As I said in my Feb 16 post, LGBT news out of Africa is usually bad. The author Robbie Corey-Boulet offers a quote from a Ugandan politician that manages to be both bad news and good news.
In 2011 the Obama administration made supporting LGBT rights a priority worldwide. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton said gay rights are human rights.
John Nagenda, who Robbie Corey-Boulet identifies as “a senior adviser to President Yoweri Museveni,” was quoted in the international press calling “homosexuality … taboo, it’s something anathema to Africans.”
I remember hearing something like this. Nagenda even calls the Obama/Clinton position “abhorrent.”
Along with the murder of gay activist David Kato that same year, Nagenda’s unequivocal denunciation of justice for gay people makes Uganda seem a hellhole for sexual minorities.
But Robbie Corey-Boulet says Nagenda’s full statement, not disseminated as widely, sounds more hopeful:
A very, very slowly increasing number of Ugandans, and I am one of them, see homosexuals as full human beings who can do what they like in private, between consenting adults. But people look at me like I am a very funny fish when I say these things, even in my own household.
The path to the revocation of legal sanctions against LGBT people was a long and slow process, even where our rights are fully recognized. The US, sadly, has not yet gotten all the way to full recognition. But we’ve come a long way. As for Africa, it is a big place, a land of many cultures and nations. There will be change for the better in some places, for the worse in others. But I do hope “very, very slowly” can speed up.
source:
Love Falls on Us: a story of American ideas and African LGBT lives
by Robbie Corey-Boulet
2019. Zed Books, London UK
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