By David John Frank
Last year, MP David Bahati introduced a bill before the Ugandan Parliament that would elevate and establish penalties for a wide array of homosexual offences. The Times of London described the bill’s core provisions thus:
The Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009 is going through Uganda’s Parliament after receiving its first reading last month. According to Clause 2 of the Bill, a person who is convicted of gay sex is liable to life imprisonment. But if that person is also HIV positive the penalty — under the heading “aggravated homosexuality” — is death.
While the bill’s fate remains uncertain, Parliament Speaker Edward Ssekandi insists– as of March 2010 –it will proceed.
As might be expected, world and African leaders have showered the proposal with protests. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, for example, calls the Ugandan bill’s provisions “terrible backward steps for human rights in Africa” and reminds fellow Christians that “hate has no place in the house of God.”
Most such criticisms have been fair and well-grounded.
A few complaints, however, seem misdirected. These censure African culture for the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, and they thereby understate its colonial and neo-colonial antecedents. For example, ABC’s Dana Hughes reported that:
East Africa, and for that matter Africa as a whole, is decidedly, virulently against homosexuality….Africans see homosexuality as being both un-African and un-Christian, a double whammy in a place where both local tradition and the religious influence of colonialism and missionaries intersect and often dictate people’s everyday lives. And the poorer and more uneducated a person is the more likely they are to both go to church on Sundays and see a “witch doctor” on Monday, and be a zealot about both.
Meanwhile, the BBC’s William Crawley wrote that:
It is important to understand that…in many African cultures homosexuality is widely seen in starkly negative terms as a threat to traditional and tribal values. That is why [Anglican] Bishop [Joseph] Abura regards any comment from western churches or governments on this question as a form of cultural aggression. “Christianity in Africa is under attack by Gays and Christians in Europe and the Americas,” he writes. “Africans do not need Europeans to teach them what the Gospels say….The vice of homosexuality through the necessary laws in place can be checked.”
The tone in such accounts is indignant and self-righteous.
The African cultural origins of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, however, seem less striking than its Western colonial origins. At independence in 1962, Article 140 of the Ugandan Penal Code – leftover from the British – stated that:
Any person who –
(a) has carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature; or
(b) has carnal knowledge of an animal; or
(c) permits a male person to have carnal knowledge of him or her against the order of nature, is guilty of a felony and is liable to imprisonment for 14 years.
Similar laws applied throughout the British Commonwealth. Needless to say, it would stretch reason to attach any special Ugandan-ness or African-ness to such a widespread law – many copied verbatim.
Later in 1990, Uganda raised the maximum penalty in Article 140 from 14 years to life prison. The move was sharply retrogressive by human-rights standards, but it nevertheless conformed to accepted models of British Commonwealth law. At the time, for example, the life sentence for “unnatural offenses” also applied in Ireland (until 1993), in India (until 2009), and in Singapore (to this day). Once again, the distinguishing marks of a unique and deep-seated Ugandan or African culture are difficult to find. The law, while moving backward, remained well within the parameters of standard British Commonwealth law.
Now today there is the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009. As in the past, the colonial – or neo-colonial – role seems a crucial feature of the reform process. Shortly before the bill’s introduction last year, a group of U.S. evangelical Christians gave a series of talks in the capital city of Kampala. For three days, according to the New York Times:
[T]housands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”
As in previous decades, the catalyst and framework for the bill seem external. Even Time admits “[t]he bill has an American genesis.”
My objective here is not to defend the Ugandan proposal or the Ugandan politicians who proposed it. Both warrant the most vigorous denunciation. My objective here is only to reflect on the proposal’s roots. They lie, as I see them, much more in colonialism and in neo-colonialism than in “African culture.”
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David John Frank is Professor of Sociology and, by courtesy, Education at the University of California, Irvine. He can be reached at frankd@uci.edu.