Homosexuality in Contemporary Uganda SAM SHU
This As the “Pearl of Africa,” Uganda has always been under the spotlight on the international stage. With the help of rapid globalization in the past decades, Uganda has been exposed to unparalleled opportunities for its development, but it has also drawn the public’s attention in a variety of circumstances. One of the instances of such attention, without doubt, lies in the debate of LGBT rights in the country. It was not disputed widely across the globe until the proposal of the notorious Anti-Homosexuality Bill in 2009, and the subsequent release of the 2012 award-winning documentary Call Me Kuchu, directed by Katherine Fairfax Wright, which brought the issue to a wider audience. The documentary specifically focuses on the LGBTQ community and its struggles in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda, before and after the bill proposal. It primarily revolves around David Kato, Uganda’s “first openly gay man” who had dedicated himself to promoting LGBT rights in Uganda. But with beliefs rooted in Christianity from the colonial era and African cultures that existed for centuries, the vast majority of Kampala’s citizens denied him such an opportunity and even trampled on the legitimacy of the community’s existence. It has become clear that the interactions of modern Western values and local traditional norms are the key factors shaping people’s understanding and judgment of homosexuality in Kampala as portrayed explicitly in Call Me Kuchu. In particular, with the help of Lydia Boyd’s research on individual personhood and social concern of youth recruitment in Kampala, and discussions of Christianity and the origin of homosexuality, the national hatred towards homosexuality depicted in Call Me Kuchu can be seen as a display of ekitiibwa (honor and respectability) in African values and a denial of Western influence. In the documentary, the concern with homosexuality extends beyond personal choices and is more linked with a family’s overall lineage and individual personhood in a collective environment. In the scene where one of
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