HIV/AIDS plays but a bit part in Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall’s documentary Call Me Kuchu, but its toxic shadow looms large in this depiction of violent, anti-gay sentiment in Uganda.
Like many other African countries, colonial-era laws banning homosexuality remain on the books in Uganda. When the HIV/AIDS epidemic exploded there in the mid-1980s, the post-civil-war Ugandan Government launched its famous “ABC” programme, beloved by political conservatives the world over for eschewing traditional HIV prevention and treatment models—with their implicit support for gay rights—in favour of preaching abstinence, monogamy, and regular condom use to the masses instead. Untreated, HIV-infected Ugandans died in droves, but new infections fell too and the AIDS epidemic slid off the Ugandan national agenda.
But the marginalisation of gay rights that the ABC campaign implicitly embraced metastasised. The resulting ugliness is the subject of Call Me Kuchu, which depicts a year in the life of Uganda’s beleaguered gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community (they call themselves “Kuchus”). The film opens in October, 2010, when a local magazine prints an incendiary article showcasing photographs of “Uganda’s homos” and calling for their hanging. “Sometimes violence is justifiable”, the managing editor of the magazine says, smug and unrepentant. Shortly afterwards, an “Anti-Homosexuality Bill” is introduced into Parliament that would levy the death penalty for people who engage in homosexual acts and jail time for those who failed to report them.
An array of social forces aligns against the Kuchus. Besides the anti-gay political establishment is the church, which expels at least one clergyman for his sympathy for gay people. “What they [gay men and lesbians] are doing is evil”, says an African preacher. Visiting American evangelicals help fan the fire. “The homosexual agenda is sweeping the educational system in America”, one bellows from the podium at a huge gathering of Ugandans, “and Uganda is ground zero.”
A final social force driving anti-gay sentiment in the country, alluded to obliquely in the film, is the reaction of some Ugandans to western aid. “If giving us mosquito nets, ARVs, and malaria medicine involves us embracing sodomy”, one unnamed anti-gay advocate asserts, “then we would rather die in dignity than live in dishonour.” Uganda’s anti-gay advocates posit homosexuality as yet another unwanted western invention, forced upon an unwitting traditional society. Homosexuality, as one unnamed passerby puts it, is “a curse and an abomination on our nation”.
Ugandan gay rights activist David Kato, along with a rag-tag team of fellow Kuchu activists, dares to challenge the violence-inciting magazine in court. The film recounts some of their harrowing personal stories. One lesbian describes, in an affectless monotone, how a man who purported to be her friend raped her to “show her how to be a woman”. Her relatives did not believe her description of the attack. She miscarried the resulting pregnancy but became infected with HIV and attempted suicide—“Nothing worked”, she says ruefully.
Together, Kato and other Kuchu activists build a warm, vibrant community. They hold dance parties and make-shift celebrations, where they dream of building a gay village, and a high-walled sanctuary for Kuchus on the run. But the film’s attempt to posit Kato and his fellow Kuchus as hopeful, inspirational figures falls short. Their fragile, modest gains pale into nothingness against a rising tide of venomous violence.
By the film’s end, the court has ruled in Kato’s favour against the magazine and the Parliamentary session has closed without considering the anti-gay bill, but violence has decimated this little community. Kato is slaughtered in his sleep. Anti-gay preachers and advocates rail at Kato’s friends and relatives even as they gather to weep at his grave. And Kato’s allies start packing, alerted that they are next on the list to be killed.
Call Me Kuchu—filmed in an oddly upbeat fashion, despite the dark, ominous story it tells—ends there. But the story of Uganda’s war on gay men and women continues. This February, the anti-gay bill was reintroduced into Uganda’s Parliament, albeit stripped of the death penalty. Bowing to international pressure, President Yoweri Museveni now publicly says that gay people should not be persecuted, but nor should they be allowed to live openly among others.
The prospects for reaching Uganda’s gay community with HIV prevention and treatment seem similarly bleak. The country has no HIV/AIDS services aimed specifically at men who have sex with men, leaving the job to a smattering of non-governmental organisations. This July, the government sought bans on 38 of them, for “promoting” homosexuality.
by Sonia Shah
Source – The Lancet
