C Street

by Jeff Sharlet

  I tried to make a trade. “Tell me first who the American politicians are who say they’re supporting you,” I said. “The ones who tell you the gays control the media.”

  Bahati chuckled. “I can’t tell you this!”

  “You’re protecting them?”

  “No, I am not protecting them. I am defending them.” He saw himself as a martyr to the cause, taking the heat for his American friends. There were times in our conversations when he seemed tempted to name those for whom he suffered, but every time he’d rally by reminding himself of the meaning of love between brothers: “We must protect each other’s secrets, eh? That is what the Fellowship is, men we can trust, take our sins to.”

  He called this idea the context of lying. For him, he said, it was African, but the context was like Christ, universal. He told me a story about the East African revival of 1935. “The same year,” he said, tapping his plate with his fork, “Abraham Vereide began the Fellowship in America, eh?” He smiled. He liked showing off his knowledge of the Family’s history. The East African revival began in similar fashion: a roomful of foreign-educated Ugandan elites in Bahati’s hometown, Kabale, singing foreign songs and declaring themselves the balokole, the saved ones, responsible for the future of their nation. But they made a mistake: they confessed their sins in public. That might be all right for the masses, but not for men to whom God had entrusted power. If a leader revealed his secret lovers, the rabble might take his confession as license; if he admitted he had stolen, even less scrupulous men would use that information against him. Better to let like handle like, leaders tending to each other’s sins behind closed doors. “The best way to kill a snake in the house is not to destroy the house. Eh?”

  The second item on Bahati’s agenda was an invitation. “I think, Jeff, that we cannot keep meeting like this.” He waved at the empty Serena. “You have come so far to see me. I must, therefore, let you know me. You must come to my house.”

  This did not seem like a good idea.

  “Well, tomorrow is my last day here.”

  Bahati threw his hands in the air. “Perfect, then! I am just in time.”

  We cut dinner short. I was headed for my abstinence rally date with Sharon, the Makerere college girl who wanted my help killing homosexuals. I invited Bahati. “No,” he said, “I cannot go to church tonight. I have some arrangements I must make. Eh? For our brunch tomorrow!” He patted my shoulder. “Who will drive you?”

  “Robert,” I said.

  “Ah, good. He is a nice boy. I’m glad you two will come together.”

  “David,” I said.

  “Yes, Jeff?”

  “I have your guarantee of safety, right?”

  Bahati wasn’t in the least offended. “Of course! I am a Christian. Am I not?”

  Later that night, after the abstinence rally, Robert and I went driving. Up along a ridge through a park of tall grass overlooking the city’s skyline, not illuminated but merely spotted with light, like a horizon of stars, and then down along avenues of street fires and mud-hut discos and night-watch churches, Pentecostal services that went through to dawn. And finally out to a street party amid office buildings and warehouses, shiny sheets of corrugated steel slicing the road off from traffic, men with guns, soldiers and cops and for-hires, leaning against a maze of fencing thrown up to slow down the entering crowd. Inside there was a stage and a light show and Uganda’s biggest hip-hop musicians, a solid brick of a crowd not really dancing, just throbbing, except for the gay men around whom circles formed like they were prom stars in a high school movie. There they’d be joined by the girls who wanted more movement than the stiff-legged weeble-wobble straight boys would offer. We did, too; we’d had enough of Bahati and Buturo and Kreutter. We found two girls and I bought us all awful sweetened bottles of vodka and we took refuge in a tiny gay kingdom ruled by two men who seemed brilliantly, secretly, obviously queer. Or so I thought. When we left, at around 2:00, Robert refused to believe me when I told him he’d just danced alongside gays. “At the street jam?” he asked, incredulous. “Those boys?” I’d thought their lipstick might give them away.

  Robert was devout on Sundays, more forgiving the night before, anti-gay like nearly every Ugandan but also a libertarian, troubled by what we’d learned of the Family’s presence in Uganda. “I think they are trying to steal my country,” he’d said. Tim Kreutter and his Leadership Academy in particular had disturbed him. The calm with which the American had described his academy’s quiet construction of a new elite class. “What Tim is doing is owning people, training them and owning them. Even if he wants them to do good things, the principle is corrupting. It is the seduction principle.”

  That was the irony of Bahati’s anti-gay fantasies, his vision of gay men from Europe and America trolling the streets of Kampala, trading iPods for blow jobs. It was Bahati who had been seduced, recruited for a foreign agenda, reconciled. “Now he is caught in the middle,” Robert had said. “They gave him a structure, but they disown him. Let me tell you one thing. When you go to make love to a girl, you buy chocolate, buy flowers, you entice her—in order to use that thing.” To use her, that is. “That’s exactly what’s happening.” Robert thought of Bahati like a ruined woman in a Victorian novel. He no longer belonged to himself, but he was no longer wanted, either. He could neither drop the bill nor carry it forward. But there was one play left, a powerful one. The bill he was holding—just the idea of it—was a bomb, and he’d already lit the fuse.

  “I don’t know if it’s wise to go see him tomorrow,” Robert said, as we left the party. Before we could consider the question, the risks, Robert spotted a photographer he knew, and then another and another, a herd of journalists rushing toward the sheet metal walls. “Look!” the photographer shouted. We turned and saw a circle of soldiers, in their midst a man down. He was shirtless, perfectly muscled, his skin almost liquid, red and shiny. He was lying on his back, half curled, rolling left then right as soldiers on either side planted their boots in him. Not in a fury; more like a simple rhythm. Tick, tock. Every time a boot hit him he made a noise that sounded like a question. “Eh? Eh?” Like Bahati. “It is sick justice, man,” said the photographer. He took some pictures. “This boy, though, he brought it on himself.” Robert asked in Lugandan what had happened. “Acid attack,” the photographer answered in English, like it was a sad but everyday crime. The bloody man had thrown acid at somebody, supposedly one of the stars. The word was that the attack had been some kind of message. Nobody knew what it’d been meant to say, and it didn’t really matter. Tick, tock went the boots. “They say this boy, he was paid,” said the photographer. He crouched to hear the beat from the bloody man’s perspective. “Disgusting,” he said, rising to leave. “Well, I got what I need.”

  It’s a month later. Blessed has left Kampala to hide. Tim Kreutter e-mailed me a phrase he found meaningful, sourced to a forgotten writer from the Thirty Years’ War: “IN ESSENTIALS UNITY, IN NON-ESSENTIALS LIBERTY, IN ALL THINGS CHARITY.” Pastor Ssempa has some land he wants to show me. But I’m home, in America, and tonight I’m working late, listening to my recordings of Bahati and thinking about what I owe him. Literally, that is: his two boys, David Jr. and Daniel, had decided to make movies of themselves with my iPhone while their father and I were talking at his house, and I had said I’d e-mail them when I got home.

  Bahati’s house was a redbrick villa high up a hill outside Kampala. Robert’s car barely made it. You needed a heavier vehicle to handle the rutted, red dirt roads. There were no boda-boda drivers in those hills, just big cars with chauffeurs to drive them and houses with servants inside to crank open the great iron doors that guarded each plot, small maps of close-cropped grass in the suburban style within walls topped by razor wire and seeded with shards of broken glass. Bahati’s was an especially lovely compound. “There are so many right ways to get here,” he told us on the phone as we discovered many wrong ones, grinding the underbelly of Robert’s hatchback and rocking ourselves g
ently out of little canyons, not so much driving as rock climbing. So many ways, but Bahati could not name them; the roads weren’t like that in Bahati’s hills. Named, that is. And the servants we saw weren’t talking. So we found it by trial and error, or maybe the gift of discernment, because when we made our guess it was the right one: a hobbit-sized door within the iron gates opened and a servant woman peeped out, clanged it shut, and then swung both shrieking doors open and we were in.

  Bahati stood above us on a terrace, unsmiling. “Hello, Robert,” he called. We hiked up the hill and the stairs and joined him. “Eh?” he said, gesturing to the view without pride: the red tile roofs of his neighbors interlocking down the hill below him, steely rain clouds over Lake Victoria, Africa’s biggest, beyond. And in the yard, evidence of family: a miniature army Jeep on the grass, a BMX bike ridden into a hedgerow. The bike, I believe, belonged to David Jr., six years old; the Jeep was just right for his Daniel, a four-year-old cross between General Patton and Cecil B. DeMille. “He is already stronger than his older brother,” Bahati boasted. It was Daniel’s idea to use my phone to shoot movies. “Make a movie of me dancing!” he shouted; it was an order. David Jr., a joyfully bucktoothed boy, introduced himself to us not long after our arrival by presenting to his father one of my notebooks, lifted from my briefcase while we were in another room. He’d flipped the page on which I’d written a remark of Bahati’s—“all acknowledgement of homosexuality is defilement”—and had added commentary of his own in a script of looping flourishes, remarkably neat for a six-year-old: “You are not enabled to view this channel or your account has been suspended.” He’d copied it from the screen of his father’s big-screen TV. “Ah no,” Bahati told his son, “this belongs to Uncle Jeff.” And so I was made a member of the Bahati family.

  We sat in one of the living rooms, modeled, it seemed, on the Serena: minimalist white with bright red Scandinavian-style furniture. We took one corner, Bahati far across the room with his back to a wall-sized window, a small round glass table between us on which a servant placed a glass pitcher of sticky-sweet orange juice. Bahati wore a black soccer shirt with red panels and long black shorts. Today, it seemed, there was nothing on his agenda. He leaned back and tugged up his shirt, distractedly rubbing his belly, just going to paunch, watching international news out of the corner of his eye. He sifted through a small heap of cell phones beside him to take calls, short, clipped, or murmuring, receiving news from his supporters.

  “I do not understand you Americans,” he said, sighing. “Look at a woman like Hillary Clinton, supporting the killing of babies, and then you say no, you should not threaten to punish somebody with death.” He was beginning to come to terms with the possibility that the threat of losing foreign aid—Sweden said they’d cut it; Germany would offer Museveni $148 million to muzzle him—would force him to cut a deal: no death penalty. He’d have to settle for prison and purges, an outcome Western governments, eager to do business with the newly oil-rich country, would call a human rights victory.

  Bahati was disillusioned by such half measures. “Leviticus is very clear. If a man sleeps with a man—punishable by death. If a woman sleeps with a woman—punishable.” He meant Leviticus 18:22, not clear at all and subject to great debate among serious Bible scholars: Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind; it is abomination. “But if the majority say this clause of death is not necessary,” Bahati continued. “Well.” He gave me a sad smile, no teeth. The majority had at first said it was necessary, and it had quickly become the most popular political idea in Uganda. Even those known to be secretly gay themselves, when presented with a choice—vote for death or mark themselves candidates for it—were willing to choose death, for other people. Now, under the direction of the dictator and possibly pressure from Hunter—“even Jesus was betrayed,” observed Bahati—the majority was tiptoeing away from the killing clause, waiting for signs from above. But Museveni was no clearer than scripture. Go slow, he said to one. Stop the homos! he ordered another. “It’s a democracy,” said Bahati. “Eh?”

  He could live with that. He was already adjusting his stance, narrowing his position. His new line was that his bill would not deliver death to adults engaging in consensual sex, but life: in prison, where they’d be protected from themselves and cured, if possible, using the latest scientific techniques developed in the churches of America. He had never intended to kill anyone but child rapers, he claimed. “But David,” I said, “the big clause, ‘aggravated homosexuality,’ only three of the seven varieties punishable by death involve minors.” Death, also, for HIV-positive homosexuals who have sex, regardless of precautions; for sex with a disabled person; and, most alarmingly, for “serial offenders.”

  Bahati started laughing, rubbing his belly faster. Not one of his little giggles, but sustained laughter. Robert and I glanced at each other, waiting for the joke. It never came. Instead, this, between guffaws: “A serial offender. A serial! Like, like, a serial killer!” That was even more of a knee-slapper. “It’s a guy who does not kill for good causes. But he is like a, a fun—”

  Laughter cut off the last word. He tried to calm down. “No, you see, the law, it’s for adult / minor. If you are a boss. Or a guardian. Or you are a known”—this one cracked him up—“just to be molesting kids, you know?”

  “That clarifies it,” I said.

  But “serial” was just too funny to let go. “No, no,” he said, leaning forward and holding up a hand. “If I have a boyfriend”—that was too rich, he had to fall back and laugh—“and I go and have another boyfriend”—snort—“do I become a serial?”

  “No?” I guessed.

  “No,” said Bahati. “So what I want to call it—”

  He stopped, shaking his head, the corner of his eyes watering. “A ‘Safe Family Bill.’ ‘Save Children Bill.’ ”

  “Better branding?”

  “Too late!” said Bahati, and that was a hoot, too. “No. No. That was actually what many wanted, many thought ‘Anti-Homosexuality’ would be a little stigma, stigma—” He looked to Robert for help.

  “Stigmatizing, Honorable.”

  “Yes. But I still believe the title of the bill is what we need. We must confront it.”

  “But you’re not, are you?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Your law is not biblical.”

  “The law is biblical—”

  “But you’re letting some homosexuals get away, aren’t you?”

  The question was a trap, and he knew it. Or rather, more like a fault line, between the idea of “God-led government” and the bloody prospect of “biblical law.”

  “You just quoted Leviticus,” I said. “You said that if a man lies with a man, he should die.” All of them, that is, no qualifiers. “But your law doesn’t provide for that.”

  Bahati chuckled. “Well, Jeff. I was not writing a Bible! I was writing a law. Eh?” He laughed, and Robert and I laughed with him. Our response was an instinct, I think, to provide an embarrassed man cover. “The principles of the Bible only guide you,” he said, nodding at his own explanation. “The fundamental issue is homosexuality is sin. And if it is sin, it must be punished. Now. We live in the world, so we must see how best we can punish these people. Yeah?”

  “Yeah. But if you thought there was the political support to follow the law of Leviticus, would that be a good idea?”

  Bahati was silent a moment, leaning back into the breeze of the window behind him, the red and green hills of Kampala, a sweep of gray rain falling farther off over Lake Victoria. He looked at the ceiling, then at me, holding my eye even as he giggled without humor; it was, I realized, like a cough for him. “If it was a political possibility?” he said.

  “If you proposed a law that said kill all the gays, on sight.”

  “It wouldn’t pass.”

  “Would it be a good idea?”

  His hand dropped to his belly, tugging his shirt up again and making circles beneath his sternum. “I mean,” he said quie
tly, “if we had an opportunity to implement what is in the Bible, that would be a perfect position.” He paused. “But we don’t live in a perfect world.”

  No, just something like a democracy. The Kingdom is yet to come.

  But the story doesn’t quite end there, with the promise of murder. Because what I owe Bahati, I realized, is recognition—of that which is obscured by the slogan never again, words that suppose that murder begins with hate, ugly and easily identifiable, something other, outside, far off in Africa. But Bahati began with love.

  “The Fellowship teaches us that we all come together,” he said, explaining that to him the perfect world would not be a theocracy, a word he despised, or a regime of one religion over another. Once, he might have thought that; but Kreutter had showed him something better. “God does not know whether you’re a Christian or not. He just knows you. And we just need to develop a relationship with him.” This was open to anybody, Muslim or Jew or Christian. Even a homosexual? Even a homo.

  “Through Jesus?

  “Yes,” said Bahati, his smile now warm and sincere.

  “That’s reconciliation?

  “Yes! And love. The Fellowship. We call it Fellowship. It’s part of the world Family.”

  That’s what he had learned from the Family, he said. Begin with love, end with love. In between, civilization and its laws. That’s what I owe: the recognition that the killer is a civilized man.

  That recognition requires that I confess that when Bahati told me he was writing not a Bible but just a law—it’s not a perfect world!—I laughed with him because, I think, we were being civil. He had promised me that, if I returned after his law is passed, he would have me arrested for promotion of homosexuality; and he understood I was there to tell a story about him that would hurt him; but despite it all we had found common ground: civility. We were within the circle of reconciliation.

  Better that I’d been the criminal of the night before, within the circle of boots.