It is curious that Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni cited the protection of children when asked about the newly revived Anti-Homosexuality Bill in his country’s parliament. After all, this is a president who has done very little to protect children in the wake of severe austerity measures imposed by international lenders and structural adjustment over many years. Child starvation remains a serious problem in the country, where, as recently as 2010, allafrica.com reported that only 45% of Ugandans have food security. And the non-profit NETwork Against Malaria says 30% of Ugandan children under the age of five die each year from malaria.
So, it seemed disingenuous at best when Museveni appeared last week on BBC Television to defend the anti-gay fervor in his country in the name of protecting children. Specifically, he said his support for the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which in its present form promises either life imprisonment or the death penalty for LGBT “repeat offenders,” would depend on what the legislation “is for. For instance, is it for recruiting young children into that practice by promising money? That’s what the problem is: inducement, manipulating, using money, which they collect from the West. That’s what I also do not like.” This statement was meant to appease the bill’s supporters back home, where many people believe that LGBT people are pedophiles.
It was a strange interview all around, with Museveni spouting rhetoric seemingly designed to appease both the bill’s critics and supporters. He said, “The difference between Africa and Western Europe is on the promotion of homosexuality, as if it is something good… I do not support the promotion of homosexuality, but I do not support persecution or discrimination of homosexuals as our society has always done… We never marginalized them or discriminated against them… What people resent is promotion… We are not like Europeans or Arabs who want to impose their views. When I hear Arabs talking over haram [or what is forbidden], I always tell them that my list of haram is much longer than yours. I don’t eat fish… I don’t eat chicken because I think if you eat chicken, you’ll be unstable. I don’t eat pigs. I don’t eat very many of the things which you eat. When I come here, I have a problem of what to eat, but I keep this to myself. This is a difference with black people.”
On one hand, Museveni’s rhetoric appeals to bill supporters and ensures the public that the President is on their side. On the other hand, his defense rests on essentialist, racist ideas about “African culture” that often have currency with people in the West. Africans, Museveni implies, are essentially superstitious people with strict codes of conduct that govern their everyday lives. And unlike Western polities, which engage in politics allegedly outside of culture, the argument goes, African culture is static. For a Western critic to engage something that is a matter of “culture” is an act of neocolonial heavy-handedness because culture is innate and unchanging. In any case, Westerners, who generally know very little about the continent or its many diverse cultures, are unlikely to point out, for instance, that not eating chicken because it induces “instability” has far more to do with Adventist Christian missionaries from the West than longstanding cultural fears of poultry consumption.
We’ve all heard this before: The Rwandan genocide was framed in Western media as the result of “ancient ethnic hatreds” rather than contemporary geopolitical realities. Somali piracy is the result of greedy Somalis and has nothing to do with personal survival in the wake of state collapse. Civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo was all about war-mongering Africans enacting longstanding petty grievances against political rivals and had nothing to do with global diamond and coltan trade. I’ve even heard Western missionaries refer to Africa as “the dark continent,” and then go on to spread fear of the continent’s so-called “witch doctors” and “pagan cultural beliefs.” Westerners, whether secular or religious, have a tendency to accept simplistic, “culture-based” statements about Africa that have little basis in fact. After all, we are not that far-removed from a generation that cast Africans as brutal “savages.”
I am not suggesting that there is no historical or cultural basis for explaining homophobia in Uganda or in any other country. But I maintain that culture-based arguments are no substantive defense given that “culture” is something impossible to pin down because it changes through time. And in a country beset by colonial prejudices – including homophobia – not that long ago, it’s impossible to distinguish “ancient African homophobia” from that exacerbated by colonial Britain in the twentieth century. It isn’t even possible to distinguish Ugandan homophobia from the 2009 anti-gay conference organized by American zealots like fundamentalist Christian Scott Lively, who famously alleged that homosexuals caused the Holocaust, and “probably” also perpetrated the genocide in neighboring Rwanda.
Political views are not the result of innate culture. There is no “pure” or “true” culture that can be separated out from politics or historical change. But Westerners all too often accept backward ideas about Africans in the name of “multiculturalism.” So, Museveni is appealing to racist Western assumptions about Africans, but dressing it all up in the language of post-colonialism in order to prove his loyalties at home.
He’s a genius at political maneuvering, and the international uproar over the Anti-Homosexuality Bill has contributed to obscuring political questions both at home and on the international stage. It’s a very shrewd political diversion for a government that needs to deflect attention from Oxfam’s recent report detailing a government land grab that robbed more than 20,000 people of their homes between 2006 and 2010.
But the land grab isn’t the only thing the scandal-ridden Museveni government needs to keep out of the public discourse. With the world community so focused on the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, there is little talk of Museveni’s unpopular – and probably illegitimate – reelection last year, or of his government’s violent crackdowns on peaceful protesters speaking out against poverty and food insecurity. And very few people are talking about the government’s recent agreement with Tullow Oil, PLC to build an oil refinery in Uganda, an act that activists in the country said was illegal. And of course it deflects from real threats to Ugandan children like hunger, malaria and inadequate access to education and healthcare.
While Museveni parades around like some kind of African elder statesman, he has revealed himself a master of political diversion. It isn’t unusual for corrupt leaders to exploit vulnerable minorities to obscure their own incompetence and inefficacy. And this is what has happened both at home and abroad as a result of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill. As long as it serves his interests, Museveni is not above stoking anti-LGBT hatreds in his country. And this is the sad reality of current Ugandan politics. If this legislation becomes the law of the land in Uganda, it will both victimize innocent people and undermine the legitimacy of the state.
But as Museveni’s early embrace of structural adjustment had already shown, he is not a man with much concern for the well-being of future Ugandans. He’s an autocrat who first and foremost protects his own interests, but he’s managed to fool people at home and all over the world into thinking otherwise. Maybe the President will throw a bone to the West by putting off the Anti-Homosexuality Bill for a while as he has done in the past. For the best political theatre, he would need to swoop in at the last minute as the reasoned protector of human rights in Uganda and stop the bill. If this happens, the world community is not going to continue asking questions, and Ugandans will be stuck, once again, with a government apparatus that has none of their interests at heart. Either way, Museveni comes out on top, and the “protection of children” remains a laughably insincere, if politically effective, bait and switch.
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Front page photo: campaign poster for Incumbent President of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni. Designed by Samson Mwaka, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.