C Street

by Jeff Sharlet

  Mukasa became a man and an activist, determined to prevent what had happened to him from happening again. In 2003, he cofounded Freedom and Roam Uganda, an organization for lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex human rights. In 2005, Ugandan police, led by government officials, raided his house. They didn’t find Mukasa. But a friend, Yvonne Oyoo, was there. They took her down to the station. They stripped her. You look like a man, they said. We’re going to prove you’re a woman.

  It happened again.

  Mukasa fled. But in hiding and then in exile, he planned. The plan wasn’t lesbian, it wasn’t gay, it was… human, Blessed would say. It was a citizen’s plan: Mukasa sued, and never was a lawsuit more like a gift of the spirit, the romance of the rule of law.

  Blessed, of course, was a romantic boy. He thought the trial was exciting! He wanted to be there, and so did his friends. They would swish for dignity, drag for democracy, be themselves for God and Victor Mukasa. Blessed could hardly wait.

  What he didn’t know was that his golden-skinned pastor, Martin Ssempa, was gathering an opposing force. Blessed, with his head in the clouds! He hadn’t paid attention. When he walked into the courtroom—late, as always—he could not have faced a starker choice. The two halves of his life sat on opposite sides of the aisle. “Blessed!” called his church friends. Pastor Ssempa himself saw him and smiled. Blessed looked down at the T-shirt he’d chosen for the occasion: a rainbow. He looked to the other side of the room. His gay friends looked back. Some of them sighed. They knew how it was. If, with a sly, earnest smile, he chose Ssempa today, they would forgive him tomorrow. If he didn’t—the truth was, he didn’t know. All that would follow, all that he would lose, was beyond the seventeen-year-old’s imagination.

  “I don’t know if I have a very strong heart,” he told me. “I do not know if I am a tough man.”

  “How did you make your choice, Blessed?”

  He gave me the smile, a mask for all he had lost. “I had a breakthrough.”

  “Breakthrough,” in the Ugandan church, is a spiritual term. A gift from the Holy Ghost. Grace, in whatever shape it’s needed.

  “I got courage.”

  Blessed sat down with the homos.

  * * *

  And then something like a miracle occurred: Victor Mukasa and Yvonne Oyoo won. The court ruled that the state had transgressed. Yes, homosexuality is illegal in Uganda, but officially there is still due process, even for homos, and the police had violated it. Without warrants, you cannot kick in doors, you cannot take prisoners, you cannot strip them, you cannot do what had been done to Victor Mukasa and Yvonne Oyoo.

  Unless, that is, you change the law. Which is what a small coalition of Ugandans, inspired by American fundamentalism—its activist hatred of homosexuality, a politics based on sex without precedent in East Africa—set out to do. In the beginning, they weren’t shy about their American influences. They invited American anti-gay speakers, most notably Scott Lively—the coauthor, with Kevin Abrams, of a book, attributing the Holocaust to homosexuality, called The Pink Swastika—to address Parliament. “I can’t say this in America, but I can say it in Africa,” Lively declared during a 2009 visit to Uganda. That’s hard to imagine, since in The Pink Swastika Lively writes that “from the ashes of Nazi Germany, the homo-fascist phoenix has risen again—this time in the United States.” But in Uganda, he went into greater detail, with a chart outlining different types of gay men, ranging from “monster” to “super-macho” (that’s worse) to “butcher.” “This is the kind of person it takes to run a gas chamber,” he said, and then brought it home for the Ugandans: “The Rwandan stuff probably involved these guys.”

  Lively has much less influence in the United States than he does overseas. The leadership of the Family dismiss him as the representative par excellence of the vulgar fundamentalism to which they see themselves as offering an alternative. But the Ugandans aren’t so concerned about the finer points of the American class system. They look at a fanatic such as Lively, or a politician such as Inhofe, and they see the same thing: a smiling white man come to preach moral “purity” as the path out of poverty.

  “In Africa,” observes Rev. Kapya Kaoma, an Anglican priest from Zambia, “the Christian Right… operates under the banner of ‘evangelicalism.’ ” That is, he argues, most Africans don’t distinguish between the varieties of American fundamentalism, so long as they all come bearing gifts in the form of support for African churches and, sometimes, African politicians. They are only too happy to return the favor, providing for their American allies examples of the policies too extreme to be implemented in the United States. In the past, American politicians used Uganda’s anti-condom campaign as a justification for abstinence-only sex education in the United States. So it is now, with Uganda’s anti-gay campaign an inspiration for American fundamentalists to hold the line here. The first draft of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, for instance, seems to have been written with the concerns of Bahati’s American friends in mind. It singled out same-sex marriage as a threat to Ugandan heterosexuality, and in an opening clause declared the bill a model for other nations—such as those where same-sex marriage is actually a possibility.

  Human rights activists saw the bill as the direct result of a March 2009 conference in Kampala featuring Lively and American “ex-gay” activists. The truth is, however, Lively and his friends were not so much the cause of the bill as a catalyst for a process that had already been set in motion. Some Ugandans date the roots of Uganda’s anti-gay witch hunt to a 1996 race for the mayoralty of Kampala, in which one candidate successfully gay-baited the other. Ugandan lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists point to 2003, when a coalition of semi-legal groups called Sexual Minorities of Uganda formed. The politicians who hate them tend to agree, only they look back to the early 2000s as the period when “neo-colonialists,” foreign human rights activists, began “recruiting” straight Ugandans into homosexuality under the cover of anti-AIDS work.

  One camp within the anti-gay movement, led by Pastor Michael Kyazze, of the Omega Healing Centre, a compound of sports fields, a giant pavilion, and an even bigger sanctuary under construction, argues that Ugandans must admit that homosexuality is an internal Ugandan problem. By contemporary Ugandan standards, this point of view marks Kyazze as a progressive, since he acknowledges the universality of homosexuality, albeit as the worst of all plagues. “Let’s be honest,” one of Kyazze’s allies explained the pastor’s position to me. “ ‘Pedophilia’ is really just a euphemism for homosexuality.”

  But Kyazze’s friend Martin Ssempa had a different perspective, Kyazze told me, when I went to see him at his church. “Now Martin, he believes it is you.”

  “Me?” I had worn a suit and tie to our meeting, a terrible choice on a sweltering day. I began to sweat.

  Kyazze, a tall, broad, bald man with a slight stoop and a warm, gentle rasp, laughed and patted my hand. “No, not you, Jeff. You Americans.” He signaled for an assistant to bring me a small glass bottle of Coke. Kyazze, a pastor named Moses Solomon Male, and I were sitting around a café table by a window in Kyazze’s office. Outside the window, a cow stared at us, chewing grass. Omega was a small church by Ugandan standards, almost pastoral—just 2,500 regulars and a full-time school for 400 students, a humble spread of one-story classrooms arrayed around a garden spiked with signs reminding students of the righteous path. Say No to Homosexuality; Avoid Sex Before Marriage. A young teacher, Joanna, took my photograph beside the most ambitious proverb of all: Always Say No to Sex. Behind it, a mural of the human digestive system added extra force to that injunction.

  “What Martin means,” Kyazze continued, “is that the Americans, the Europeans, the Dutch, are under the control of the homo.” That was an ironic stand for Ssempa, since he’d received significant support from the United States, most notably at least $90,000 for his church, through the federal PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) anti-AIDS program. In 2004, he testified before C
ongress, and in 2005 and 2006 he appeared at Rick Warren’s massive Orange County, California, church. “You are my brother, Martin, and I love you,” Warren’s wife declared from the stage, her eyes watering.

  Kyazze, with a more modest network of American supporters, worried that his friend Martin was too close to the West. “The homosexuals can use your organizations to spread their ways. To recruit, you see. There are many methods, you know.”

  I did; David Bahati had listed several by phone before I came to Uganda. Among the most insidious, irresistible to kids: iPods. Also, laptops and cell phones. Gay recruiters are said to offer them the way pedophiles entice with lollipops in the park. “But it is technology. So much more seductive,” Bahati had explained. “Always the new thing.”

  “The iPad?” I’d asked.

  “Yes, this could happen.”

  “To me?” One could hope.

  Kyazze had bigger trouble in mind. “The homos use a UNICEF—this is true!—to attempt to colonize Uganda.” He meant a United Nations Children’s Fund “Teenagers Toolkit,” distributed to schools in 2002, that had referred to homosexuality as natural. “And, my friend, they begin with the children. That is what we want the world to understand. Now.” He clapped his hands together. “This is absolutely correct, what I am informing you. But. It is only one half of the story!”

  “Yes,” murmured Kyazze’s sidekick, Pastor Male. He was a graying, fine-boned man, given to stroking a stiff, blue-striped tie that looked like it might be permanently knotted. “Is it possible that one nationality would have homosexuality and another would not? No. You see, this is an area where we disagree with Pastor Ssempa. We have democracy, and we have science. We have these two powerful weapons and—with God!—we can fight homosexuality. And we know it is here. It is in us.” Pastor Male patted his tie. “In us. Yes. Not me! But in Uganda. It is even”—he paused—“in the church.”

  Then he stopped. I waited. Finally I said, “No,” mustering a little shock to keep the story going.

  “Yes,” Pastor Male said, smiling gently at my naïveté. He produced from his briefcase a thick blue spiral-bound document, a report on homosexual infiltration of the church he had prepared for the Ugandan parliament, urging them to take action. “Mob justice,” he read from it, “is not a deliberate attempt to flout the law, but an inner compulsion due to people’s lack of trust in the judicial and entire law enforcement system based on any previous attempts to get justice in vain.”

  It was true that, despite anti-gay laws dating from colonial times (they were a British import), there had been very few convictions for homosexuality. There were, however, plenty of arrests. Most of the gay men I spoke with in Kampala had been through the routine. Someone they thought was a friend or someone who was a lover would turn them in, and the police, working with the blackmailer, would offer the gay man a choice: prison or money. The art of it, one of Kampala’s few out gay men, Long Jones, told me, was for the blackmailer to spend enough time with his mark to determine how much he could be bled for.

  What was different about Male and Kyazze, along with Ssempa and their other allies, was that they were attempting the trick on a much bigger scale. “Our number-one problem,” Kyazze said, “is Kayanja.” Bishop Robert Kayanja, that is, the Billy Graham of East Africa, a church leader with a bigger following than all the gay-haters combined. Part of their problem with Kayanja was that he took no position on the bill, but the real issue was money, especially American money. He had it, they wanted it. He sold uplift; they had on offer something newer, more exciting: death to the enemy.

  Kayanja is a miracle healer—he claims he can make the lame walk, the blind see, and exorcise AIDS—and a prosperity gospel preacher, practicing an old variation on a new con. God’s promise, Kayanja preaches, is wealth and health, and his flock could hasten their realization by making “love offerings” to his 80,000-member Miracle Centre Cathedral or his 1,216 satellite churches. He says his “spiritual father” is Tulsa, Oklahoma, faith healer Dr. T. L. Osborn. American star pastors such as Benny Hinn, T. D. Jakes, and the aptly named Creflo Dollar make pilgrimages to Kayanja. The Americans get to show off their compassion for Africa in special broadcasts for their American followers, and Kayanja gets screen time in the wonderful and lucrative world of American televangelism. He’s now one of the richest men in Uganda.

  Compared to the product on offer from Kyazze and Ssempa—the idea that you could make a lame nation walk by eradicating an internal population of five hundred thousand homosexuals—what Kayanja practices might be considered honest graft. But Kyazze and his allies decided to call it something worse, by Ugandan standards: homosexuality. Most of the documents in Male’s blue binder were police reports related to the claims made by young men Male brought to the authorities to accuse Kayanja of rape. Kayanja certainly wouldn’t be the first televangelist to abuse his flock. According to the Los Angeles Times, one of his biggest American supporters, Paul Crouch, paid an employee $425,000 in 2004 to silence the employee’s claims that he’d been forced into sex. But the police ruled Kyazze’s alleged victims not credible. Kyazze, in turn, pointed to an order of new toilets purchased for Kampala police by Kayanja as a bribe. The truth, inasmuch as it can be discerned, is that Kayanja is untouchable; and that he didn’t rape the men in question, unless the passport stamps and travel receipts one of his lawyers showed me to prove that he had been out of the country at the time of the alleged crimes are evidence that U.S. and UK customs and British Airways are part of the international gay conspiracy.

  Kyazze and his allies wouldn’t put it past them. Gays, he believes, control unimaginable wealth, which they use to fund decadence in weak nations. They also secretly run the media. I thought I’d heard this story before. “What about hooked noses?” I asked.

  Kyazze rumbled with laughter. “You are from America! You should know! Gays can disguise themselves as anybody.” Indeed. An alleged rape victim of one of Kayanja’s associate pastors told me that beneath his suit the handsome preacher had breasts as “big as Dolly Parton’s.”

  Kyazze and Pastor Male are nothing if not ambitious. Their only critique of the bill is that it is actually too soft on homosexuality. They see a clause forbidding the media from exposing victims of gay rape as evidence that there’s a gay infiltrator within their ranks. Even Buturo, the minister of ethics and integrity and chairman of the Fellowship group from which the bill emerged, is suspect in their eyes. They don’t think he’s gay, but they wonder whether he’s protecting powerful homosexuals. Like many Ugandans, both pastors believe the bill’s timing has much to do with a massive corruption inquiry that has brushed closer to the dictator than any other.

  “First,” said Male, “Buturo does nothing. Then, all of a sudden, we must act right away! We said to him, ‘Please, Honorable, let us be scientific about this. The government must provide funds for a proper study of the scope of the problem. We must know how many homosexuals there are, where they are, who can be cured, and who cannot. We must be modern in our approach.’ But Buturo said to us, ‘We’re going to kill them, so we don’t have to have this inquiry.’ You see, he is afraid of the inquiry, because he insists homosexuality is a Western problem. He knows that if we study it, we will find it here. We will find it in the government! And then we will be able to do nothing. ‘If we kill them,’ he says, ‘we don’t have to count them. If we have an inquiry, we are shooting ourselves in the foot!’ ”

  “What about Bahati?” I asked. Both men sighed.

  “Honorable is a good boy,” said Kyazze, who, at forty-nine, is thirteen years Bahati’s senior. “But he is too eager. He says, ‘Forget about the inquiry! We must stop them right now.’ He sees the danger. He feels the evil wind of the homosexual. But the eye of the storm and the whirlwind are two different things. What we are dealing with is a moral problem.” That didn’t mean it couldn’t be defeated, but it would take a war, not a battle, and a force greater than law: Christ, transcendent, purifier of nations.

&nbs
p; There was a hint of sectarian rivalry in their critique. Bahati, like Buturo, is an Anglican, their pastor the American-educated Archbishop Luke Orombi. Orombi travels back and forth to the United States with ease; in America, he stays in a room with his name on it in an elegant home across from the Cedars. Kyazze and Male are Pentecostals; when Kyazze goes to America, it’s to preach in working-class churches. Bahati prays quietly, his eyes closed and his hands folded in front of him. Male in prayer looks like the bride of Frankenstein, his head tipped back, his hands rigid, his eyes jolted wide by the Spirit. Kyazze roars, his hands above him.

  There are ethnic differences to consider as well, and those matter in Uganda, though Ugandans are careful when speaking of them, now more than ever. On September 11, 2009, the Ugandan military opened fire on a crowd of rioters, killing at least forty. They were members of the Baganda, Uganda’s largest ethnic group, furious that Museveni—a member of the Banyankole people—had attempted to stop their king from visiting a section of Kampala traditionally under his rule. Even more frightening to many Ugandans than the killing was a government ban on four Lugandan-language radio stations—on the grounds that their live coverage of the state murder of their tribesmen constituted incitement to genocide.

  Genocide, in Uganda, is not an abstraction but a living memory and a neighbor, always close at hand. In the 1970s, Idi Amin murdered hundreds of thousands of his countrymen. In the ’80s, a war between dictator Milton Obote and Museveni’s bush army killed hundreds of thousands more, the country fracturing down ethnic lines. But Museveni in power was different. He disposed of his enemies through “accidents” and frame-ups, not massacres. He depended on the press to show similar restraint in its coverage of corruption. He wasn’t a kleptocrat, but he surrounded himself with thieves—on the theory, apparently, that rich men are peaceful men. Better to steal than to kill, so long as you can persuade your people that there are no other options.