In August this year, the World Bank announced it would halt new lending to the Ugandan government due to the passing of the country’s draconian anti-Gay law in May. The international monetary body stated that the law “fundamentally contradicts the World Bank Group’s values,” and stressed the need to “include everyone irrespective of race, gender, or sexuality” in global poverty eradication efforts.
The move was met with condemnation by Uganda’s leaders who termed it unjust and hypocritical. Leading the charge was Uganda’s state Minister for State Affairs, Okello Oryem, who pointed to countries with harsher penalties against Homosexuality than those proposed in the Ugandan law.
“There are many Middle East[ern] countries who do not tolerate homosexuals, they actually hang and execute homosexuals, in the United States of America many states have passed laws that are either against or restrict activities of homosexuality … so why pick on Uganda?” he said, further accusing the World Bank of succumbing to pressure from “the usual imperialists.”
Moneys to the tune of $5 billion provided by the World Bank in 2022 under the International Development Association for projects including health and education projects will continue to be disbursed, while new lending will be halted indefinitely. Additionally, private sector projects backed by the International Finance Cooperation and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) could continue “on a selective basis,” the Bank is reported to have said, with an aim to include additional measures that would “ensure inclusion and non-discrimination as needed.”
Months before, after the signing of the law described as one of the world’s harshest anti-LGBTQIA+ laws, Ugandan President Yoweri Musveni rubbished widespread criticism from Western countries and leaders, including US President Joe Biden’s threat to cut aid to Uganda and impose sanctions. “Nobody will move us,” Museveni declared after the signing of the bill into law targeting the East African country’s LGBTQIA+ community.
The president, who claimed he made wide consultations before signing the bill into law, and opining that Homosexuality is a “psychological distortion” also added: “”The problem is that, yes, you are disoriented. You have got a problem to yourself. Now, don’t try to recruit others. If you try to recruit people into a disorientation, then we go for you. We punish you.”
This is not the first time that international aid to Uganda has been cut. In 2014, when the first iteration of the anti-Homosexuality law was passed by the Ugandan Parliament, then US secretary of state John Kerry announced a review of “all dimensions” of US-Uganda relations. The US had, until then, been Uganda’s biggest donor, providing a total $1.7 billion between 2006 and 2010, while in 2011 alone the country received $1.6 billion, making it the 20th largest aid recipient in the world.
The UK followed suit by announcing it would withhold 97.5 million pounds, while promising the money would be channeled through alternative routes including international aid agencies deemed to have met the UK’s human rights criteria. Norway and Denmark were next to cut aid, withholding $8 million and $9 million respectively, with the latter’s Minister of Trade and Development stating: “We cannot distance ourselves too strongly from the law and the signal that the Ugandan government now sends to not only persecuted minority groups, but to the whole world.” It was hoped that discovered oil deposits in Uganda would increase self-reliance and reduce the country’s dependence on foreign aid, but that is yet to be the case.
Also, shortly after the signing of the Anti-Gay bill into law, the US announced travel restrictions against Ugandan officials and issued a travel advisory against US citizens wishing to travel to Uganda “to highlight the risk that LGBTQI+ persons, or those perceived to be LGBTQI+, could be prosecuted and subjected to life imprisonment or the death penalty based on provisions in the law,” according to a statement by the US State Department.
The move came two years after the US announced travel restrictions on Ugandans when the country’s ruling class, through a press statement by Department of State spokesman Antony Blinken, stood accused of “undermining democratic process,” after Uganda’s elections were marred with violence.
As much as the West has made its voice heard in Uganda’s regressive steps to criminalize homosexuality, going so far as to include the death penalty, it is also clear that much of this perfect storm began to brew in the West itself.
Overzealous American evangelicals, disenchanted with the anti-gay and anti-abortion fight in the US chose the small East African nation, that has long been an ally to the West, as an ideological battleground, even importing American-style views on the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which raged through much of Uganda in the 1990s and early 2000s, as being caused and spread by homosexuality.
But just how much of this moral panic turned deadly legislation can be squarely blamed on Western influence?
An Anglican Panic?
For the Christian faithful in East Africa, the story of the Buganda martyrs is well known, memorialized in song by famous choirs in the region, and yearly pilgrimages to the designated martyr sites in Uganda. As the story is told, 31 young pages of then Kabaka (king) of Buganda, Mwanga II, who had converted to Christianity, were killed under orders from the king after refusing his perverted sexual attentions. In the same cannon, Joseph Mukasa Balikuddembe, killed the year before, is praised for protecting new converts from the new Kabaka’s attentions.
The pages, who were burned alive, would become a linchpin in Ugandan Christian faith, and would also spell the beginning of the end of Mwanga II’s rule, and the official start of colonial rule in Uganda. However, as the East African country entered its anti-Homosexual era, opponents to what increasingly became seen as an un-African lifestyle labeled it as foreign; a Western plot hatched to weaken the Christian African family unit.
It therefore holds that it would be Western figures who would give legitimacy to these claims, blaming shadowy figures in the US for the proliferation of Homosexuality in Africa. Pastor Scott Bright, who would play a prominent role in galvanizing homophobic sentiment and eventual legislation in the country, for instance, has blamed the likes of Hungarian-American Billionaire and philanthropist George Soros for the spread of the “homosexual agenda,” which he has urged countries like Uganda to fight against.
The moral panic around the proliferation of homosexuality may also have been triggered by the Anglican Church of America’s decision to ordain Gene Robinson as the first openly Gay bishop in the Anglican Communion in 2003. Only a year before, the Anglican Church of Canada, Diocese of New Westminster, had permitted the blessing of same-sex unions. Both moves sparked public outcry in much of Africa, a continent with a prominent Anglican presence.
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Shortly after, the Church of Uganda (COU) cut ties with the American Anglican Church. In a released statement, the House of Bishops said: “The COU cuts her relationship and communication with the Episcopal Church of the US (ECUSA) on their resolution and consequent action of consecrating and enthroning an openly confessed homosexual, Gene Robinson, as Bishop of New Hampshire Diocese in the Anglican Community.”
Later, in 2008, the Anglican Church of Uganda threatened to leave the worldwide communion unless the ECUSA condemned homosexuality. “If they don’t change and continue to support homosexual practices and same-sex marriage, our relationship with them will be completely broken,” warned Reverend Aaron Mwesigye, provincial secretary and spokesman of the Ugandan Church. “Anglicanism is just an identity and if they abuse it, we shall secede. Yes, we shall remain Christians, but not in the same communion.”
The warning came only a week after then Archbishop of Uganda, Henry Orombi had joined other African Archbishops from Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, and Argentina, in signing an open letter explaining their decision to snub a 10-yearly gathering or world Anglican Bishops, due to the increased support of homosexuality and same-sex unions in the church.
In 2014, after the controversial Anti-Gay law was struck down by the Ugandan Constitutional Court, Archbishop Stanley Ntagali weighed in on the court’s decision, claiming that the law was still needed to protect children and families from Western-imported Homosexuality, Ntagali appealed “to all God-fearing people and all Ugandans to remain committed to the support against homosexuality,” while calling on Ugandan parliamentarians to once again vote for the bill that was struck down by the court after being passed without proper quorum, because “the court of public opinion has clearly indicated its support for the Act.”
A Historical Reading
Whether or not homosexual acts were introduced by Arab traders to the region or were already endemic to the region before the arrival of outsiders, including Europeans remains unclear. Some scholars of African sexualities rely on missionary and informants’ accounts from pre-colonial Uganda to support the foreign introduction theory.
Others, however, argue that the Arab introduction hypothesis is no more than an extension of the hypersexualization of Africans by Europeans, who considered pre-colonial African societies to be both close to nature and far too primitive to have native forms of homosexuality present in more developed parts of the world including East and South Asia, the Middle East, and much of Europe.
Far from being unique to Buganda, and regardless of its origins, forms of homosexuality were practiced in other tribes in East Africa, from the Zanzibar Sultanate to the Congo, including among tribes that are now a part of post-colonial Uganda. Still, with this history, the country’s anti-homosexuality campaign has fashioned the “struggle” as one against pervasive Western influences on a people that, up until then, had no concept of Homosexuality – ritualistic or otherwise.
Whether Homosexuality was, as had been in the case of other communities across Africa and the rest of the world, a tool to strengthen fealty to the crown, or was part of Mwanga II’s own pathology is a matter of evangelical, political, and academic debate. So too is the accuracy of the tyrannical Homosexual Kabaka, and whether the events, cultural practices, and circumstances leading up to the events of June 6, 1886, were interpreted and presented through the lens of conservative 19th-century Christian missionary work in Africa.
Either way, themes of ritualism, indoctrination, sexual tyranny, and a conservative Christian understanding of Homosexuality in present-day Uganda have all collided to create the perfect nursery from which one of the world’s harshest anti-Homosexuality laws has grown.
Photos: Unsplash
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