4 - Reflection: A Postcolonial and Self-reflexive Reading

Summary

As a key part of project activities, participants read two stories in the Bible and related these stories to their own perspectives and experiences. In the process, they spontaneously related the stories’ characters and events with figures and experiences in their own day-to-day context and lives. In this concluding reflection, two of us, Adriaan and Johanna, as the lead authors of this book, turn the gaze briefly but explicitly towards ourselves, as white European academics who see ourselves as friends and allies – according to some of our participants ‘members of the family’ – of the Ugandan LGBTQ+ refugees we worked with together in this project. How have the stories come to speak to us? What follows are some tentative thoughts emerging from postcolonial and self-reflexive readings of the Bible stories and inter-reading them with our own experience in this project.

We begin with what might seem to be a slight detour: political theorist Rahul Rao’s recent conceptualisation of a ‘queer politics of postcoloniality’, which he applies specifically to the Ugandan context of sexual politics as crystallised in the discourse around the Anti-Homosexuality Bill (AHB). Rao argues that the AHB infamously

sought to intensify and expand the realm of prohibition, creating a range of new offences related to the practice and ‘promotion’ of homosexuality out of a professed desire to protect the ‘traditional family’ and ‘culture of the people of Uganda’ from the putatively alien scourge of queer sex.

In other words, from the point of view of the proponents of the AHB, queer sexuality and advocates of LGBTQ+ rights threaten the moral purity and cultural integrity of the ‘pearl of Africa’, as Uganda is popularly known, because they allegedly defy Ugandan culture and sell out the body of the nation by engaging intimately with ‘the West’ and copying its supposedly morally degraded sexual culture. In the eyes of these proponents, members of Ugandan LGBTQ+ communities are like the guys charged with indecency in the drama: sexually corrupted, comparable with adulterers, defiantly deviant, and deserving of imprisonment, even the death penalty.

But Rao goes further to observe: ‘Faced with the claim that they were “unAfrican”, Ugandan LGBTI activists responded by pointing to the remarkable internationalism of the AHB itself.’