a subtle struggle in africa

By Andrea Huncar (Toronto Star www.thestar.com)

gays gaining some ground, but many still persecuted, Young pastors use ugandan church to teach tolerance

August 29, 2004: A regal-looking woman wades through rows of parishioners at the Global Harvest Church, fervently singing her thanks to Jesus.

Rachel's voice and the pulsing drums intensify, seeming to lift the barn-like structure and the faithful - dressed in their Sunday best - toward the heavens.
But the reality of this neighbourhood, sitting on the dusty outskirts of Uganda's capital, is one pinned down by hunger, poverty and disease.

Seven young pastors opened this Pentecostal church in the community at the beginning of the year to help tackle these problems. But it's not the only struggle they've taken on.

The church is sponsored by MUSLA - the Makerere University Students' Lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender Association. But for now, the members' sexual orientation, and their activist agenda, is kept secret from most of the churchgoers.

Despite a flourishing gay movement in Uganda, and across much of Africa, being gay is not only socially unacceptable here, it's a crime.

"They may chase him or her from the school," says 29-year old Andrew Milton, one of the MUSLA pastors.

"If you're working-class, you may lose your job. If family members realize you are doing such a thing, they get you as outcast. The community may stone you."

Section 140 of the Ugandan penal code criminalizes "carnal knowledge against the order of nature" with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

The situation demands prudence, so MUSLA's pastors plant their seeds subtly.
Sermons embrace various faiths, nationalities (Congolese and Rwandan refugees attend the church) and, very quietly, sexual preference.

"You don't say: `We support gays and lesbians'," explains Milton, who says he is straight.

"You say: `We are concerned about people's rights.' Then, you bring in an example - like people who are doing gay things."

The message, he says, is that people should be free to make choices about their sexuality.

"We tell them, if someone wants to be single, he can be single. If someone wants to be celibate, he can. If someone is committed to God and you are doing, for example, gay things, no problem."

But anti-gay sentiment is deeply entrenched in Ugandan society and persecution is sanctioned right from the top.

In 1999, after rumours spread in the media about two Ugandan men marrying, President Yoweri Museveni told the Criminal Investigations Department to look for homosexuals and lock them up.

Activists also point to illegal detentions, convictions without trials, rape to "remedy' lesbianism and cases of torture.

Persecution is not exclusive to Uganda.

In Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe has described homosexuals as "lower than pigs and dogs" and some gays including the late Canaan Banana, a former Methodist minister and Zimbabwe's first president, have been convicted and imprisoned on sodomy charges.

"In the Islamic north (of Nigeria), we have heard of people being stoned to death for sodomy," says Daniel Somerville, editor of Behind The Mask, an African gay and lesbian website (http://www.mask.org.za).

Somerville also cites reports of vigilante groups in Somalia rounding up homosexuals and killing them.

But generally, he says, it's difficult to nail down the number of African governments that de-facto criminalize gay behaviour.

"There are four or five countries that make no mention of it - so, it is assumed to be legal but in fact it is socially taboo. Then, there are situations like Egypt and Eritrea, where it is legal, but gays are still persecuted.

"In the vast majority of countries, homosexuality is criminalized through anti-sodomy laws or wording in morality bills."

MUSLA's president, 28-year-old law student Christopher Kalima, says he has been arrested 11 times not including the times the police "called him up to the station for a chat."

He says that when he was first arrested, at age 18, he was blindfolded and carted off to a secret location.

"Sometimes, they flogged us," Kalima says matter-of-factly, sipping on a beer.

"We were made to sleep with dead bodies because sometimes they torture people and they die. You sleep in there with them, to torture you emotionally, you understand?"

The authorities made sure Kalima did.

"I was released with serious warnings - that if you ever get in here again, you're going to die. I was given strict orders not to say anything that happened to me."

Some MUSLA members might not have been so lucky. Kalima says that, despite being warned off by authorities, MUSLA is looking for six colleagues who have "disappeared."

Makerere University law professor Sylvia Tamale says most rights activists stay away from issues involving sexual minorities: "They will not, and I repeat, they will not, touch the subject of homosexuality."
But Tamale will.

Though she has been shunned by peers and is the subject of hate mail and violent remarks on the state newspaper's online discussion board - "women like Tamale need to be roasted in the sight of everybody at the Constitutional Square!" - she continues to speak out publicly in support of gay rights and changing morality laws.

Global Harvest pastor Milton says MUSLA realized early on the importance of working from within the church - to provide the activists with a safer cover, while exposing Christians to other ways of thinking.

But activists like Tamale flatly reject the religious approach.

"Religions were introduced into our country on this continent from the West - Christianity, Islam," she says.

"They argue that homosexuality is foreign. And I keep telling them it is not homosexuality that is foreign to Africa; it is those religions they base their arguments on."

Islam and Christianity were both spread to much of the continent about 1,300 years ago.

The Arab conquest of the north in the 7th century secured Islam, which later migrated to the interior.

Christianity moved south much later, when European missionaries and settlers arrived, starting in the 1500s but culminating during the 19th-century colonial period.

In Uganda, Christians make up about two-thirds of the population. The remainder follow Islam or indigenous traditions.

On a continent largely perceived as homophobic, another side of Africa - one in which indigenous forms of homosexuality, lesbianism and bisexuality are well-documented - might surprise many.

Pre-marriage homosexual activity between young men, followed by marriage to a woman, is the norm among some tribes in countries like Cameroon and women of Burkino Faso's Dagara tribe partner with other women and sleep together in a group as part of their spiritual practice.

Similarly, inverted gender roles and sexuality are used as means of getting in tune with ancestors in parts of Nigeria and Angola.

Initially, all this makes African leaders' denials of homosexuality puzzling.

Mugabe and others have called homosexuality "un-African" and an "imported Western decadence."

In 2002, while receiving an award in Australia for his country's fight against HIV/AIDS, Museveni said the virus spreads mostly through heterosexual transmission, because homosexuals don't exist in Uganda.

But Queen's University professor Marc Epprecht, who has been researching homosexuality in Africa since 1996, says such statements are not all that inaccurate.

Epprecht distinguishes between indigenous forms of homosexual behaviour in Africa and what he refers to as the "San Francisco model."

"If you conceive homosexuality as a cultural expression of individual self-gratification and that sort of thing - that wasn't there in African culture," he explains.

"In terms of whether people had sex with members of their own sex - that happened, but it was explained in different and sometimes quite sophisticated cultural mechanisms. "
"They had other explanations. It could happen, but it wasn't named as homosexual. "

"Certainly, in the history of the modern gay-rights movement in southern Africa, very often whites were out there first and only later formed bridges to the black community."

Also significant, Epprecht says, is that the Western approach to same-sex relationships threatens the most powerful social force in African society - the family.

"There are economic motives: Who's going to take care of you? And there are political motives: As a family, you make alliances with other families through the marriage of your children."

And then there's the afterlife.

"It's commonplace throughout much of Africa that you die and you become an ancestor.

"To become an ancestor, you have to have children. If you have no children, you don't become an ancestor. You become a nothing."

Despite all the barriers, gay rights have been making headway in Africa, says Somerville, who points to the emergence of rights groups in 15 countries, including Botswana, Burundi, Ethiopia, Ghana, Rwanda and Sierra Leone.

In many African countries, there is a continuing dialogue in the media. And in February, representatives from 16 African nations called on United Nations' African member countries to support a resolution protecting the rights of sexual minorities.

"I'd check back in five or six years," says Queen's professor Epprecht, citing gains made in South Africa, where the constitution bans discrimination based on sexual orientation.

"In the face of the kind of obstacles they've had to deal with, they've done a remarkable job getting off the ground.

"And if you want to make a comparison to the West, we have so many advantages here and they've had so many disadvantages and yet have come quite far in the face of those.

"And I think that's a reason for great optimism."