Straight Talk on the Gay Question in Uganda

The final verdict on Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill was delivered with characteristic Ugandan confusion. The now world-famous piece of legislation—which was introduced in 2009 by a man named David Bahati, a first-term Member of Parliament—sought to criminalize and punish gay Ugandans with the death penalty. But as I write this, the bill is lying blessedly comatose in Uganda’s Parliament. To be exact, it was put on life support May 13, 2011, at the close of Uganda’s last parliamentary session, and in all likelihood, will be impossible to revive. While the ultimate demise of this bill was something that many people (myself included) had been predicting since November 2009, the end result shouldn’t be taken as though the process was a stroll in the park. It wasn’t.

A brief background

From the time of its induction to its final shelving, the anti-gay bill elicited a ferocious response from the international community. This much is known. What is less known, however, is the response of Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, to the whole ordeal. Given the amount of control that Museveni wields within Ugandan politics, one can’t know the full story behind the bill without knowing where Museveni stood on the matter. And by all accounts, the international response seems to have caught him off guard—mainly because, prior to the bill’s introduction, Museveni hadn’t paid any attention to it. The reason for this (for the non-Ugandan readers out there) is that Museveni usually doesn’t pay attention to the private maneuvers of legislators, preferring instead to “direct” Members of Parliament (MPs) to do his bidding when he needs it, and sending in his trusted ministerial handlers to read the riot act to those MPs inclined to go rogue. When that doesn’t work, Museveni has been known to invite recalcitrant MPs to his country home in Rwakitura, in western Uganda, for a paternalistic dressing down laced with a promise of some goodies thrown in for good measure. That usually settles things. [End Page B-44]

Opposite page: All Color, No Color, Series I. Body paint on human skin. ©2010 Daudi Karungi.

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But this time, it didn’t—at least not initially. David Bahati, the author of the bill, was emboldened by the initial lack of attention that his draft legislation had received from State House, and egged on by the narrow-minded certitude of the vociferously anti-gay Archbishop Luke Orombi and Pastor Martin Ssempa (the latter of whom had close ties to rightwing American evangelists such as Abiding Truth Ministries’ Scott Lively and the ever “Purpose Driven” Rick Warren). Bahati had put practically every outrageous clause he could think of in the bill. You couldn’t find a better example of a bill designed on the back of a tithing envelope in the midst of an Elmer Gantry feverish night prayer. Otherwise, there is no way that anyone rational would, for instance, not have seen the Nazi overtones of demanding that anyone who knew of a gay person and didn’t report him or her to the police would be punished with up to three years in jail. And what could have possessed Bahati to include a clause that would allow for gays and lesbians to be arrested from abroad and extradited to Uganda for trial and execution? Even murderers are protected from overseas extradition under Ugandan law.

Museveni intervenes

Blindsided by the sharp and sudden international outcry that the draft Bahati bill had ignited, President Museveni’s political instincts took over. Likely with his eye to the religious constituency of born-again Christians in Uganda, he at first sought to muddy the waters and retreat without openly conceding that the bill was unacceptable. Nsaba Buturo, who was Uganda’s then-Minister of Ethics and Integrity, and a hitherto strident advocate of the bill within the president’s cabinet, was quickly replaced by Sam Kutesa, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, as the voice of the government on the bill. Kutesa’s first act of...