"Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great. You can be that great generation."
About 450,000 people from around the world opposing Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill have taken an online petition to the country’s parliament. The petition is the latest attempt to halt the bill, which carries the death penalty for some homosexual acts. US President Barack Obama has called the proposed legislation “odious”.
The global outcry against Uganda’s ‘Anti-Homosexuality Bill’ could not be more deafening. Opponents of the legislation have condemned the effort not just to put gays in prison, which is already the law in Uganda, but to further criminalise the ‘promotion of homosexuality’, require that suspected gays and lesbians be turned in to authorities, and to punish some individuals – including those who are HIV positive or those euphemistically called ‘repeat offenders’ – with death.
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has indicated he will not back a bill that would impose the death sentence for the crime of “aggravated homosexuality” – when an HIV-positive person has sex with anyone who is disabled or under the age of 18.
First come the Americans. Second, comes the law. Third, comes the protest. According to a recent article published by The New York Times, the Ugandan politician who promoted the blamed bill on homosexuality – the 2009 Anti-Homosexuality Bill – had been previously inspired by “his evangelical friends in the American government” and by the meetings which took place in Kampala to educate people in “curing gays”. But apart from the role of religious emphasis on this issue, which is breaking walls, uncovering sufferings, leaving scars and splitting the Ugandan community, it is the whole of Africa that has to face the anti homosexuality movement in its borders.
Uganda will be going back to the days of the Idi Amin regime if it passes a Bill which will arrest or kill people for being gay or lesbian and for repeatedly engaging in homosexual sex, say rights activists.
Ory Okolloh, the Executive Director of Ushahidi , is from Kenya but currently lives in Johannesburg. Her blog is "outlet for her opinions. While it is primarily focused on Kenya, she reserves to write about whatever she wants."
Sokari Ekine is a Nigerian social justice activist living in Spain, with a background in technology, gender issues and human rights. She is interested in creating a community of grassroots African bloggers as a way for Africans to exchange ideas, share experiences and tell their own stories in our own words.
Native of Cape Town, Sean Jacobs lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches in Manhattan. He obsesses about the relationship between politics and popular culture, but the main rationale for his blog is to comment on what passes for media coverage of the African continent.
Rosebelle Kagumire is an experienced Ugandan Journalist. She won the best Journalist blogger English category at the Panos hosted competition in 2009. Currently she is a student of MA. Media, Conflict and Peace studies at University for Peace (UPEACE), Costa Rica.
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