Re-membering Mwanga: Queer Memory and Belonging in Postcolonial Uganda'

Dr. Rahul Rao, Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, SOAS, University of London

Re-membering Mwanga: Queer Memory and Belonging in Postcolonial Uganda, Dr Rahul Rao

In 2009, Uganda shot to infamy when a little-known parliamentarian named David Bahati introduced an 'Anti-Homosexuality Bill', which proposed enhancing punishments for consensual same-sex conduct, mandating the death penalty for certain classes of offences. Although the bill remained bottled up in parliamentary committees for the duration of the 8th Parliament thanks to a sophisticated campaign in which local activists were able to bring international pressure to bear on the government, it has recently returned to the parliamentary agenda.

The bill and much of the homophobic discourse that underpins it is informed by a perception of homosexuality as a culturally inauthentic import into Uganda from the West. Many commentators have pointed out the irony of this premise by revealing the ways in which homophobia in Uganda has been the product of increasingly close relationships between US-based Christian evangelicals and Ugandan clergy and politicians. Less attention has been paid to the 19th century antecedents of this production of homophobia in an earlier encounter between British and French colonial missionaries and elites of the powerful Baganda tribe.

Missionary sources from this time suggest that the ruler of the Buganda kingdom—Kabaka Mwanga—was fond of consummating his ‘unnatural desires’ with men in his court. When some of them, following conversion to Christianity, refused complicity in this ‘vice’, he had them burnt at the stake, precipitating a series of events that culminated in the institution of British rule over what is now Uganda. As such, the very practices that contemporary African elites consider Western seem to have been stamped out by an earlier wave of Western imperialism. Far from lying buried in history textbooks, these events are commemorated annually in Uganda. Almost immediately after the execution of these early Christian converts, the Catholic missionaries began an energetic campaign to have the murdered pages canonised—a project that was realised in 1964.

The Uganda Martyrs, as the executed pages have come to be remembered, are amongst the most widely celebrated African saints and are indeed a focus of global Catholic devotion every year on June 3, the anniversary of their execution. The site of execution is today marked by an Anglican shrine, and a larger Catholic shrine nearby which receives hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, some walking from their countries of origin. Through archival and ethnographic fieldwork at the Namugongo shrines, I hope to investigate whether pilgrims recall the same-sex encounters that lie at the heart of the foundational moment of their church, and more broadly, whether memory, rather than human rights, offers a more conducive avenue for the inclusion and legitimation of queer life.

Biography

Rahul Rao is a Lecturer in Politics at SOAS where he teaches courses in international relations, political thought and queer studies. He has a law degree from the National Law School of India University and a doctorate in international relations from the University of Oxford. He is the author of Third World Protest: Between Home and the World (OUP, 2010 & 2012 paperback).

Organiser: Bloomsbury Gender Network hosted by the SOAS Centre for Gender Studies

Contact email: rs94@soas.ac.uk