INTRODUCTION
There has been considerable recent international attention to issues of lesbian and gay rights on the African continent, with a number of sources raising awareness of ‘increasing public homophobia’ (Guardian Online 28.5.2010) as a ‘new African oppression’ (Mail and Guardian 25.1.2010). The introduction of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill (2009) to the Ugandan Parliament (still under consideration at the time of writing) has acted as a major flashpoint for this attention (Le Figaro 4.2.2010; The Guardian 5.12.2009; New York Times 4.1.2010; The Times 20.4.2010; Die Welt 13.12.2009), as has the internationally reported (and still unsolved) murder of Ugandan gay activist David Kato in January 2011.
This legislation, which increases the legal penalties against those discovered to be engaging in same-sex sexual activity, proposes the death penalty for ‘aggravated homosexuality’ (which includes sex with a minor or sex in which one of the parties is HIV positive), a factor which has caused international outcry. If passed, a ‘failure to disclose’ clause would also make it an offence for the wider public not to report known homosexuals to the police, thus criminalising landlords with lesbian or gay tenants and the teachers and parents of lesbian and gay children, as well as those seen to ‘promote’ homosexuality through the dissemination of information about same-sex relationships and identities (for a further discussion of the legal implications see Sander Reference Sander2010). Homosexuality has, in any case, been illegal in Uganda since the colonial period, under British legislation outlawing ‘carnal knowledge … against the order of nature’. The wording of the draft legislation is, in places, lifted verbatim from the colonial legislation (Hollander Reference Hollander2009/10).Footnote 1
International response to Uganda's draft anti-homosexuality legislation has been considerable. States and NGOs petitioned the Ugandan government to drop the bill and threatened to cut aid if it was passed. In response, James Nsaba Butoro MP, Minister of State for Ethics and Integrity, argued that ‘the government was determined to pass the legislation, even if it meant withdrawing from international treaties and conventions or losing donor funding’ (The Guardian 4.12.2009). Linking the moral integrity of Ugandan society with resistance to a destructive Western influence, Butoro clarified his position: ‘I have been pressured by some donors to allow homosexuality, but I have told them they can keep their money and the homosexuality because it is not about charity at the expense of our moral destruction’ (Monitor 2.7.2009). This rhetorical contradistinction between morality and money, central to the ‘anti-gay’ position represented by religious and state leaders within Uganda, belies the intimate linkages between material and moral issues expressed in data collected from Ugandan respondents.
Uganda's draft bill and the international uproar which it provoked serves, intentionally or inadvertently, to place sexuality and sexual activity at the core of Uganda's current nationalising project. National and international responses to this move by human rights activists and observers have called attention to the ‘homophobia’ of the bill and its supporters, arguing that its passage would represent an ‘abuse’ or ‘violation’ of human rights (The Guardian 27.10.2009; 26.11.2009). The Ugandan state's attempt to reject Western moral categories through the drafting of the bill can be read as part of a broader discourse of national self-identity – an identity shaped by the early days of Uganda's HIV pandemic, when Ugandan leaders sought to dispel ‘images that made it the pariah of the international world’ (Putzel Reference Putzel2004: 23). The dominant tone of Uganda's state media reporting over the draft bill has framed the ‘threat’ posed by increasing lesbian and gay activism and presence in the country in relation to concerns over ‘Uganda's moral decadence’ and ‘moral bankruptcy’ (New Vision 26.10.2009). This is seen as a battle for control over moral influence within Uganda, a battle for the ‘soul of Uganda’ itself (New Vision 1.6.2009). It likewise arouses frustration over the perceived ‘colonial’ nature of foreign media (New Vision 28.10.2009), Western agents (New Vision 26.10.2009), and (Western) concepts of humanity and society entailed by human rights discourses (New Vision 26.11.2009).
This article proposes a reading and analysis of the recent wave of anti-homosexuality sentiment in Uganda which moves beyond the human rights-inflected interpretation of homophobia. It does so by analysing popular anti-homosexuality discourses within the specific socio-cultural context of Uganda itself, recognising the significance of contextual factors to the interpretation and ‘reading’ of discourses and texts produced (Skinner Reference Skinner1978: xii–xiv). Challenging oversimplified interpretations that see the rise of anti-gay discourses as the straightforward result of an innately African homophobia, we argue that responses to the issue must proceed from an understanding of both (1) the deep imbrication of sexuality, family life, procreation and material exchange in Uganda; and (2) the ways in which elite actors (including government officials, the media and religious leaders) are able to further particular ends by manipulating social anxieties about the destabilisation of this nexus of relations.
A primary focus of our discussion involves the context-specific economic concerns which both implicate and are implicated in the social positioning of those who identify as lesbian or gay. Discourses of material exchange are frequently invoked in both press coverage and our interview data, articulated both by those who identified as gay or lesbian, and those who most decisively did not and indeed rejected the viability of such identities altogether. Such articulations demonstrate the social significance of economic gain and reveal important concerns about the nature and role of familial relationships within Uganda. We argue that economically inflected commentaries about lesbian and gay members of society serve to locate debates about sexuality within Uganda, as same-sex relationships are read and become implicated in the complex networks of exchange and reciprocity through which social and romantic relationships are more widely constituted (Mills & Ssewakiriyanga Reference Mills, Ssewakiriyanga and Cornwall2005; Sadgrove Reference Sadgrove2007a). In light of this evidence, we argue that a perspective which recognises deep connections between the moral and the material may help in understanding why, in a continental context in which same-sex sexual activity was historically sanctioned in various forms and guises (Epprecht Reference Epprecht2004; Morgan & Wierenga Reference Morgan and Wierenga2005; O'Murray & Roscoe Reference O'Murray and Roscoe1998), hostility towards lesbian and gay Ugandans appears so virulent.
Our analysis draws on a diverse body of evidence collected by the authors over a period of years. This includes media analysis of debates about homosexuality in Uganda, twenty formal interviews, two focus groups, and numerous informal observations collected by the first author in Uganda in 2009, supplemented by extensive, long-term work on sexuality in Uganda with particular reference to HIV/AIDS and religion (Sadgrove Reference Sadgrove2007a, Reference Sadgrove2007b; Ward Reference Ward2002, Reference Ward2004). We use this range of evidence to examine how lesbian and gay members of society are constructed, and how Ugandans who are not lesbian or gay conceive of sexual orientation and homosexuality. In doing so we seek to show how certain key concepts are mobilised in order to reject the viability of lesbian and gay identities and rights. In particular we stress the significance of notions of family and community that operate in turn as sites of both moral and material reproduction.
The interview data for this paper were collected as part of a wider research project exploring debates over issues of homosexuality in the worldwide Anglican Communion. Individual interviews and focus groups were conducted in Uganda by the first author in June–July 2009 with a diverse range of respondents, many of whom are lesbian or gay identified, and some of whom are activists, and with other respondents including religious professionals and many practising Christians. Due to the sensitive nature of the data, all participants have been anonymised, except for the Anglican Archbishop of the Church of Uganda Henry Orombi and retired Anglican bishop Christopher Senyonjo, both of whom requested to be named in full.
The paper proceeds as follows. We begin by examining the scholarly literature on human rights and, in particular, how lesbian and gay rights discourses travel from the ‘West to the rest’. We then explore the current public debates about homosexuality in Uganda, showing how the Ugandan government allied newspaper, New Vision, constructs the homosexual as a pivotal figure in a rhetorical battle involving ‘Western imperialism’, as represented by human rights activists and international donors, which seeks to erode the morality of ‘African tradition’. This morality has at its core the figure of an individual who is a corporate member of family and community and who subjugates his or her individual will and desires to the survival of the group (Mbiti Reference Mbiti1969; Menkiti Reference Menkiti and Wright1979). In response to interview data, we consider the ways in which ‘the family’ is instrumentalised in anti-gay rhetoric, and examine its role as a site of both moral and material reproduction. Finally we examine the ways in which homosexual encounters are repeatedly constructed and read as financial transactions, and how such understandings serve to delegitimise the concept of an innate sexual orientation.
THE LIMITS OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND ‘CULTURAL’ EXPLANATIONS
An analysis of the emergence of discourses about lesbian and gay rights within the Ugandan context engages many of the well-rehearsed concerns about the transmissibility of human rights discourses, and the conceptual, social, economic and political worlds into which they must be translated. Scholarship has moved on somewhat from the intensity of the ‘universalism/relativism’ debate regarding human rights in the 1980s (Donnelly Reference Donnelly1984). That debate engaged questions about the potentially hegemonic nature of the human rights project ‘premised on the transformation by Western cultures of non-Western cultures into a Eurocentric prototype’ (Mutua Reference Mutua2001: 205). This critique, based on the legitimacy of Western conceptualisations of the individual, asked how essentially Western liberal political and philosophical concepts could be translated into diverse socio-cultural and moral contexts. Recognising that ‘international human rights instruments … are by and large Western in character’, scholars concerned themselves with questions about whether non-Western ‘peoples’ could be expected to ‘embrace’ them, criticising the United Declaration of Human Rights as ‘an instrument of cultural imperialism’ (Cobbah Reference Cobbah1987: 309; Legesse, cited in Ilesanmi Reference Ilesanmi1995: 295). While the debate shifted its focus to how human rights concepts can be better adapted to local world-views, the recent eruptions in a number of African states regarding lesbian and gay rights suggest that there are still deeply rooted difficulties with the transcultural application of human rights concepts as they are received into local epistemologies.
Moves by the UN on sexual rights, including protecting individuals against discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, have been met with strong resistance from certain governments (many of them African) which seek to ‘erect protective barriers of cultural and national sovereignty’, frequently by appealing to ‘traditional values’ to evade rights obligations, as demonstrated in the popular Ugandan discourses cited throughout this article (Saiz Reference Saiz2004: 60–1). Such struggles between human rights and ‘culturalist’ perspectives speak to the agenda of both states and human rights organisations as they pursue their particular political causes in opposition to each other. Yet they serve to detract from the complex ways in which human beings and societies negotiate and understand their own identities amidst the prescriptions and proscriptions of states, NGOs, donors, activists, religious leaders, churches, neighbours, friends and family. That the gay rights agenda can be constructed by those who oppose such rights, including certain African leaders, as ‘colonial’ and ‘neo-imperialist’, and utilised as a site of projection for certain imaginings of ‘traditional’ social values, is deeply problematic. That the lesbian and gay rights advocates’ accusation of homophobia is met in turn by such vigorous African counter-critique serves to entrench the polarity between divergent conceptions of society, the individual, sexuality and power. The complexities generated by the particular histories of specific states (which include complex relationships between those states) complicate the perceived front at which a ‘permissive’, ‘morally bankrupt West’ meets a ‘homophobic’, ‘backward’ Africa.Footnote 2 But such complexities are lost in these polarised imaginings, as both sides reinvent themselves to pursue political ends which rest on reductive perceptions of the other (see also Tucker Reference Tucker2009, Reference Tucker2010).
Between these two positions lie very different ways of imaging society, the self, and the function and role of sexuality within society. To understand anxieties regarding the rights claims of gay rights activists in Uganda, situated discourses about gay and lesbian people need to be decoupled from universalising notions of an innate African cultural homophobia, and explored through a contextual reading of such discourses. It is clear that certain state and media discourses about the ‘moral bankruptcy’ of the West, epitomised in same-sex sexuality, feed into societal concerns over morality and the control of sexuality. Yet this is not to say that individual opposition to lesbian and gay identities directly reflects anxieties about ‘cultural imperialism’ or even the need to protect the ‘family’ and ‘traditional’ values.Footnote 3 Rather, the dominant state position maps onto, and often takes advantage of, other widely felt anxieties, creating the image of a national unity of purpose (conveniently for certain state and religious leaders who have monopolised public discursive space). In doing so, elite actors draw attention away from the myriad social and material rationales underpinning anxiety about lesbian and gay activism, many of which, as we demonstrate, relate directly or indirectly to the profound economic insecurity and fears for the future (especially within the context of the HIV crisis) experienced by ordinary Ugandans.
Concerns over the lesbian and gay international activist agenda to transform ‘practitioners of same-sex contact into subjects who identify as homosexual and gay’ are highly relevant within the Ugandan context (Massad Reference Massad2002: 362). In his work on the ‘Gay International’,Footnote 4 a critique of scholarship on Muslim and Arab sexualities, Massad (Reference Massad2002: 363) interrogates the teleological nature of a self-regarding, Western activist model informed by human rights-based understandings about sexual orientation, identity and the idea that ‘sexual freedom transcends culture’. Within this model, it is the assurance and protection of ‘rights’ which affords this freedom. As he argues in relation to Arab societies, such discourses and agencies assume ‘prediscursively that homosexuals, gays and lesbians are universal categories that exist everywhere in the world … It is the discourse of the Gay International that both produces homosexuals, as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist, and represses same-sex desires and practices that refuse to be assimilated into its sexual epistemology’ (ibid.).
It is this perceived ‘Gay International’ that certain voices within the Ugandan state and religious leadership imagine and respond to as they propound their anti-colonial, anti-Western, anti-gay discourse. The instrumentalisation by state agents of a ‘Gay International’ is underscored by Scholar A's (Reference Scholar A2006) work on gay rights activism in Egypt. Scholar A demonstrates how, within the Egyptian political context, adoption of American rights models of ‘gay identity’ (the apex of which is ‘coming out of the closet’) to pursue the protection of those practising same-sex behaviour has provided the state with a target from which it can ‘deploy gays as a scapegoat for other problems such as rising unemployment and poverty’ (ibid.: 30). Scholar A's auto-ethnographic writing demonstrates the tensions which can arise from the complex blurring of religious and national discourses about identity, generated to oppress those practising same-sex behaviour. Such discourses are particularly difficult to align with secular forms of personhood and identity encompassed by human rights discourses. These tensions are clearly evident within Ugandan debates.
Recognising these ‘repressive’ and destructive outcomes, Altman (Reference Altman1996: 84) notes that ‘the rhetorics of liberation and modernity rarely allow for the fact that each change contains a restrictive as well as liberatory component’ in which existing patterns of ‘homosociobility’ are trumped by Western models (ibid.: 88). In his work on the ‘internationalisation of gay identities’, Altman advises caution against assuming a ‘linear genealogy’ in which Western-style identities emerge inevitably from the economic and cultural forces of globalisation. While recognising the links between societal affluence and the development of a ‘commercial gay world’, Altman argues for analyses across socio-cultural and geographic contexts which understand sexuality as ‘involving the complex and varied ways in which biological possibilities are shaped by social, economic, political, and cultural structures’ (Altman Reference Altman1996: 79; Reference Altman1997). Such analyses allow for the visibility of a diverse array of sexual practices which are neither obscured by the imposition of (Western) binary models of gender, nor confused with or reduced to homosexual identity. Altman focuses his analysis on evidence from Asia and South America, yet many of his questions bear relevance to the African context. Such concerns reflect Brown's (Reference Brown1995: 11) caution against assuming ‘that dimension of liberalism which presumes social and political forms to have relative autonomy from economic ones, to be that which can be tinkered with independently of developments of the forces of capitalism’. Oswin (Reference Oswin2005: 581), reflecting on this, argues that in the context of South Africa, while legal rights may have been secured for homosexuals, until there is greater economic stability, sexual identity is unlikely to be a personal priority. Our own data suggest that analyses about morality and sexual identity must be rooted within a deep understanding of local moral economies and the material flows of resources through reciprocal social networks.
HOMOSEXUALITY DISCOURSES IN UGANDA
Interviewer: Why has homosexuality become such a big issue in Uganda?
Respondent: Well, what the media is doing it … and it's like a business … They know that when something about homosexuality is put in the media, people hurry to buy those papers … their interest is making money … So in the media, they normally say, er, these mad people, these, er, drunken people, people who are mentally disorganised, people who are disorganised inside – the abusive way … So that adds a kind of fear … and whoever had that orientation should get scared … to see how it can [be removed from Uganda] which is impossible.
(Mark 2009 int.)Newspaper debates about homosexuality in Uganda reveal and reflect profound social anxieties over the changing nature of sexual norms and discourses. The 2009/10 period of heightened concern fits well into sociological conceptualisations of ‘moral panic’ in which ‘the agents responsible for the threat – “folk devils” – are stereotyped and classified as deviants’ (Goode & Ben-Yahuda Reference Goode and Ben-Yahuda1994: 149). Media-constructed moral panics, ‘used by politicians to orchestrate consent, by business to promote sales in certain niche markets and by media to make home and social affairs newsworthy’, are strongly reflected in responses from Ugandan lesbian and gay rights activists to the heightened attention paid to homosexuality by the Ugandan media in 2009–10 (McRobbie & Thornton Reference McRobbie and Thornton1995: 560).
Uganda's print media environment has become increasingly competitive. Several dozen newspaper titles have been launched since 2001 and as a result, publications have become competitively sensationalist in their attempts to survive. Examples include the tabloids Red Pepper – which regularly refers to gay men as ‘bum drillers’ – and the now infamous Rolling Stone newspaper, which, on 10 October 2010 published the names and personal details of known homosexuals in Uganda and called for their hanging. While this headline caught the attention of the international media and activist groups, less interest has been shown in the way that the anti-homosexuality nationalising project is more subtly expressed in the state-owned newspaper New Vision, widely recognised within Uganda as the ‘government's mouthpiece’. To that end, we focus our discourse analysis on New Vision in order to explore the role of an alternative yet strongly influential media voice.
Press coverage of dominant (state) moral discourses over the past four years in Uganda depicts it as a country under moral siege: ‘[Uganda is] besieged by pornography, prostitution, human sacrifice, drug abuse, embezzlement and witchcraft to the extent that it is “dangerously becoming a permissive society”’ (Nsaba Butoro quoted in New Vision 1.7.2009). Homosexuality is frequently taken to represent one aspect of Uganda's ‘moral decline’, of which HIV infection rates, girls wearing miniskirts, drug and alcohol use amongst young people and ‘men marrying men’ are all evidence. Within this discourse, the dangers posed by external (Western) influences are often amplified by the internal factor of the failure of Ugandans to instil ‘good values’. A return to traditional and religious moralities, both of which imagine the family as a centrepiece, continues to be idealised as an appropriate response by political and religious leaders. Where ‘homosexuality, indecent dressing and promiscuity’ are represented as a result of ‘weak cultural up-bringing’, the preservation of culture and values represents the required solution to such national moral decline (New Vision 15.7.2009, 28.10.2010). The responsibility to lead this campaign lies both with parents – who must ‘[teach] children the right morals before they learn from the environment’ – and ‘the government [which] has been urged to formulate a national curriculum emphasising moral values so as to discourage foreign practices like homosexuality and prostitution’ (New Vision 15.7.2009).
This moral tone has been strongly encouraged by religious leaders in Uganda. Between 2008 and 2010 Uganda witnessed an upsurge in the volume of press coverage relating to homosexuality. This escalation was catalysed by the actions of the Church of Uganda under the leadership of Archbishop Henry Orombi, who, with other African bishops, responded with outrage to the consecration of the openly gay, partnered bishop, Gene Robinson of New Hampshire in America. The Church of Uganda went as far as breaking with the (US) Episcopal Church, boycotting the 2008 Lambeth Conference, and joining ranks with other bishops who opposed the consecration to form an alliance within the Anglican Communion (Hassett Reference Hassett2007; Rubenstein Reference Rubenstein2008; Vanderbeck et al. Reference Vanderbeck, Valentine, Ward, Sadgrove and Andersson2010). Within Uganda itself, Orombi was regularly reported as speaking out regarding the issue of homosexuality, both in the church and in wider society.
High-profile born-again pastors have also played a significant role in mobilising anti-gay sentiment. The most public commentator is Pastor Martin Ssempa of Makerere Community Church, who leads the Inter-Faith Rainbow Coalition against Homosexuality (Monitor 10.7.2009).Footnote 5 Notorious for his public displays of outrage, his most recent public demonstrations have included the screening of homosexual sexual acts in his church, and his now infamous proclamations about how gay men ‘eat-da-poo-poo’, which became a viral video sensation on YouTube and other internet sites (YouTube 2010). Ssempa, alongside other prominent pastors, has frequently been shown to have strong links with the American religious right as well as with government ministers in Uganda (Girard Reference Girard2004; Kaoma Reference Kaoma2009; Long Reference Long2005; Monitor 17.1.2010). Such elision of local and transnational religio-political networks complicates the context from which Uganda's anti-homosexuality legislation emerged. The timing of the appearance of the legislation has been specifically linked to the presence in Uganda of three well-known US evangelists who ran a three-day seminar to ‘expose the truth behind homosexuality and the homosexual agenda’. This seminar culminated in a parliamentary petition denouncing homosexuality. A few months later, the anti-homosexuality private member's bill appeared, tabled by the young National Resistance Movement (NRM) member for Ndorwa West, David Bahati MP, himself rumoured to have strong links with the US religio-political organisation ‘The Family’ (Sander Reference Sander2010). Bahati is one of a new generation of young MPs who have attempted to challenge the party status quo by tabling pieces of ‘radical’ legislation. Therefore, while the anti-homosexuality bill had the backing of some senior people, such as Ethics Minister James Butoro, it was also deeply unpopular amongst large parts of the caucus, demonstrating contest over the legislation within the NRM.
Responding to this anti-homosexual outrage, Ugandan gay activists have identified a conservative religious constitution at the heart of government as responsible not only for their persecution but for a deeper social and political malaise. One writes:
It is not surprising that most of those connected to state power are rigid, fundamentalist, revivalist Christians who bring to the public policy process and the management of state affairs, their religious bigotry that they pass off as public morality and ethics. It is the reason no significant progress will come out of Africa, because we have erected a ring fire of religious and social taboos around our lives and thoughts, that venturing beyond is not only terrifying, but patrolled and policed by authoritarians.
(Monitor 11.1.10)Seeking to galvanise a public image of Uganda as a God-fearing society, New Vision routinely makes alliances between the state and religious leaders highly visible. Concerning homosexuality, the public read of religious institutions being urged by state leaders to ‘address matters of the soul’ and ‘fight immorality’ in Uganda (New Vision 1.7.2009). The public read that the president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, ‘backs church against gays’, praising and ‘salut[ing] the Archbishop and bishops of Africa for resisting disorientation and a decadent culture … being passed on by Western nations’ (New Vision 17.8.2008). From the clergy, the public hear ‘call[s] upon the government to partner with the church to fight such evils’, and witness engagements in which church and state agencies borrow each other's public spaces (New Vision 28.5.2009). One report describes the Assistant Inspector General of Police addressing a church congregation about community policing and telling clergy to ‘support police’ in the fighting of ‘vices like homosexuality and lesbianism’. Such reports demonstrate significant boundary dissolution between the language of the church and the language of the law. In relation to accusations brought against a prominent pastor, accused of ‘sodomising’ young boys, the Assistant Inspector General of Police told the church congregation: ‘Such acts are called crimes in Police while in church they are called sins. Since the two are similar, you should inform us about people who are committing sins so that they are dealt with accordingly’ (New Vision 4.10.2009).
The war ‘for the soul of Uganda’ is therefore constructed as a battle between the forces of ‘secularism and extreme liberalism’, and ‘those which are advocating for a morally upright and spiritually-inclined Uganda’ (New Vision 1.6.2009). These forces of secularism include a national media in Uganda which is deemed to privilege the perspectives of the secular camp over those of the ‘spiritually-inclined’, due to the fact that ‘media owners are entrepreneurs who are simply in the business to make money by any means possible’, and who ‘care little about having a Uganda that has integrity’ (ibid.). Further, while not always explicitly foregrounded, many of the anxieties about moral degeneration as reflected within popular media are rationalised by recourse to material and financial gain. The ultimate threat to living a morally upstanding life, it is suggested, is ‘greed’ for money. Such commentary pits capitalist ideals against spiritual ones so that readers see the tools of a rights-based, capitalist, Western model confronting a God fearing, family-orientated Uganda. Yet by pitting the materialist and the moral as antithetical, such rhetorics obscure the deep imbrication of material and moral motives within Ugandan society and the (historical) role of material factors in the production of moral norms (Draper Reference Draper1989).
MONEY AND MORALITY
I would not forgive my government if it dares to mind about foreign aid and forget our cultural values.
(MP Elijah Kyetunda, cited in Monitor 29.12.2009)Issues of money and funding are central preoccupations of Ugandan discourses about homosexuality. At the micro level, money figures prominently in popular conceptions of the transactional ways in which same-sex practitioners are ‘incentivised’ (as we elaborate below). At the macro-level, the Ugandan government's approach to human rights has been intimately linked to the flow of funding from donor states (Monitor 12.12.2009, 17.1.2010, 9.1.2010). Yet the apparently cavalier attitude towards donor funding from certain government figures reflects and reinforces the rhetorical intensity of the ‘struggle for the soul of Uganda’. In an article which considered the donor relationship implications of the ‘anti-gay’ bill, Butoro responded to the threat to withdraw funds: ‘I all the time tell them to leave us alone. I say that Uganda's integrity is more than the money they give us. We are not going to be taken advantage of on account of financial support’ (New Vision 1.7.2009).
Such pronouncements are intended to reflect commonly felt grievances over moral laxitude in wider society. Such is the anxiety about the sway of financial incentive that it is only by positing the ‘moral’ as entirely removed both from the materiality of everyday encounters and from the economic dimension of international state relations that ‘integrity’ can be ensured. Any decision which involves exchange is immediately suspect. Museveni therefore risked severe domestic criticism when apparently swayed by pressure from donors. Known to be ‘no friend of same-sex relationships’, Museveni initially said very little about the bill. Yet close international attention, coupled with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's threats to keep a close eye on upcoming elections, led Museveni to warn advocates of the bill to ‘go slow’, framing the matter as a sensitive foreign policy issue. This deeply frustrated the bill's supporters (Monitor 15.1.2010, 17.1.2010). Further, Museveni was criticised for responding to international pressure, while ignoring local protests in support of the bill. This was interpreted as indicating a ‘disregard for domestic opinion’ and a preoccupation with international concerns because those who hold such concerns ‘help sustain his government through aid’ (Monitor 16.1.2010). While Butoro may insist ‘that Uganda's integrity is more than the money they give us’, to supporters of the bill, Museveni's actions suggest otherwise.
‘Greed’ is a commonly decried ‘source of evil’ in Ugandan society, responsible for a number of evils including ‘homosexuality, defilement, human sacrifice, corruption and theft’, all of which have become ‘rampant’ in Uganda (New Vision 26.7.2009). There is a profound anxiety about the promise of financial gain and its power to motivate Ugandans to a whole host of ‘immoral’ activities. Homosexuality is no exception, and church and state leaders are regularly reported as warning young people ‘against receiving money from people who may want to lure them into homosexuality’ (New Vision 9.6.2009). Other reports of financial motivation to ‘immoral’ behaviour state that money has been used to provide (false) evidence to accuse others of engaging in homosexual activity. In a high-profile case in Uganda, one of Uganda's best-known Pentecostal pastors, Robert Kayanja, was accused of ‘sodomising’ young boys. Subsequently, Kayanja's accusers retracted their complaint ‘saying that they had been bribed to make the accusations’ (New Vision 4.10.2009, 1.12.2009). Similar accusations followed the story of George Oundo, a known gay rights activist. He later renounced his homosexual behaviour after becoming a born-again Christian. At a workshop organised by the Family Life Network, a conservative organisation of American origin that promotes family values, Oundo confessed to having ‘recruited school children into homosexuality as part of a programme to promote the practice in Ugandan schools’ (New Vision 23.3.2009). Members of the lesbian and gay activist community were shocked by what they perceived as Oundo's betrayal. Rumours circulated that Oundo had received money from the Family Life Network in exchange for his testimony. Commentaries about personal motive, whether from supporters or opponents of gay rights in Uganda, are frequently financially inflected. As one commentator reflected, ‘last week, we argued that those so loudly against the gays and those who are against it in the name of human rights could possibly be trying to do some business, for it seems as profitable to fight gays as it is to defend them’ (Monitor 18.12.2009).
Theoretical explorations of the relationship between money and morality provide insights into the current social anxieties about public morality and profit that are increasingly evident in debates over homosexuality in Uganda. The expressed preference for moral absolutism in Uganda's discourse, and the wariness about material exchange as queering otherwise clear moral lines, speaks to understandings of money's disruptive qualities: ‘turning what was formerly black and white into greyness’ (Macfarlane Reference Macfarlane and Parkin1985: 72; see also Simmel Reference Simmel1978). This may explain why anxiety over sexual morality might be discussed in terms of money or material acquisition, implicating sexual morality in a critique of the ways in which the capitalist order disrupts kinship solidarities. Yet we also witness considerable contestation within Uganda regarding the multiple representations and meanings of material acquisition. As well as providing a language for articulating anxieties about moral evils, acquisition and ‘prosperity’ are celebrated and encouraged at the many popular Pentecostal churches that propound the gospel of health and wealth. This doctrine, offering a ‘morally responsible materialism’, has been argued to privilege collective over individualised forms of accumulation in some of its African expressions (Hunt Reference Hunt2000; Marshall-Fratani Reference Marshall-Fratani1998). Distinguishing between long-term and short-term cycles of reproduction is helpful in this context. In relation to a range of case studies, Parry and Bloch (Reference Parry and Bloch1989: 26) suggest that systems ‘have to make some ideological space within which individual acquisition is a legitimate and even laudable goal; but that such activities are consigned to a separate sphere which is ideologically articulated with, and subordinated to, a sphere of activity concerned with the cycle of long-term reproduction’. Anxiety is generated when long-term reproduction (expressed in terms of concern for the family) appears to be sacrificed for short-term material goals. Acquisition is therefore construed as morally good when it is seen to further long-term social reproduction of the family, but as morally bad when it is linked to other motivations (e.g. non-procreative sex). Discourses about materialism in relation to same-sex activity therefore can be read as both reflecting and constituting anxieties about the moral order and the threat of new moral identities.
HOMOSEXUALITY AND THE FAMILY IN UGANDA
The future of our country and the family in particular is under threat by the vice of homosexuality.
(New Vision 16.10.2009)Within the Ugandan context, the threat that homosexuality is deemed to pose to the future of Uganda is heavily focused on the vulnerability of the ‘traditional family’, undermined by the actions of homosexuals who reject their reproductive potential and thus defy their responsibility to produce future Ugandan generations. The provisions afforded by Uganda's draft legislation are interpreted within this framework as existing to ‘protect the traditional family’ (Anti Homosexuality Bill 2009: 1.1). Fuelling anxiety about the family and the reproduction of Ugandan society is an especially potent way of garnering support in a context where the social status of an individual and his or her family continues to rest in large part on the production of offspring (O'Murray & Roscoe Reference O'Murray and Roscoe1998: 273).
There is a considerable range in the ways in which sexuality is performed and imagined in Uganda, and understandings are subject to constant change and negotiation. Yet emphasis upon the connections between sex and procreation appeared frequently in the interview data, suggesting that public debates over homosexuality are in some ways serving to reinforce links between procreation and sexuality. As one lesbian-identified respondent suggested: ‘I think Ugandan people believe so much in procreation, so they can look at it as a loss if their son doesn't marry a woman and then they have children and even you as a woman you don't get married to a man and you have children … they care about you having children, they care about if you produce; that's the important one.’ (Clare 2009 int.).
In discussions with lesbian and gay-identified Ugandans, the demand to marry and produce children became an explanatory factor for high numbers of ‘bisexuals’ who were forced to live double lives to meet the demands of society. One gay-identified male respondent suggested that in order to demonstrate that one is ‘living in line with culture … you have to portray [marriage]. And you also have to produce children. For your parents. The grandchild, even if it is only one. But at least one.’ (Brian 2009 int.) One of Uganda's most public supporters of the lesbian and gay rights movement in Uganda, retired Anglican bishop Christopher Senyonjo (2009 int.), stated:
What people think about sexuality is to have children, especially. And so if someone said these people want to maybe reduce the population they were thinking of homosexuality as being brought in by the Western people to have fewer people in Africa … But you know African society for a long time, they didn't even want to talk about sexuality, even if it wasn't homosexuality. Talking about sex, it is so private. Now when you bring in this other element of homosexuality which threatens even having children, because for people, some of them have been open they're not happy because it may lead to people not having children. That is the real argument that they usually bring out. They say if this went on it would mean the end of the human race – they go to that extent.
An examination of the ways in which both family and marriage are constructed within the context of Uganda enables better contextualisation of some of the anxieties about the family being articulated in relation to homosexuality. It is certainly the case that the increasing presence of lesbian and gay identities both threatens and reflects an existing process of change in the nature of the family and, at a deeper level, social relations within Uganda. It is also the case that historically within Ugandan society it is marriage and childbearing that have come to constitute the events around which the deep imbrication of materiality and morality are most strongly evident.
While marriage and kinship practices within Uganda are diverse, there are often strong links between marriage partnership and exchanges of (bride) wealth and material goods. Shapiro (Reference Shapiro and Robertson2005: 15) considers woman-woman marriage practices amongst the Nandi in neighbouring Kenya to show how flexibility about gender roles rests on the stability of a system in which marriages are ‘established through exchanges of wealth; in which they are relationships not so much between individuals as between kin groups defined through descent’ (see also Parikh Reference Parikh, Adams and Pigg2005; Southall Reference Southall1960). Scholars have historically supported this position, describing marriage as at one level entailing an ‘economic transaction’ in which the ‘bonds it creates between giver and receiver of bridewealth are similar to, though more lasting than, those created by other economic transactions’ (La Fontaine Reference La Fontaine and Fortes1962: 97; Radcliffe-Brown & Forde Reference Radcliffe-Brown and Forde1950). Bledsoe's (Reference Bledsoe1980: 81 n.1) discussion of the historical literature on marriage and kinship across Africa considers ‘marriage and the control of women to form the core of economic and political advancement’. The production of children secures the inheritance and transfer of land and resources within the kinship group, assures the economic survival of the family by providing labour, particularly in rural areas, and provides ‘security’ for the parents in old age (Meillasoux Reference Meillasoux1983). Understanding marriage as historically concerned with bringing new parts of community into economic as well as social relationship with each other, and with controlling the ways in which resources flow from one group to another, offers a deeper context for understanding the perceived threat posed by emerging, individualised sexual identities. Crucially, such identities have not, as yet, been incorporated within the control of extended family groups and remain outside formalised networks of exchange.Footnote 6 Individuals are thus perceived to prioritise their own interests over and above those of the corporate group.
Evidence of the persistent links between material exchange, marriage and sexuality came from a young man involved in a same-sex relationship with a long-term partner, who suggested that while Ugandan society was ‘getting used’ to its increasingly visible and numerous gay and lesbian members, the pressure to marry due to anxieties about material (as well as emotional and biological) inheritance persists:
Respondent: Now my mum is calling me to get married … My brother following me got married. When I moved from my home village, they forced me to get a lady and they asked me …
Interviewer: How could they force you?
Respondent: My clan, decides for a child to marry these ladies and they're the ones to pay [bridewealth]. If you are 18 years and you're not schooling, it is there that you have to get a wife … And [the clan are the] ones … to pay [bridewealth] not my money … Then [the clan] say that this is your house, this is … the beginning, these are the land you are going to use if you improve on, it's up to you.
(Chris 2009 int.)The societal tension surrounding the relationship between corporate and individual interests can be usefully illuminated by Mbiti's (Reference Mbiti1969: 279) distinction between a morality of conduct and a morality of being. A morality of conduct, he argued, entailed a form of ethics that was essentially dynamic: ‘This is what one might call “dynamic ethics” rather than “static ethics” for it defines what a person does, rather than what he is. Conversely, a person is what he is because of what he does rather than he does what he does because of what he is’. Such a notion of personhood in which ‘a person is what he is because of what he does’ links to another crucial aspect of historical sexual morality in Uganda: that of a deep privacy and discretion about matters of sexuality. This secrecy, linked to the functioning of what Heald (Reference Heald1995: 492–5) has dubbed ‘respect cultures’ in which ‘respect draws its power from that accorded to sexuality’, is necessitated by the ‘rules of respect’. These rules require a particular attention towards outward appearances to demonstrate the maintenance of proper decorum, a significant part of which was premised on very strict modesty codes, taboos about the open discussion of matters of sexuality, and the prohibition of any display of sexuality (see also Epprecht Reference Epprecht1998; Haram Reference Haram2005).
Mbiti's stress on a morality grounded in behaviour (what one does) explains why the tendency of lesbian and gay activists to talk in terms of identity (who they are) is perceived as threatening dominant social norms. It also helps to explain the emphasis Ugandans commonly place on the importance of privacy and discretion as a central part of sexual morality. The challenge that lesbian and gay-identified activists present and confront in Uganda concerns at one level the discursive reframing of sexuality from being a deeply ‘private’ matter, something which it is difficult to talk about publically except with recourse to social reproduction (and in the context of HIV prevention, health and well-being), to being about public identities which wrench sexuality from the ‘respectable’ contexts of childbearing and health. The deep imbrication of sexuality, procreation, family life and material exchange provides a context where lesbian and gay identities are readily constructed as a threat by the state, media and religious leaders seeking to use the issue for particular ends.
MONEY AND MOTIVE
While notions of material exchange are deeply linked to understandings of sexual relationships and marriage, they are also central to public imaginings of how and why people enter into same-sex encounters and relationships. Archbishop Henry Orombi (2009 int.) reflects popular understandings about how lesbian and gay activists attract support: ‘Another entry point which we find very interesting is how much the activists that are promoting gay relationships have attracted people financially … Now in a place where a boy needs school fees to go to a secondary school, to go to university and you offer him money. The temptation is very strong.’
Children are represented as a particular locus of social vulnerability within Ugandan discourses about homosexuality, and the sexual ‘defilement’ of children by adults is a common concern (New Vision 3.8.2009, 10.9.2009). Homosexuals (imagined to be non-procreative and therefore incapable of reproducing their identity by other means) are often represented as being forced to ‘recruit’ or ‘initiate’ new members, and children are imagined as particularly vulnerable recruitment targets (New Vision 26.10.2009; interviews).
Boarding schools are often cited as sites where, away from the scrutiny of parents who otherwise encourage children to ‘learn their good culture’, homosexuals seek to prey on young boys (New Vision 30.9.2009). A Roman Catholic nun who had spent many years in education reported the following:
At Bwanda we had a girl from Tanzania who was sent away. For Tanzanian girls it's a habit to practice that [same-sex behaviour]. At one time the Sisters got concerned. The girl, who was in [the top year of secondary education] was a ring leader, encouraging other girls to do that. She was sent away to do her exams from outside the school. She came to me to look for a place. I asked her ‘Why have they expelled you?’ She said ‘Because I'm a lesbian. I don't know why they sent me away. Even my brother said he didn't see anything wrong.’ The Tanzanians are the ones who brought that here. Teachers used to get children from Tanzania as they pay very well and they also pay for English training. But now everybody knows that they brought chaos in schools.
(Sr Grace 2009 int.)Here we see several key tropes regarding popular constructions of homosexuality in Uganda. First, the student who had ‘brought chaos’ into the school was from outside Uganda – in this case Tanzania. Second, the girl in question was a ‘ring leader’, ‘initiating’ others into the practice. Third, and most important, there is an economic component. Tanzanian students were welcomed because they ‘pay very well’, yet this financial reward comes at a moral cost to the school community.
The ways in which money and funding are discursively implicated at both the macro and micro-level reinforce the significance of the anxiety generated by the fact that lesbian and gay members of society threaten to redirect resources into newly formed networks, posing both an existential and symbolic threat to dominant formations of clan and family. Such imaginings also inform understandings about the immorality of same-sex behaviour and the rejection of a concept of fixed sexual orientation:
I know that right now there are countries that really influence the way things happen here … because we receive lots of funds from them. And tomorrow if we had an Obama that was strongly gay, they say ‘Uganda you will receive our funds if you accept gay marriages’ … They really really affect everything that happens … most of our policies.
(Sarah 2009 focus group)During discussions with many lesbian and gay activists in Uganda, prevailing negative attitudes within Uganda towards gay and lesbian members of society were attributed to a ‘lack of education’ about human sexuality:
Most of the problem is that, many people's problem is they lack education; they are ignorant about orientation, what orientation is because all of them their argument is always, why shouldn't they stop being that [homosexual]? No one can come out and believe that it is someone's feeling; it is a feeling. It, it's not something, er, made. In most of the cases it is born.
(David 2009 int.)While this view from lesbian and gay supporters suggests that a lack of education about human sexuality lies at the root of Uganda's hostility towards its lesbian and gay members, there remains, from those opposed to same-sex behaviour, a recurrent focus on the role of material incentive within relationships between same-sex partners. This suspicion undermines any concept of ‘orientation’ by constructing same-sex sexual encounters as primarily transactional:
There are students who have been in those kinds of things [homosexuality] so why are you giving people money to initiate other people into a practice that you think is not natural – what we have been taught … The problem [is] where this money comes from is from Western countries … There, well there are silent networks that we ordinary people can't know. They have some kind of system. They, they give these guys money even at universities I'm told, well I haven't seen live example[s] but I'm told there's a network of people who are supposed to initiate … people into this kind of practice and they're given large sums of money.
(Bethany 2009 int.)Within Uganda, suspicions about financial or material gain or motivation are embedded and frequently articulated within everyday relationships. Dr Sylvia Tamale (Reference Tamale, Cole, Manuh and Misescher2007), Dean of Law at Makerere University and an outspoken advocate for human rights (including lesbian and gay rights), recounts a ‘wave of homophobia’ in 2003 arising out of an encounter between a section of the women's movement in Uganda and the Equal Opportunities Commission in which the former tried to convince the latter to address the rights of lesbian and gay members of society as a marginalised group in Uganda. Tamale, heavily involved in this move and vocal in the national and international press at the time, writes of a text message that she received from a friend: ‘Congs Sylvia; on your way to becoming a millionaire!’ When Tamale asked her friend to explain what she had meant in the text, she explained that ‘there was an assumption that [Tamale's] support for the rights of homosexuals meant that money was going to pour in from gay and lesbian organisations in Western Europe and North America to facilitate [her] work’ (ibid.: 17)
A gay or lesbian lifestyle is thus perceived as a choice intended to provide access to new patronage networks and opportunities. Yet this understanding about rational motive undermines the viability of the concept of ‘sexual orientation’ in the Ugandan context, as the following interview quote epitomises:
Interviewer: Why do you think people in Uganda end up engaging in same-sex activity?
Respondent: Here it's because of money and poverty, people learn how to be gay. Maybe if money wasn't an issue. But where the money thing is, you can never know if they are born that way.
Interviewer: So are there any times when people are just naturally attracted to members of the same sex?
Respondent: I don't think here [in Uganda]. You have to look at all the reasons – abuse, money – you strip them off and then you're left with just a person. I've had that when I am counselling people over this issue. You can always find the reasons why. But in Europe they could convince you that it's real. [Lesbian and gay people] think we don't understand them. When you talk of [behaviour] change they just don't understand. It's come from abroad and … it's a selfish culture. In sexuality we know there are men who fear women, people who fear intimacy, women who fear men but they've just turned that into this other thing [orientation] and used it to their advantage. They're so convinced that it's real.
(Sr Grace 2009 int.)Other data from those who rejected lesbian and gay identities reflected similar concerns over the involvement and incentive of material gain. A focus group with youth members of the Church of Uganda demonstrates how financial resources are deemed to be the ultimate catalyst of immorality within Uganda, positioning the country as a battleground for the forces of material secularism versus God-fearing, family-oriented morality:
I mean if we wait for people to speak out, we're going to lose this battle. It is being funded, I'm sorry to say, by Western countries. People are getting a lot of money because of practicing this thing. They are paying. Some people are doing this not because they like it but because they are making money. They don't enjoy it, but they are getting money. And believe you me, in Africa, as long as you are paying money for something it can go anywhere.
(Colin 2009 focus group)Constructions of morality within Uganda are thus closely tied to imaginings of perceived levels of individual prosperity and the means through which this was achieved. While this nexus of money and morality is often also evident in expressions of popular anxiety about government corruption (see Olivier de Sardan Reference Olivier de Sardan1999), links between morality and money are particularly visible in relation to issues of homosexuality, and these links have been conceptualised in different ways to reflect and explain a variety of positions vis-á-vis sexuality. Material gain provides a culturally legible explanation for why a person engages in same-sex activity, an explanation that even the most extreme critics of same-sex sexualities can ‘understand’:
Respondent 1: We have inherited a culture which is not our own and we cannot sustain it. People grow up and see ‘that's the way we need to live’. Also we want immediate jobs. The dependency norm. In Africa, unlike Europe, we have dependency everywhere …
Respondent 2: About the gay thing, people say ‘that's how I was born’, but the evidence is that people have adopted the habit – for whatever reason – poverty, economic, society.
Respondent 1: For gay people, they must have their own reasons for what they do. If it is cause of poverty, then we can understand that.
(Rev. Peter & Rev. James 2009 int.)Such data serve to demonstrate the power of local, economic understandings about the reciprocal nature of relationships, and how such understandings shape responses to sexual identities which are viewed as threatening to the primary existing structures for material exchange (family networks, marriage and the production of offspring) by creating new spaces for individualised identities. The threat to the family comes not only through a perceived undermining of patterns of Ugandan generational reproduction, but also through the likelihood that established channels of inheritance may not be utilised and resources may be taken outside the family. Equally, the implications of the anxiety generated by society about these issues implies that those who ‘come out’ and so who risk being ‘cut off’ by families must secure alternative financial arrangements. For many of our lesbian and gay-identified respondents, such support often comes in the form of work for one of the lesbian and gay activist groups – something which is then deployed by opponents as evidence that organisations (often partially supported by foreign donors) are ‘funding’ lesbian and gay recruitment.
This paper has sought to provide a situated understanding of the politics of homosexuality within Uganda through an analysis of the moral economy in which debates over homosexuality enfold. Persecution of those Ugandans who experience same-sex attraction or who identify as lesbian or gay is harmful and traumatic, but responsive expressions of outrage need to be combined with an adequate understanding of why anti-gay rhetoric has purchase in Uganda and the ways in which it is exploited for political ends.
Through an analysis of discourse in the government allied newspaper New Vision, we have highlighted three key features of prevailing discourse: first, the construction of the West as a decadent ‘other’, in contrast to a morally virtuous Ugandan self; second, the positioning of individual Ugandans as (frequently deficient) custodians of this national self – as parents, community members, exemplars and educators; and third, the discounting of orientation through the conjoining of sexual behaviour and material interest. The possibility that two people of the same sex may experience physical or emotional attraction is frequently discounted on the grounds that same-sex activity can only result from greed for material gain, an idea itself inseparable from wider anxieties over communal and national decline.
Moving beyond the realm of official public discourse, we have argued that researchers, activists and other commentators need to develop a deeper understanding of the ways in which individuals make sense for themselves of their own and others’ sexual behaviour. Ethnographic fieldwork highlighted two key and related discourses through which aversion to homosexuality was expressed. First, in rejecting their reproductive capacities, homosexuals were perceived to threaten the well-being of the family and the wider community. In a context in which procreation is considered the core of social responsibility (and, in turn, respectability), individuals who appear unwilling or unable to produce offspring cannot help but transgress fundamental social norms. Second, in a social context where the individual is defined in terms of the community of which he or she claims to be a part, people who fail to adequately embed themselves in reciprocal social relations are viewed as presenting insuperable challenges to notions of personhood and identity. Homosexual relationships and those who claim homosexual identities force Ugandan society to confront the prospect of a new kind of modern individual – one who does not submit his or her will to that of the group and does not meet the expectations of the community by which the interests of the individual are in turn defined. A recognition of the complex nexus of notions of personhood, community, nationhood and economic exchange in Uganda – and the ways in which this nexus is currently being both reproduced and challenged – is essential for moving beyond explanations of the current situation that rely on oversimplified notions of an innate and immutable African homophobia.
