I keep going back to Kabalagala for the grills that come out onto the pavement and get fired up to cook fish at sunset, the fresh bundles of qat on sale, and the zouk music blasting from Congolese restaurants.
Pepe Julian Onziema stands in the middle of the road with a cellphone in one hand, and another waving at me. I’m interviewing the human rights activist at the offices of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG). To be gay in Uganda is to blend in, disguise and hide yourself. People have aliases for interviews and the offices from where they do the mammoth task of fighting for universal human rights, and their right to be, don’t have signboards or anything that makes them stand out from the suburban homes they hide among. Growing up a girl, Pepe feels misplaced, like she doesn’t belong in her body. She’s a boy. We meet at the beginning of his transition. His mother dies knowing this about Pepe and his family offer love and support when he comes out. The problem with his sexuality is that, like his colleagues at SMUG and other LGBTI Ugandans, he has been attacked for being himself. It’s not that all Ugandans are hateful, it’s that given the leeway by people like David Bahati and Giles, some Ugandans feel free to show their homophobia with fists and machetes.
Pepe has been attacked several times in the CBD, and is currently avoiding it. This morning, he looks like someone who is still settling into his body in oversized jeans and a blue tartan shirt. Anyone with a TV knows Pepe from the media interviews and court appearances he makes with others in the community to fight David Bahati’s hate bill.
‘Bahati is not going to stop us, he is certainly not going to stop me. They can intimidate us and arrest us – we are still not going anywhere.’
I confess that David scares me. ‘He’s determined.’
‘I’ll be honest, we live in fear,’ Pepe says. ‘But I know I’m going to fight that bill with everything in me.’
Pepe’s lucky. His family has always on been on his side. For many of his comrades, coming out or even being suspected of being gay comes with rapes and attacks, losing families and jobs. Pepe, who is openly gay and regularly appears on local TV, is self-assured in his mission to change the story from hate to acceptance and freedom.
‘Why do you keep living here when you can be free elsewhere in the world?’ I ask.
‘Do I want to live freely in a free country? Yes, of course. But my ideal of freedom is Ugandan. This is my home. I want to be free here.’
He stands up, straightens his jeans and leads me inside the office, where colleagues, including Frank Mugisha, are behind their desks. Unlike the LGBTI people in one of Bénédicte pictures, where a group of lesbians with blurred out faces burn twigs praying against the passing of the hate bill, the mood at SMUG is confident. Everyone here is public about their sexuality and not backing down from their position on the battlefield.
‘I’ll only stop fighting when we are free. When I’m no longer a criminal,’ he says. He’s willing to face whatever the law throws at him. ‘Like Nelson Mandela, I’m prepared to die for my freedom. Obviously, I don’t want to be killed. But it’s all the same anyway. We are attacked, and shamed. We are denied access to health care and fight every day just to be who we are. We are not going to back down.’
Our interview turns into the beginning of a friendship and, on my part, admiration that keeps growing with time.
‘This talk has been heavy,’ he sighs, ‘Meet me at Sappho tomorrow night to see a different side of me,’ he says when I leave.
‘What happens there?’ I ask.
‘That’s when I get to smile from ear to ear,’ he says, flashing his smile.
Sappho is a bar in the same suburb as SMUG’s offices. ‘You’ll know you’ve arrived when the boda boda drops you off at Jakobo’s pork joint,’ he says by way of directions. Pork joints are to Uganda what chisa nyama joints are to South Africa. Unless you know what the small rainbow flag at the door means, the bar passes for a regular one, where couples and groups of friends meet on Fridays to drink and dance the night away. Pepe is still on his way but his people – made up of colleagues and friends – offer me a seat at their table when I tell them who I’m here to meet.
Sappho is Uganda’s first and only exclusively gay bar. Its owner is the feisty radical feminist Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera, founder of Freedom and Roam Uganda. FARUG is the first organisation established to fight for the freedom and human right to not be heterosexual.
I’m at the table with Kasha, Sandra – whose moniker is Crazy – two Peace Corps workers, an American student, and Gerald, who is also an activist. The mood is positively jovial. Everyone in the bar is gay or here with a gay friend and hanging out as an act of defiance against the hysterical national homophobia.
The soundtrack is set on Nigerian hiplife and Tanzanian bongo flava music and the throats watered with waragi, Ugandan beers and Italian wine. By the time Pepe arrives, I’ve made friends with almost everyone in the club; meeting Angela, Didi and his date, Long Jones and several activists and other LGBTI people who work in corporate Uganda. As always on a night out in Kampala, I crawl out of the club at dawn. Sandra invites me to party with her on Sunday night in Makerere. It’s a regular club but one area of it has turned into the gay corner. We are here to gather information for Sandra’s research project between drinking, flirting, dancing and unwinding with students, nurses, admin workers and teachers. David Bahati is high on goodness knows what if he thinks his bill will succeed.
Away from David’s hysteria and the religious freaks there are many Ugandans who are simply not interested in being part of the narrative of homophobia. I meet some of them again on Wednesday night at a club in the CBD and make it a point to ask people I meet whenever I’m out and about what they think of the bill. The consensus is the same – other than religious fanatics and political nuts using culture to incite hate, people are mostly not interested in policing who can love whom and what consenting adults do behind closed doors. But it doesn’t mean that everyone is accepting, as I discover on World Aids Day.
After a public event attended by healthcare workers, where the LGBTI community and activists also have a tent, we go to a hotel for a more intimate recognition of the day. There are seminars on safer sex and leaders from different NGOs talking about their experiences and challenges with accessing healthcare while gay. As a moral stand, two doctors have set up a consulting room to offer health checks and HIV tests. Where their peers take the option of turning away patients because of their sexuality, these doctors are allies and adamant that they will not be caught on the wrong side of history.
While waiting for my HIV test results, the nurse makes small talk with me and pleads with me to tell everyone at the event that ‘what they are doing is wrong’. Her husband is one of the two doctors. She’s not here because she believes in universal human rights, she is tending to her marriage while looking for sneaky ways to assert her homophobia.
‘I’m leaving tomorrow morning’ becomes the story of my life in Kampala. I’m a slave to the intoxicating night life and besotted with the city’s people. I love its overcrowded streets, afternoons of chewing qat, the café culture in Kabalagala and evenings on friends’ balconies, when the city’s seven hills twinkle with lights.
Although Peter and I hang out together at Red Chilli, he still keeps to himself most of the time and is always guarded when talking about his private life. One Friday when I tell him I’m leaving ‘tomorrow morning’, he says I should stay the weekend to attend a party with him in Entebbe on Sunday. A friend with a beachfront mansion has a party. ‘You have to meet him,’ Sammy says. He’s Dr ________, a businessman, father and husband in his fifties. When we arrive at the house, we find our host at the beach with three couples who are around his age. This is Dr ________ the husband. We greet them and join his sons at the house, where he’s setting up the music system and serving drinks to a group of his friends.
When the sun goes down, our host strides into the lounge with a gin and tonic in one hand, and the other one flinging in the air. He’s still in
his khaki shorts and his tropical print shirt has made way for a flowing kaftan. ‘Finally,’ he says, ‘the boring people are gone. It’s time to enjoy myself.’ He plonks himself on the couch and raises his glass for a toast. ‘Here’s to being gay or straight, depending on what I feel,’ he laughs. He’s bisexual and belongs to a generation of gay people who didn’t dare explore their sexuality beyond acknowledging it to a few trusted friends, like Peter.
‘The wife lives in a different country and the kids don’t really care,’ he says, explaining his rather interesting double life, where he is ‘gay at my beach house and straight elsewhere’. We clink our glasses and join the kids at the party outside. There’s no more than ten people, yet the set up, with a full sound system and two long tables with beers and spirits, is high gear. Ugandans party as hard as they work and worship.
When I finally leave Kampala, it’s to play in Jinja. It’s Uganda’s adrenalin and adventure capital. Jinja is subdued compared to Kampala. There are no potholes in sight and the wide boulevards scarcely have people. It’s still a friendly town and the Luganda word for friend, mukwano, follows me around on multiple invitations for tea, lunch and beer. I stop putting myself through the hell of camping and move back to hostel rooms. My fun comes from a loud sunset booze cruise with mostly European travellers. They’re either on their way to track mountain gorillas or just back from there so all talk is about their wildlife encounters instead of an analysis of Africa’s problems and straight-faced declarations that, bad as colonisation was, it did bring development and education to Africa. Still, I spend most of our time sailing past the tranquil villages with the crew or on the dance floor. After sailing the White Nile, my inability to listen to wild stories without wanting my own encounter gets the better of me, and I book a rafting trip with Nile River Explorers.
I line up with five others to sign an indemnity form. I’m the only one who is excited by the thought of playing in grade five rapids with rocks that snap bones on contact. I strike up a conversation with a United Nations worker based in Khartoum and tell the three women who are silenced by their anxiety to take it easy. I love experiences that come with a hint of danger, and by the sound of the roars that we hear before we see the rapids, rafting the Nile is going to be my kind of fun.
The twelve rapids have threatening names like Rib Cage, Big Brother, Hair of the Dog, Madness, Silver Back and Overtime. Our adventure starts with a safety drill. Our guide, Yo, gives us life jackets, helmets and paddles and shows us how to row. We jump into the raft for a trial run of what to do when it inevitably flips over. ‘Firstly, the raft will capsize,’ Yo says. ‘That’s just a fact. Your safety depends on how you act in the water. Always paddle hard towards the raft and if you can’t, you must float instead of trying to swim. No matter how strong you think you are, the rapid will carry you if you swim.’ The paddles are another worry. The sticks are hard with handles that dislocate jaws and the bottoms can crack skulls on impact. I jump into the water laughing when he tells us to practise getting back in the raft.
Everything goes downhill, taking my bravado with it, when I try getting back into the raft. It’s as easy as holding the rope around the raft and flinging my left leg into it first then pulling my body in. Everyone passes the test, while it takes Mr UN and Yo to pull my limbs to drag my body back in.
The Nile River, at our launching point, is calm and flows gently. Action starts at Rib Cage. It’s mild and makes our boat swirl like a cool version of a merry-go-round. Next up is Bujagali Falls, between rocks covered in bird poo. Thousands of bats flap in circles above us. Yo says we’re about to capsize and those of us sitting in the middle are definitely going to fall into the river. He tells me to hold on tight to the rope; my hands act like sand in the water. I fall into the water and get pulled into the rapid. My waist feels like it’s wrapped by two very strong legs that refuse to let go. I forget to float and try to swim before Yo paddles towards me. He and Mr UN haul me back in – something they do every time I fall into the river, which happens whenever we are at a rapid. I heave while water gushes out of my mouth and nose. The only faces that aren’t red are mine and Yo’s. ‘This is ah-may-zing,’ I finally scream.
Madness lives up to its name and sets me off on a pattern of capsizing into the water while the others hold tightly to the rope. This time, I’m rescued by Hassan, the champion kayaker who works as part of the company’s safety crew. All rafts are accompanied by an extra raft and kayak with safety crew. They enter rapids ahead of us. I heave and spew out more water from the orifices on my face. My head is spinning and I can feel the blood coursing through my body.
We finally hit a stretch of the river without rapids. Here it flows through green fields and past villagers bathing or washing their laundry; some of it is left to dry on the grass. Birds swoop above or glide on the water. The crew gathers around us to hand out chunks of pineapples and biscuits. We jump into the water to swim or float until Yo tells us to preserve our energy: ‘You are going to need it.’
The next sets of rapids are a lot like the previous ones. The raft gets toppled, we go underwater, I’m pulled back into the raft and let water run out of my mouth and nose and start laughing at how great rafting is. We paddle over twenty kilometres in almost four hours, until I complain about being bored.
‘Wait and see,’ Yo promises.
‘To think you made me sign an indemnity form for this,’ I say, rolling my eyes. He laughs with me. We get to a stretch of the river where even Hassan and the safety crew get back on land. At the end of the footpath, Yo offers us the option of staying on land. We are at the Bad Place; the most violent of all rapids. Three people in our group sit under a shade, Mr UN thinks twice about jumping back in the water while I, cool as ever, coo ‘this is what I signed up for’.
I’m a firm believer that if it doesn’t kill you, it makes a damn good story; and if it kills me, well, then it’s better to go out with a bang. Still, my feet refuse to move when I try getting into the raft. I freak the hell out of my mind looking at the Bad Place and its vortex but my curiosity will always win over my anxiety. What happens next is an event that lasts seconds but feels like a lifetime.
The Bad Place tosses me into the river, pulling me into its violent current. The strap on my helmet snaps open, and it floats away from me. My life jacket moves up to my chin, then my lips, before touching my nose.
‘Indemnity. In-dem-ni-tee, Lerato Mogoatlhe, as in security or protection against a loss or financial burden; noun, not joke,’ I say to myself whenever I open my eyes and see the sharp rocks that keep getting closer. I can’t see Yo or Hassan.
The Nile gushes into my mouth and nostrils until breathing becomes my latest problem. I struggle to keep my head above the water and my life jacket keeps moving up from my body. I’m screwed and there’ll be no orgasm at the end of it. I hear Hassan’s voice telling me to jump in but I can’t move. My feet keep sliding off the kayak and my arms are completely paralysed.
‘JUMP IN, LERATO,’ he screams. His voice is tinged with desperation. Yo and another safety crew member paddle over to help Hassan pull me into the kayak. My head is hot. My heart wants to jump out of my chest. I’m dizzy. There’s a bonfire in my lungs. I cough violently and regurgitate the Nile. Everyone is as bewildered as I am. Hassan keeps asking if I’m fine. It takes a long time before I can talk, and when I do, all I can do is shout: ‘I feel fantastic.’ It’s the best fun I’ve had in water so far.
XV
JOHARI
December 2010
A CREATURE OF HABIT, I leave Jinja for Nairobi aboard a Kampala Coach bus to once again bounce off my seat and hit the overhead compartment while our driver fuels himself on bags of qat; I take a handful of his leaves when we stop for food in Kitale. We share the road on both sides of the border with trucks, matatu, boda boda, flocks of sheep and goats and herds of cattle. Pavements are mini markets that sell anything from everyday stuff like coals, produce and washing soaps, to full lounge sets, door frames, sheets of
zinc and other building materials.
When we get to Kisumu, and we leave the bus to stretch our legs or buy snacks and drinks, our driver gets two more bags of fresh qat to keep him high for the rest of the trip to Nairobi, through parts of the Rift Valley in Naivasha, Ngong and Nakuru and the tea regions of Kericho.
I sleepwalk through my first moments in Nairobi in one of the streets downtown crammed with buses and taxis, and sleep through my cab ride to my backpackers in Kileleshwa and its lavish mansions and bungalows with parking lots that are occupied by Mercs, Beemers and Range Rovers. The garages here have a wide selection of Belgian chocolates, and Italian and Argentinian wines. I’m a firm believer in naming buildings, roads and other public spaces after heroes and freedom fighters, and in languages that didn’t come to Africa on boats. Affluent places with African names are an anomaly in South Africa; it makes Kileleshwa and Nairobi all the more amazing to me. This city fills me with an overflowing sense of black pride. It takes hold of me within two hours of arrival, after I’ve checked in, showered and taken a bus to town. Lately, I arrive in new places dressed to impress conservatives.
It finally hits me that the reason Nairobians seem so different is that everyone dresses how they want to, from women who are fully covered in burkas to those in micro minis and tight jeans. I’m dressed for Kampala in a little black dress I dial down with tights and a kanga on my chest. I remove my ballet pumps and unwrap my kanga to spread it out over my thighs, then get rid of my tights. I make my lips shimmer with a red lip gloss and put the kanga in my bag so my cleavage can breathe. My ears dangle with Rwandan handwoven sisal statement earrings with swirls of red for the blood that unites us, the gold of the minerals that are still lining the pockets of an elite few, the green of Africa our beautiful land, and the blackness of our skins, which I buy in Kampala for my visit to Makerere University.
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