shifting homophobia that can place itself on the side of both imperial
collaboration and anti-colonial nationalism seems more attuned to the history
of Uganda. In what follows, I present two key moments in which the trans-
national flows that constitute the ‘permanence’ that gets called ‘Ugandan
homophobia’ become visible. I pay particular attention to the agency of
Baganda/Ugandan elites in enabling these flows. In the first of these moments,
‘homophobia’ functions in the service of imperial collaboration; in the second,
it is an expression of decolonisation. The perspective I offer integrates the
materialist, postcolonial and queer theoretical approaches that I have outlined
above.
‘Homophobia’ as imperial collaboration
The Kabakas (kings) of 19th-century Buganda, the largest of the pre-colonial
kingdoms merged to form present-day Uganda, permitted their subjects to
convert to Islam and Christianity for reasons that continue to be debated by
analogous argument in the context of the South African anti-apartheid movement, see C Stychin, A
Nation By Rights: National Cultures, Sexual Identity Politics, and the Discourse of Rights (Temple UP,
1998) ch. 3.
57 J Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke UP, 2008).
58 J Bennett, ‘Subversion and Resistance: Activist Initiatives’, in S Tamale (ed.), African Sexualities: A
Reader (Pambazuka Press, 2011); P Awondo, P Geschiere & G Reid, ‘Homophobic Africa? Toward a
More Nuanced View’ 55 African Studies Review (2012) 145-68.
184 Rao: The locations of homophobia
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historians. Some view the decision as a means of cultivating ties with the outside
world that would facilitate modernisation, or as a canny attempt on the part of
Mutesa I (1856-1884) to introduce new religions that would offset indigenous
gods who were independent, and subversive, of royal authority.
Others em-
phasise the spiritual yearnings of the Baganda elite whose worldview had been
shattered by inexplicable disasters—epidemics, drought, famine and military
defeat—making them unusually receptive, relative to other flourishing tribal
societies, to new cosmologies.
By the time Mwanga II ascended the throne in
1884 at the age of 17, he inherited a court that was sharply polarised between
different religious factions, each of which stood in varying degrees of alliance
with external powers encroaching on Buganda in the ongoing scramble for
Africa. The Protestants were close to the British, the Catholics to the
Germans, and the Muslims to the sultan of Zanzibar; traditionalists in the
court viewed all three groups with suspicion. Less adept than his father at
balancing these contending factions, Mwanga struggled to retain his authority.
It is against this fraught geopolitical backdrop that missionary interest in
Mwanga’s bodily intimacies assumes particular significance.
Missionary sources from the time express horror at the ‘abominable vices’
and ‘shameful passions’ that allegedly stalked Mwanga’s court, with the Kabaka
himself described as being addicted to ‘the practice of homosexuality’.
When
Joseph Mukasa Balikuddembe, leader of the Catholic pages at the court, took it
upon himself to protect the new converts from the Kabaka’s carnal solicitations,
Mwanga ordered his execution in November 1885 to punish this unprecedented
challenge to his authority. Failing to quell insubordination, Mwanga ordered a
more thoroughgoing execution of all the Christians in his court who refused to
renounce their allegiance to the Anglican and Catholic missionaries. On 3 June
1886, 31 people were burned to death at Namugongo (near present-day
Kampala). While attentive to the broader geopolitical context prevailing at
the time, the most authoritative source that continues to supply the hegemonic
textual narrative of these events insists that ‘To gloss over the unpleasant vice to
which Mwanga was addicted would be to disregard the decisive factor in the
59 DA Low, ‘Converts and Martyrs in Buganda’, in CB Baëta (ed.), Christianity in Tropical Africa
(Oxford UP, 1968) 150, 154; R Reid, ‘Images of an African Ruler: Kabaka Mutesa of Buganda,
1857-1884’ 26 History in Africa (1999) 269, 282-83.
60 J Brierly & T Spear, ‘Mutesa, The Missionaries, and Christian Conversion in Buganda’ 21 The
International Journal of African Historical Studies (1988) 601, 603, 609.
61 JF Faupel, African Holocaust: The Story of the Uganda Martyrs (Geoffrey Chapman, 1965) 9-10. See,
e.g., Rev. RP Ashe, Two Kings of Uganda; Or, Life By the Shores of Victoria Nyanza, Being an Account
of A Residence of Six Years in Eastern Equatorial Africa (Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington,
1890) 101.
London Review of International Law Volume 2, Issue 2, 2014 185
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story of the persecutions.’
The killings continued sporadically until March
1888, rousing a coalition of Muslims, Catholics and Protestants in opposition to
Mwanga who was deposed in September that year. In the civil wars that ensued,
the Protestants eventually gained the upper hand with the assistance of the
Imperial British East African Company (IBEAC), paving the way for the insti-
tution of British rule over Uganda. Meanwhile, the French Catholic order of the
White Fathers had initiated proceedings for the beatification and canonisation
of the murdered pages,
a process that reached fruition in 1964 when Pope
Paul VI declared as saints the 22 Catholics who were amongst the murdered
pages of 1886.
Queer theorists have been here before. In a brilliant reading of these events,
Neville Hoad cautions against imposing a ‘sexual’ interpretation on the narra-
tive, notwithstanding the rhetoric of abomination with which the missionary
sources are replete. Beginning from a premise of uncertainty about the social
meanings that the ‘corporeal intimacies’ that Mwanga indulged in with his
pages had for his contemporaries, Hoad speculates that practices that might
have served ritual, religious, initiatory, fealty-producing and/or other public
functions may have been recorded and re-coded by 19th-century European
missionaries as ‘sex’, steeped as they were in discourses of perverse sexuality
that were emerging contemporaneously in Europe. Whatever the meaning of
these practices—for which even ‘intimacy’ may be too presumptuous a descrip-
tion—their non-observance seems to have functioned as a marker of disloyalty
to the Kabaka, provoking his violent reaction. Hoad resists a modern sexual
identitarian reading of the events of the 1880s. Yet with one eye on contem-
porary homophobic discourses casting same-sex behaviour as a western import,
he reminds us that ‘it was precisely these practices that were stamped out by an
earlier wave of European imperialism’. Mwanga emerges from his argument as
a heroic figure ‘who fucked (with the full and bizarre semantic range of that
verb) both Christianity and imperialism and ultimately lost.’
While Hoad’s Mwanga is a queer, anti-imperialist patriot, we hear rather
less in this argument about the forces ranged against him, and specifically about
native elites working in opposition to him. It is here, I suggest, that we can see
62 Faupel (1965) 82.
63 JP Thoonen, Black Martyrs (Sheed & Ward, 1941) 282-91.
64 N Hoad, African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization (University of Minnesota Press,
2007) 19-20. See also K Hamilton, ‘The flames of Namugongo: Postcolonial, queer, and thea/
ological reflections on the narrative of the 1886 Uganda martyrdom’, available at https://www.
academia.edu/1404802/The_flames_of_Namugongo_Postcolonial_queer_and_thea_ological_
reflections_on_the_narrative_of_the_1886_Ugandan_martyrdom (last visited 2 December 2013).
186 Rao: The locations of homophobia
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https://www.academia.edu/1404802/The_flames_of_Namugongo_Postcolonial_queer_and_thea_ological_reflections_on_the_narrative_of_the_1886_Ugandan_martyrdom
https://www.academia.edu/1404802/The_flames_of_Namugongo_Postcolonial_queer_and_thea_ological_reflections_on_the_narrative_of_the_1886_Ugandan_martyrdom
https://www.academia.edu/1404802/The_flames_of_Namugongo_Postcolonial_queer_and_thea_ological_reflections_on_the_narrative_of_the_1886_Ugandan_martyrdom
something akin to homophobia
operating in the service of imperial collab-
oration. Indeed paying attention to Kiganda agency throws into question some
of the ways in which the martyrdoms have been ‘queered’ by recent scholarship.
For one thing, it is misleading to think of Christianity as a colonial imposition
on the Baganda: Mutesa’s epistolary invitation to Western missionaries, pub-
lished in the Daily Telegraph of London in 1875, is well known—although it is
entirely likely that the missionaries would have come uninvited, as they did
elsewhere. More particularly, it is crucial to enquire into pre-colonial Kiganda
attitudes towards ‘sodomy’, to the extent possible, without assuming that these
were easily overwritten by colonial Christian mores. Here my argument is
speculative, but reading between the lines of missionary and other contempor-
aneous sources brings troubling aporias into view. In his account of the
Catholic procedures that culminated in the intermediate step of beatification
of the martyrs in 1920, JP Thoonen records an important discrepancy between
witness depositions at a first tribunal hearing held in November 1887, and those
made before a second tribunal in 1913-1914. The first depositions are silent on
the issue of Mwanga’s ‘shameful passions’, although these find mention in the
introductory statements of the missionaries. In contrast, all the witnesses ap-
pearing before the second tribunal cited this issue as a cause of Mwanga’s
hostility to the Christians.
While these discrepancies do not shake
Thoonen’s faith in the centrality of ‘sodomy’ to the narrative of the martyr-
doms, we must wonder, first, whether the lack of reference to Mwanga’s cor-
poreal behaviour by the native witnesses appearing before the first tribunal
implies that they found it unremarkable; and second, whether the shift in the
nature of testimony given by the witnesses before the two tribunals suggests a
process of witness tutoring by the missionaries with a view to improving the
prospects for successful canonisation.
Interestingly, the missionary accounts are keen to emphasise that sodomy
was not only unchristian, but also abhorred by the Baganda. The source on
which they rely to make this claim is a text on the customs of the Baganda by
Apolo Kagwa, widely considered Buganda’s first native ethnographer.
But
Kagwa is no disinterested anthropologist. Barely escaping the purges, he
emerged as a leader of the Protestant faction before going on to become perhaps
the key collaborator with the IBEAC and its agent Frederick (later Lord) Lugard,
65 I use the clumsy formulation ‘something akin to homophobia’ because the very notion of ‘homo-
phobia’ will only just have begun to become intelligible in this historical moment, as the practitioner
of sodomy (Mwanga) is individuated in the missionary discourse of the time as a ‘homosexual’.
66 Thoonen (1941) 168.
67 A Kagwa, The Customs of the Baganda (Columbia UP, 1934); Faupel (1965) 9; Thoonen (1941) 6-7,
30-31, 53, 102.
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whose bluster and firepower were crucial to the eventual triumph of the
Protestants and their British backers in the civil wars that ensued. Kagwa man-
oeuvred himself into the position of Katikkiro (Prime Minister) of Buganda—a
post that he held from 1890 to 1926, well into the period of the British
Protectorate in Uganda. In the judgment of a recent revisionist biography of
Mwanga by Ugandan historian Samwiri Lwanga-Lunyiigo, ‘just as Queen
Elizabeth I had bestowed a knighthood on a notorious pirate, Francis Drake,
so had King Edward VII bestowed a knighthood on Apolo Kagwa . . . Francis
Drake delivered stolen Spanish gold and silver bullion and Apolo Kagwa de-
livered Buganda’s sovereignty’.
In other words, the key ethnographic source
on which missionaries relied to claim abhorrence of sodomy in Kiganda culture
was produced by a figure deeply invested in Mwanga’s downfall.
Works by Kagwa and other elite Baganda suggest that sodomy was un-
known in Kiganda culture until its introduction by Arab visitors to the court (a
claim that mirrors contemporary claims of ‘import’ from the West). This
mapping of sodomy as endemic amongst Arabs but unknown in sub-Saharan
Africa is a familiar trope in the colonial archive.
Yet the reproduction of this
trope in elite Baganda texts comes with telling instabilities. Buried in the pages
of James Miti’s unpublished ‘Short History of Buganda’ (1939) is a contrasting
tale of two Arab imports, sodomy and gonorrhoea. Miti writes that when
Mutesa I contracted gonorrhoea, it
became no longer a shameful thing to be infected with gonorrhoea; on
the other hand, people foolishly prided themselves on having been
infected with it. The disease was praised; and people encouraged it, just
because it was a novel introduction and was so well spoken of.
Gonococcal infection then came to be regarded as a mark of great
daring and a means of earning respect from one’s fellow men. Lines
such as
He is a fool who hath no gonorrhoea
He is a coward who this disease should fear
68 S Lwanga-Lunyiigo, Mwanga II: Resistance to Imposition of British Colonial Rule in Buganda
1884-1899 (Wavah Books, 2011) 2.
69 RF Burton, A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, vol. 10 (The Burton
Club, 1886) 222, 246. For critical discussion of this trope, see RC Bleys, The Geography of Perversion:
Male-to-male Sexual Behaviour outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination 1750-1918
(Cassell, 1996); M Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of
Exploration to the Age of AIDS (Ohio UP, 2008).
188 Rao: The locations of homophobia
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were frequently quoted and used by the people, and were even sung in
public.
Evidently some Arab imports were eagerly embraced. Yet sodomy, which Miti
condemns as an ‘immoral habit’, a ‘sin against nature’, and a ‘dirty game’ in two
sentences with no further mention in an otherwise detailed description of the
events leading up to the executions of 1886, was not one of these.
Why, if
gonorrhoea became a mark of pride through its association with Mutesa despite
its cultural inauthenticity, did sodomy not enjoy the same repute on the
strength of its practice by Mwanga? And why does sodomy simply drop out
of Miti’s account? Like Kagwa, Miti spent the early years of his life as a page in
Mwanga’s court, surviving to write this history and enjoy a successful career in
the employment of the British Protectorate and as a chief in the kingdom of
Bunyoro, only because he had managed to escape the purges. His account of the
escape is shot through with ambivalence. He speaks of returning to the scene of
persecution because ‘we felt rather ashamed of ourselves in running away from
and leaving our fellows to suffer death alone’.
And he pre-empts accusations
of cowardice with the insistence that the survivors ‘suffered more by mental
agony and apprehension by being left behind while all their fellows were taken
away to the end of the sorrowful journey along which they had travelled’.
His
account is infused with an anxiety that history will judge the survivors of the
purges to have been less devout than those who perished on account of their
refusal to abandon their faith. Thoonen provides additional perspective on this
ambivalence with his insinuation that some of the pages were pardoned because
they obeyed the king’s will.
Whether this happened in Miti’s case is beside the
point: to have dwelt on the sexual shenanigans of Mwanga’s court in this tale of
survival might have invited unwelcome speculation about the reasons for which
the survivor had been spared. Once again we encounter the erasure of native
sodomy in what is essentially an autobiography of survival through imperial
collaboration.
Homophobia as decolonisation
By a curious twist of fate, the Archbishop of Uganda who attended the 1998
Lambeth conference at which homosexuality was a key wedge issue between
70 JK Miti, ‘A Short History of Buganda, Bunyoro, Busoga, Toro and Ankole’, trans. GK Rock,
Makerere University archives, box number AR/BUG/66/2, 1939, 131-32.
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid 272.
73 Ibid 287.
74 Thoonen (1941) 187.
London Review of International Law Volume 2, Issue 2, 2014 189
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clergy from the global North and South, is the descendant of a survivor of
the purges of 1886. Livingstone Mpalanyi Nkoyoyo is the grandson of Eriya
Kagiri, a page in Mwanga’s court who was initially among the condemned
Christians but received a last minute reprieve in recognition of his exemplary
service to the Kabaka.
When I asked Nkoyoyo, in an interview, about
Mwanga’s alleged sexual proclivities, he shot back: ‘That is a bazungu story
which Ugandans do not believe.’
This is ironic, given that bazungu (white
foreigner) texts are still the foundation of official church memory, with extracts
from the Catholic Faupel’s account still being read even at Anglican services
today.
Nkoyoyo’s account of the story, passed on from one generation to the
next within his family, is in some ways a survivor narrative and may reproduce
the silences that I have suggested are inherent in the logic of such narratives.
I do not want to suggest that, as Archbishop, Nkoyoyo’s attitudes towards
homosexuality were shaped purely or largely by his genealogy. Indeed
Kevin Ward has argued, in his account of postcolonial Ugandan memory of
the martyrdoms, that ‘Ugandans have not focused on the homosexual issue
in the ways they have recalled and appropriated the story of the martyrs for
the life of the Christian community. Rather, political questions of power
and the limits of obedience have been fundamental: whether one’s first loyalty
is to an earthly, possibly despotic, ruler, or to God, the King of the Universe’.
This framing has begun to change as a result of the increasing salience
of homosexuality in global and local Ugandan politics, so that the story of
the martyrs is now occasionally rendered as one in which brave Africans
prefer to die rather than submit to sodomy.
Indeed such an interpretation
was also voiced by some of the African delegates to the 1998 Lambeth
conference.
75 A Baguma, ‘My grandpa survived martyrdom—Nkoyooyo’, New Vision, 4 June 2004, available at
http://allafrica.com/stories/200406040283.html (last visited 4 December 2013).
76 Author interview with Archbishop Livingstone Mpalanyi Nkoyoyo, Kampala, 13 June 2012.
77 Participant observation at Uganda Martyrs’ Day service, Anglican shrine, Namugongo, 3 June 2012.
78 K Ward, ‘Same-Sex Relations in Africa and the Debate on Homosexuality in East African
Anglicanism’ 84 Anglican Theological Review (2002) 81, 90.
79 M Ssempa, ‘When faith, state and state-inspired homosexuality clash’, New Vision, 2 June 2005,
available at http://www.newvision.co.ug/D/8/459/437768 (last visited 3 December 2013). For an
analysis of contemporary Ugandan memory of the martyrdoms, see R Rao, ‘Re-membering
Mwanga: Same-Sex Intimacy, Memory and Belonging in Postcolonial Uganda’, forthcoming in
Journal of Eastern African Studies.
80 The Lambeth Conference, Resolution V.35 from the West Africa Region, available at http://www.
lambethconference.org/resolutions/1998/1998-1-10.cfm (last
visited 30 June 2014).
190 Rao: The locations of homophobia
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http://www.newvision.co.ug/D/8/459/437768
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s
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http://www.lambethconference.org/resolutions/1998/1998-1-10.cfm
Although there are fewer Anglicans (36.6 per cent) than Catholics (41.6 per
cent) in Uganda, the (Anglican) Church of Uganda has historically been the
more powerful institution.
Owing first to its association with the colonial
power, this position of pre-eminence has continued into the postcolonial
period in which eight of Uganda’s nine Presidents have been Anglican (the
only exception being Idi Amin, who was Muslim). As such, the global politics
of Anglicanism has had considerable impact on Uganda, particularly insofar as
the issue of homosexuality is concerned. It is widely agreed that homosexuality
was not of major concern to the Church of Uganda (or other Christian denom-
inations within the country) until 1997 when African Anglican bishops, assisted
by conservative US Episcopalians who were deeply concerned by the advance of
LGBT rights in the West, convened a series of conferences to prepare for the
1998 Lambeth conference.
Kaoma is right to point to the role of US conser-
vatives in initiating attempts to forge global conservative positions on issues of
sexuality. Yet as I suggested in the previous section, his argument begs questions
about the reasons for the receptiveness of African clergy to this American
advance.
In her account of this moment, Miranda Hassett draws attention to a
dramatic reframing of Africa’s position in the Anglican Communion that
helps us to understand this receptiveness.
Long viewed as the troubled con-
tinent not only in Anglican circles but also, of course, in international politics
more generally, ‘Africa’ was now courted by US conservatives as the solution to
the problems that bedevilled the Communion. Hassett zeroes in on Stephen
Noll, a key figure among the US Episcopal dissidents who, in the course of a
speech attempting to persuade African clergy to take seriously an issue to which
they had hitherto not devoted much attention, is reported to have said: ‘[i]t is
crucial for the rest of the Anglican Communion to take notice and “come over
and help us”. It has frequently been said in recent years that Third World
Anglicans are in a much stronger place spiritually than Westerners’.
As dis-
cussed earlier, African Anglicans did indeed assist conservative Episcopalians at
the 1998 conference and in the years since, partly by voting in ways that ensured
81 P Gifford, African Christianity: Its Public Role in Uganda and other African Countries (Fountain
Publishers, 1999). The statistics are from the Uganda Bureau of Statistics, ‘2002 Census Results’,
available at http://www.ubos.org/index.php?st¼pagerelations2&id¼16&p¼related%20pages%202:
2002Census%20Results (last visited 3 December 2013).
82 K Ward, ‘The Role of the Anglican and Catholic Churches in Uganda in Public Discourse on
Sexuality and Morality’, unpublished paper.
83 MK Hassett, Anglican Communion in Crisis: How Episcopal Dissidents and Their African Allies Are
Reshaping Anglicanism (Princeton UP, 2007).
84 Quoted in ibid 60.
London Review of International Law Volume 2, Issue 2, 2014 191
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http://www.ubos.org/index.php?st=pagerelations2&id=16&p=related%20pages%202:2002Census%20Results
http://www.ubos.org/index.php?st=pagerelations2&id=16&p=related%20pages%202:2002Census%20Results
http://www.ubos.org/index.php?st=pagerelations2&id=16&p=related%20pages%202:2002Census%20Results
http://www.ubos.org/index.php?st=pagerelations2&id=16&p=related%20pages%202:2002Census%20Results
http://www.ubos.org/index.php?st=pagerelations2&id=16&p=related%20pages%202:2002Census%20Results
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that the conference would reject ‘homosexual practice as incompatible with
Scripture’,
and partly by providing ‘spiritual protection’ to secessionist
Episcopalian parishes that now placed themselves under the oversight of
African provinces.
These complex manoeuvres should interest those with no stake in
Anglican politics on account of their startling dissonances with contemporan-
eous developments in (secular) international law and politics. We can read the
Anglican debates over the constitutionality of questions such as the permissi-
bility of intervention by bishops of one Anglican province in disputes between
bishops and priests in another, as analogues of contemporaneous debates un-
folding in secular arenas such as the United Nations over the permissibility of
humanitarian intervention in the affairs of sovereign states. Yet the Anglican
discourses evince a dramatically different imaginative geography. As Hassett
elaborates:
[The] newly developed global-mindedness of the conservative
Episcopal camp is surprising to many other Americans, who do not
generally expect socially conservative white people to think, talk, and
work in terms of greater relationships with the global South across
racial and cultural boundaries. Social and moral conservatism in the
United States tends to correlate with American exceptionalism, a view
of the United States as a special nation with a unique global role—
usually one of leading, teaching, and intervening in other nations. In
contrast, Episcopal conservatives in the late 1990s were increasingly
arguing that the Episcopal Church, and the United States in general,
had a problem that needed intervention and correction from other
nations—and not just any other nations, but the poor and margin-
alized nations of the global South.
In contrast to conservative overtures to African clergy, liberal Episcopalian
criticisms of African positions on sexuality tended to come across as patronising
or even racist. Here is Nkoyoyo’s account, in his authorised biography, of the
Lambeth debates around the ‘appalling proposal . . . seeking to approve of
homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle’:
[S]ome bishops from western countries had a patronising attitude
towards the African Church. On the one hand, they believed that
Africans were incompetent in theological reflection and, therefore, not
85 The Lambeth Conference, ‘Resolutions from 1998’, available at http://www.lambethconference.org/
resolutions/1998/1998-1-10.cfm (last visited 3 December 2013).
86 Hassett (2007) 65.
192 Rao: The locations of homophobia
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http://www.lambethconference.org/resolutions/1998/1998-1-10.cfm
http://www.lambethconference.org/resolutions/1998/1998-1-10.cfm
qualified to contribute to the development of Anglican theology. An
impression was being made that in the same way the African church
received the faith from western churches, they were obliged to endorse
the compromises that the western church had, in many places, taken
on board against the teaching of the Holy Bible. [Nkoyoyo] recalls that
there was also a general feeling that the African church was severely
impoverished, and largely dependent upon western aid for her
development activities. It was believed that this dependency did not
give her the authority to take a strong stand in defence of the
scriptures . . . . The main question that he, and other Ugandan bishops
anticipated was whether the belief and practice of the Anglican
Communion would be based upon the teaching of the scriptures or
whether it would be determined by the practices that had come to be
accepted in western culture.
The Ugandan bishops settled this question with their conviction that Biblical
truth was more important than money, that such truth had to be understood
literally rather than through the lens of shifting cultural trends, and most im-
portantly, that ‘although the western Missionaries had planted the initial seed of
the gospel, the seed had grown and matured to a status where the African
church could state her own position and challenge any teaching that conflicted
with the Holy Bible’.
Homophobia, such as it is in this account, emerges as an
almost incidental by-product of a more fundamental desire to assert the theo-
logical maturation and adulthood of a postcolonial African church. African
delegates seem to have experienced the 1998 Lambeth conference—an imperial
holdover in which they had previously exercised little voice—as a belated
moment of decolonisation. Importantly, Hassett is herself ambivalent about
this reading, and not simply because the formal egalitarianism of the
Communion continues to be skewed—like every other realm of life—by the
gross inequalities of international political economy. Her interviews with con-
servative US churchgoers in dissident Episcopalian parishes reveal a widely-held
‘noble savage’ view of African Christianity as ‘purer’ because less mediated by
human interpretation than its morally compromised US counterpart.
The
subtext of this narrative is that Africans lack the capacity for such interpret-
ation. Ironically, it is precisely this attitude that the Ugandan bishops found
patronising in the liberal Episcopalians.
87 HK Mbabazi, Leadership Under Pressure (African Christian Research & Literature Institute, 2004)
143-44.
88 Ibid 144.
89 Hassett (2007) ch. 6.
London Review of International Law Volume 2, Issue 2, 2014 193
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Ugandan homophobia / homophobia in Uganda
Understanding the dexterousness of homophobic discourse, which allows it to
accommodate itself to radically different political projects—imperial collabor-
ation in one moment, decolonisation in another—can help us to appreciate the
reasons for its hegemony. In both temporal moments, I have sought to empha-
sise the agency of Baganda/Ugandan elites in producing or harnessing homo-
phobia for their political purposes. Focusing, as I do, on a narrow set of
religious and political elites in both moments, my account of homophobia
in Uganda is neither temporally nor sociologically comprehensive.
Complementary arguments can, and have, been advanced from other vantage
points. Focusing on present-day political elites most closely linked to the AHA,
for example, one popular instrumentalist explanation for contemporary homo-
phobia suggests that it serves the political interests of the ruling elite by divert-
ing the attention of local and international publics from an increasingly dismal
record of governance.
Such instrumentalist explanations still face the burden
of explaining why non-elites buy into a politics of distraction.
Recent work addressing this question has used the notion of ‘moral panics’
to explain why homophobic discourses resonate with non-elite audiences in
Uganda.
In these arguments, moral panics around issues such as homosexu-
ality, pornography, prostitution, human sacrifice, witchcraft, drugs, alcohol and
other social ‘vices’ reflect deeper social and material insecurities about the
future. The pervasiveness of this sense of precarity is unsurprising in a society
wracked by years of civil war, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, as well as the stresses of
debt, structural adjustment and neoliberalism. Enter the figure of the queer,
enabled by these shifting material configurations and newly interpellated by
rights and identity discourses, providing a convenient scapegoat on whom the
breakdown of traditional family structures can be blamed (notwithstanding
Ugandan society’s actually existing flexibility in innovating a wide range of
non-traditional family arrangements to meet these exigencies). In a society in
which individual worth is measured in terms of participation in the institutions
of marriage and childbearing, the sexually-individuated queer Ugandan is seen
to pose a threat to mechanisms of control inherent in traditional kinship ar-
rangements. Regarded as incapable of reproduction, queers are accused of re-
cruiting children into homosexuality to swell their ranks. Indeed, deeply-rooted
materialist understandings of (heterosexual) marriage and childrearing as
90 Tamale (2013); See also posts by J Burroway, Box Turtle Bulletin, available at http://www.boxtur-
tlebulletin.com/tag/uganda/page/2 (last visited 3 December 2013).
91 This paragraph summarises the arguments of Sadgrove et al. (2012). See also K Cheney, ‘Locating
Neocolonialism, “Tradition,” and Human Rights in Uganda’s “Gay Death Penalty” ’ 55 African
Studies Review (2012) 77.
194 Rao: The locations of homophobia
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http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/tag/uganda/page/2
http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/tag/uganda/page/2
institutions for the control and transfer of property, generate an equally ma-
terialist homophobic discourse in which queers are understood as identifying in
the ways that they do, not because they are performing some internal truth, but
out of material considerations—namely, the promise of Western donor funds,
which are then allegedly used to lure economically vulnerable Ugandans into
homosexuality.
Such accounts take us further in understanding the resonance that homo-
phobic discourses have with Ugandan audiences today. But notice what has
happened to the location of homophobia in such arguments. I began this article
with a series of representations of ‘African/Ugandan homophobia’, in which
homophobia was (often implicitly) attributed to deep-rooted and primordial
local cultural beliefs. I then surveyed arguments that treat homophobia as an
imported discourse originating in the US culture wars, virtually absolving
Ugandans of responsibility for the circulation of such virulent affects within
their country. The current section problematised these understandings by re-
vealing ‘Uganda’ as itself constituted through its encounters with Western and
other external actors, but encounters in which Baganda/Ugandan elites play key
roles. In the third set of explanations, homophobia once more comes to be
attributed to Ugandans, but with a crucial difference. It is not simply that
Ugandan and Western actors share responsibility for homophobia but rather,
more significantly, that the kinds of explanations offered for homophobia in
Uganda work equally well for the West.
Arguments from the relationship between moral panics and material pre-
carity resonate strongly with D’Emilio’s classic essay on capitalism and gay iden-
tity in the West, which has unfortunately received far less attention in queer
scholarship than Foucault’s discourse-centred explanation for the production
of sexual identity.
In D’Emilio’s account, capitalism enables the expression of
sexuality (including non-normative sexualities) as an aspect of individual per-
sonhood by promoting the individuation of wage labour, thereby undermining
traditional kinship arrangements. But capitalism has historically maintained an
allegiance to heteronormativity in order to reproduce the next generation of
workers: hence its alliance with socially conservative ‘family values’ agendas,
for whom the feminist and the queer provide convenient scapegoats for the
very forms of precarity for which capitalism is responsible. Insofar as this account
resonates with scholarship tracing the links between moral panics and material
precarity in contemporary Uganda, we must conclude that there is simply no
such thing as ‘Ugandan homophobia’. The affects that travel under the sign of
‘homophobia’ in Uganda may well feature locally particular idioms (albeit
92 D’Emilio (1983).
London Review of International Law Volume 2, Issue 2, 2014 195
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significantly shaped by transnational evangelical propaganda), but their struc-
tural relations with material precarity bear a striking resemblance to those visible
in the West. In this crucial respect at least, homophobia in Uganda is not sig-
nificantly different from homophobia in the West.
P O S T S C R I P T : T H E D I S P E R S I O N O F P H O B I A S
The problem with teleological narratives of progress may not be the idea of
improvement, so much as the singular yardstick by which it is measured.
Contemporary observers of Uganda will be familiar with President Obama’s
characterisation of the AHB as ‘odious’
and his condemnation of the murder
of Ugandan kuchu activist David Kato.
Few may be aware of an earlier inter-
action between the US and Uganda. In May 1963, when police in the state of
Alabama were brutally suppressing black civil rights demonstrations, the leaders
of 30 African states meeting in Ethiopia debated whether these events warranted
a break in diplomatic relations with the US. In an open letter to President
Kennedy, Ugandan Prime Minister Milton Obote condemned US hypocrisy
and warned that ‘the eyes of the world are concentrated on Alabama’.
Political theorist Mahmood Mamdani recounts his experience of being arrested
while on a civil rights march as a young Ugandan student in the US. When he
telephoned the Ugandan Ambassador from jail, the latter asked crossly ‘What
are you doing interfering in the affairs of a foreign country?’ Mamdani: ‘What?
We just got our independence! This is the same struggle. Have you forgotten?’
The reminder seems to have persuaded the Ambassador to secure Mamdani’s
release.
What sorts of imaginative geographies can make sense of the inter-
ventions of Ugandans such as Obote and Mamdani in US politics—interven-
tions that in their own ways made possible the ascension to the US Presidency
of an African American?
93 BBC News, ‘Obama condemns Uganda anti-gay bill as “odious” ’, 4 February 2010, available at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8498836.stm (last visited 4 December 2013).
94 The White House (Office of the Press Secretary), ‘Statement by the President on the Killing of David
Kato’, 27 January 2011, available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/01/27/state-
ment-president-killing-david-kato (last visited 4 December 2013).
95 Quoted in S Spence, ‘Cultural Globalization and the US Civil Rights Movement’ 23 Public Culture
(2011) 551, 567-68.
96 B Shringarpure, ‘In Conversation with Mahmood Mamdani’, available at http://www.warscapes.
com/conversations/conversation-mahmood-mamdani (last visited 4 December 2013).
97 For an example of what such an imaginative geography might look like, see N Slate, Colored
Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Harvard UP,
2012).
196 Rao: The locations of homophobia
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8498836.stm
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/01/27/statement-president-killing-david-kato
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/01/27/statement-president-killing-david-kato
–
http://www.warscapes.com/conversations/conversation-mahmood-mamdani
http://www.warscapes.com/conversations/conversation-mahmood-mamdani
Ugandan kuchus are remaking these geographies in the course of their
struggle against the AHA, in which legal strategies have been particularly im-
portant. The leading kuchu organisation Sexual Minorities Uganda (SM-UG)
has successfully moved the High Court of Uganda to secure compensation for
violations of basic human rights perpetrated by police and other agents of the
state,
and to obtain an injunction against the Ugandan tabloid Rolling Stone to
stop its publication of homophobic stories inciting violence against the peti-
tioners on account of their sexuality.
It has been less successful at attempting
to sue the Minister for Ethics and Integrity, Simon Lokodo, for his disruption in
2012 of a seminar organised by the lesbian organisation Freedom and Roam
Uganda.
In March 2014, a group of prominent Ugandan liberals from dif-
ferent walks of life, including kuchu activists, challenged the validity of the AHA
on a variety of procedural and substantive grounds by filing suit in the
Constitutional Court of Uganda.
And in an earlier bold and innovative
move in March 2012, SM-UG filed a lawsuit in a US federal court in
Springfield, Massachusetts, against evangelical preacher Scott Lively, whom
we encountered earlier as a key participant in the infamous Kampala seminar
that preceded and influenced the drafting of the AHA. Filed under the US Alien
Tort Statute, which allows non-US citizens to sue in US courts for violations of
customary international law or a treaty to which the US is party, the suit alleges
Lively’s participation in a conspiracy to persecute sexual minorities in Uganda
on a scale sufficiently widespread and systematic to constitute a crime against
humanity. The suit names a number of prominent Ugandans including pastors,
MPs, and ministers as co-conspirators (but not co-defendants) with Lively.
In its legal and political campaign against the AHA, SM-UG demonstrates
a keen awareness of the dispersion of homophobia, attributing responsibility for
98 Mukasa and Another v Attorney-General (2008) AHRLR 248 (UgHC 2008).
99 Kasha Jacqueline and Others v Rolling Stone Ltd., available at http://www.ugandans4rights.org/
index.php/press-releases/403-court-rules-that-all-ugandans-have-a-right-to-privacy-and-dignity-
tremendous-boost-to-constitutional-rights-and-protection-of-minorities-.html (last visited 22
April 2014).
100 A Wesaka, ‘Minister wins gays case’, Sunday Monitor, 24 June 2014, available at http://www.moni-
tor.co.ug/News/National/Minister-wins-gays-case/-/688334/2359266/-/focv8tz/-/index.html (last
visited 30 June 2014).
101 Civil Society Coalition on Human Rights and Constitutional Law, ‘Legality of Anti Homosexuality
Act challenged in Constitutional Court by an unprecedented coalition of petitioners’, available at
http://www.ugandans4rights.org/index.php/press-releases/429-legality-of-anti-homosexuality-act-
challenged-in-constitutional-court-by-an-unprecedented-coalition-of-petitioners-injunction-
against-enforcement-sought.html (last visited 7 April 2014).
102 Centre for Constitutional Rights, ‘LGBTI Uganda Fights Back!’, available at http://ccrjustice.org/
LGBTUganda/ (last visited 4 December 2013).
London Review of International Law Volume 2, Issue 2, 2014 197
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http://www.ugandans4rights.org/index.php/press-releases/403-court-rules-that-all-ugandans-have-a-right-to-privacy-and-dignity-tremendous-boost-to-constitutional-rights-and-protection-of-minorities-.html
http://www.ugandans4rights.org/index.php/press-releases/403-court-rules-that-all-ugandans-have-a-right-to-privacy-and-dignity-tremendous-boost-to-constitutional-rights-and-protection-of-minorities-.html
http://www.ugandans4rights.org/index.php/press-releases/403-court-rules-that-all-ugandans-have-a-right-to-privacy-and-dignity-tremendous-boost-to-constitutional-rights-and-protection-of-minorities-.html
http://www.monitor.co.ug/News/National/Minister-wins-gays-case/-/688334/2359266/-/focv8tz/-/index.html
http://www.monitor.co.ug/News/National/Minister-wins-gays-case/-/688334/2359266/-/focv8tz/-/index.html
http://www.ugandans4rights.org/index.php/press-releases/429-legality-of-anti-homosexuality-act-challenged-in-constitutional-court-by-an-unprecedented-coalition-of-petitioners-injunction-against-enforcement-sought.html
http://www.ugandans4rights.org/index.php/press-releases/429-legality-of-anti-homosexuality-act-challenged-in-constitutional-court-by-an-unprecedented-coalition-of-petitioners-injunction-against-enforcement-sought.html
http://www.ugandans4rights.org/index.php/press-releases/429-legality-of-anti-homosexuality-act-challenged-in-constitutional-court-by-an-unprecedented-coalition-of-petitioners-injunction-against-enforcement-sought.html
Center
http://ccrjustice.org/LGBTUganda/
http://ccrjustice.org/LGBTUganda/
the climate of hostility that it faces to a range of actors—state and non-state,
political and religious, Ugandan and US. In addition, we can see in its pursuit of
legal remedies in the US, a different kind of humanitarian intervention—one in
which the putative objects of liberal international humanitarian benevolence
intervene, in their own interest, in the politics of their putative rescuer. One of
the unremarked-upon ironies of US-Uganda interactions over the AHA is that
the US executive, intensely preoccupied with the question of how it can pres-
sure the Ugandan government into withdrawing this draconian legislation,
seems precluded from preventing the export of homophobic hatred from its
territory by its constitutional obligation to respect the free speech of its citizens.
In pursuing their case against Lively, Ugandan kuchus not only forego depend-
ence on an unreliable rescuer (the US executive) but also call into question its
self-projection as agent of benevolence.
The reality of ‘dispersion’ can also be illustrated with reference to a map
that is strikingly different from the ILGA map discussed at the beginning of this
article. The Trans Murder Monitoring Project collects and analyses reports of
homicides of trans people worldwide. Its 2013 update reports that in the 12
months between November 2012 and November 2013, the highest absolute
numbers of trans murders were recorded in Brazil, Mexico, the US and
Venezuela, with high numbers relative to population size recorded in
Honduras, El Salvador, Brazil and Mexico.
The report is accompanied by a
map, which uses familiar visual strategies to signal places of highest reported
violence by colouring them red. On this map, North America and Latin
America are red. The report cautions that the paradox of the highest numbers
of trans murders being reported from countries with the strongest trans move-
ments raises worrying questions about unreported cases: in other words, the
high numbers may be a sign of progress, an indication of the increasing social
recognition of violence against trans people and the seriousness with which this
is now treated.
This is certainly correct, but there might be other reasons for the very
different message of this map. The politics of sexual orientation (with which
this article has been concerned) and gender identity (which I have not discussed
at all) are frequently highly divergent, notwithstanding their amalgamation in
categories such as ‘LGBT’ and ‘SOGI’. Countries like Iran, for example, harshly
criminalise non-normative sexual orientation while evincing greater legal
103 TvT Project, ‘Trans Respect versus Transphobia Worldwide’, available at http://www.transrespect-
transphobia.org/en_US/tvt-project/tmm-results.htm/tdor-2013 (last visited 4 December 2013).
198 Rao: The locations of homophobia
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twelve
http://www.transrespect-transphobia.org/en_US/tvt-project/tmm-results.htm/tdor-2013
http://www.transrespect-transphobia.org/en_US/tvt-project/tmm-results.htm/tdor-2013
(even if not social) tolerance of transsexuality.
Homophobia and transphobia
are neither identical nor coincidental, even if they frequently accompany one
another. The question of whether and why places with high levels of homo-
phobia may not experience similar levels of transphobia, and vice versa, is too
complex to do justice to here. For now I would simply note that something
interesting happens when the trans murder map is superimposed on ILGA’s gay
and lesbian rights map: virtually the whole world turns red. The dark side of
Aimé Césaire’s stirring insistence that ‘no race has a monopoly of beauty, in-
telligence, strength’
must surely be that no place has a monopoly on ugliness,
stupidity, weakness.
Note: Shortly before this article went to press, on 1 August 2014, the Ugandan
Constitutional Court struck down the Anti Homosexuality Act on the procedural
ground that it was passed without the requisite parliamentary quorum.
104 A Najmabadi, ‘Transing and Transpassing across Sex-Gender Walls in Iran’ 36 WSQ: Women’s
Studies Quarterly (2008) 23. See also A Najmabadi, Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex
Desire in Contemporary Iran (Duke UP, 2013).
105 A Césaire, Return to My Native Land, trans. E Snyders (Présence Africaine, 1968) 125.
London Review of International Law Volume 2, Issue 2, 2014 199
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