Breaking the Chains of Anti-Gay Fervor in Uganda

by Michael Jones · 2010-08-26 14:30:00 UTC
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We're all pretty familiar with the voices that normally come out of Uganda surrounding the issue of homosexuality. There's Pastor Martin Ssempa, who travels around to community to community showing gay porn and whipping up anti-gay sentiments. There's David Bahati, a legislator behind a piece of legislation known as the Anti-Homosexuality Bill that would criminalize homosexuality and HIV with the death penalty and harsh prison sentences. There's even the first lady of the country, Janet Museveni, who told students this week at a youth conference that "homosexuality attracts a curse" and that gay people lose their soul.

In that panoply of bleak rhetoric, is there any hope?

Yes. And it can be seen in a new video courtesy of journalist Alyssa Eisenstein, who traveled to Uganda earlier this year on a grant from Northwestern University to explore what folks on the ground think about homosexuality. And though there are moments in her video that paint a bleak picture (including one scene where a Ugandan activist is given 30 minutes to flee town or else have her life put at risk for promoting homosexuality), Eisenstein's video is one of the few resources out there that show people on the ground in Uganda working like hell against a dominant ideology that homosexuality is evil.

People like Julius Kaggma, who works at the Civil Society Coalition on Human Rights and Constitutional Law. He says there is hope in Uganda. It just requires getting a message out to people in the grassroots and challenging the powerful voice of many religious and political leaders.

"We really need the civil education aspect to get the facts to the grassroots," Kaggma said. "To the mother, to the grandmother who are being bombarded with all this propaganda from the pulpits."

Or people like Professor Sylvia Tamale at Makerere University, who notes that anti-homosexuality sentiments and laws are actually a product of British colonization in Uganda, and not native to the country.

Or people like Sandra Ntebi, who has some truly passionate comments to close out the video. "The more we come out, the more others will be free to come out."

Powerful stuff. Check out the video after the jump.

Breaking the Chains from Alyssa Eisenstein on Vimeo.

Photo credit: Vimeo

Michael Jones is a Change.org Editor. He has worked in the field of human rights communications for a decade, most recently for Harvard Law School.
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