On Talib Kweli, the LRA, Gay Rights and Ukweli

The rapper Talib Kweli on Sunday argued on twitter that Christian fundamentalism is just as likely as Islamic fundamentalism to sponsor or advocate terrorism. In his series of tweets he mentioned the ignoble LRA of Joseph Kony.

Should be a slam dunk. Nothing proves the abuse of Christianity for the purposes of terrorism better than LRA. Kony is one of the most evil men in the history of the world, and the things he did, the things he put this nation through are at the furthest extreme of extremism.

For two decades him and his bandits regularly raided villages and homes, murdering and raping whoever they found in their way, with abandon and impunity. Then there was the mutilation, the cutting off of lips, ears and noses of their victims, just to leave the most macabre reminder that their evil was present. THen there was the abduction of children, mere toddlers, who would then be trained and forced to return to kill whoever of their own family members survived.

And he did all that under the name of Jesus Christ.

So that’s it. The debate is closed. If you have terrorists who claim Islam, you obviously see, you also have terrorists who claim christianity. We can all go home englightened.

But that is not exactly how the debate went down. What Kweli said, instead, was that the LRA “massacred” gays in Uganda.

Naturally, a few Ugandans had to step in here. Because Kweli has Ugandan fans as well. He is world famous. If you don’t know who he is, that is because you waste too much time on Fetty Wap.

The Ugandans stepped in to point out this misapprehension: as profoundly wicked as LRA’s atrocious campaigns were, there was no actual time when they set out to specifically target gays.

And then it all descended into chaos. Within hours it was a mad spiral of accusations and claims and counters and obfuscation and half truths and diversions and digressions… it was a mess.

Essentially Kweli was saying that there is a bill in Uganda that criminalises homosexuality. This is true. This bill was tabled, debated and passed with great deal of fuss and it gained us global notoriety, Uganda is now known largely as  the nation that kills gays.

Kweli was also right in saying that the bill was funded, agitated for, supported and in many ways engineered by members of American Christian fundamentalist organisations.

Kweli is right when he says that there is rampant homophobia in Uganda. There is.

But the one misstep he made in his argument was there: The LRA massacred gays in Uganda.

Now, this is clearly untrue. Kony never specifically set out to single out any particular group of people. Every report of an LRA massacre has his army swoop in, murder indiscriminately, and leave. They killed muslims, christians, atheists, Acholi, Langi, Baganda, Bazungu, there are no instances where they would separate victims from those to be spared on any basis. Kony was a hun. His attacks were never systematic.

During the war we heard Kony news daily. When Kony endorsed opposition candidate Kizza Besigye for president. When Kony killed his own brother. When Kony changed his bevy of sex slaves who he called his wives. Every crazy thing. And every LRA attack was reported to us in detail. Place, time, number of victims and whatever sick message the psychopath had left behind.

They were all horrible. But not one time did we ever hear that they went looking for gay people, massacred them, and left.

Not because LRA is tolerant of sexual rights, of course. Of course they are not. Kweli himself provided an article that showed LRA speaking angrily against LGBT rights.

But then this is Uganda. Rural Uganda at that. If Uganda is homophobic, rural Uganda is even more so. You don’t come out in a village in Gulu. If you are gay, you have to keep it deep under wraps. Life for a gay person is not easy anywhere, not even in America itself. Prejudice and bigotry are everywhere. In rural Uganda, it is the rare, very rare person indeed, who will be openly gay.

If your army of terrorists wanted to search for gay people in a Ugandan village to murder, you would find three people merely suspected to be gay. You will not find enough to make a “massacre”.
Besides, the village will probably beat you to it. If the community accepts you, it will treat your lifestyle as a secret no one mentions. It is hardly likely that the LRA would find out about you. Again, Uganda is a pretty homophobic place. Even in the city, many of the most tolerant people I know view their friends’ homosexuality as a dirty habit.

I don’t however believe that we are much worse than the rest of the world. When I look for murderous violence against gays I am more likely to find it in South Africa and America. In Uganda I can only find one case of an arrest under the bill, and charges were dropped. There is the high profile case of one Chris Mubiru, but even that was lost on appeal. He is a free man now.

Two years later we see the Kill The Gays bill for what it was all along. It was not a push to exterminate a group of people. There is no task force, there have been no hunts or investigations. There is no mass action on the part of the government. The only people persecuting gay people are the same ones who have been there all along. Private citizens with way more hate and spare time on their hands than they know what to do with.

The government is not expending any energy to persecute people based on their sexual orientation. And the LRA certainly didn’t.

So you would understand why Uganda would want to clarify this to Talib Kweli, just to clear the record, just to establish that, while we are not the core of love and tolerance, we are certainly not a whole nation’s worth of Orlando shootings.

We would expect at this point that Talib Kweli would tweet, “Oh, I see my mistake. Consider me corrected” and then proceed with what was a valid and important point to be made about the relation between fundamentalist religion and terrorism, armed now with the best example of Christian terrorism the world has recently seen.

But no, instead he seems to be digging in, insisting that there have been what he calls “massacre of gays” by the LRA. He seems bent on believing that it took place until someone provides him with proof that it did not.

When asked to provide evidence that it did, he gives tangential references which prove accurate and evident things: there has been violence against gays in Uganda (by others, not LRA), the LRA does oppose LGBT rights and freedoms, the Gay Bill was supported by US christians, but no story with the headline, “LRA Massacres Gays In Village Assault”.

You can easily find proof that LRA abducted girls for sex slaves. You can find evidence that LRA would cut the lips and noses and cheeks off victims, you can find evidence that the LRA torched churches and mosques, you can find evidence of every terrible thing Kony and his army ever did.

But this alleged gay massacre, why can we not find it?

And should we, in the first place? Every debate knows that he who alleges proves. You don’t ask to prove that I have not cheated on my wife, or that the Crips have not contributed to Trump’s campaign. If you claim it has happened, you provide proof that it has, you don’t ask us to prove that it hasn’t.

It seems that Talib is vested in believing that the LRA did this.

But why? Is the scale of evil, the tremendous, immeasurable, unfathomable scale of evil perpetrated by the LRA, the litany of murder and rape and maiming and brutality perpetrated by the LRA in the name of Christ not enough if it was carried out across the gender board and included both gay and straight Ugandans? Does it have to be against gays to be a valid example of Christian terrorism?

Why the insistence that LRA massacred gay people? Why?

Uganda has been through some shit with this LRA thing. And even beyond that. The six years since the LRA left Uganda have been the longest sustained period this country has been when we are not to some degree in a state of civil war. For way too long it has been hard to be proud to be a Ugandan. First we were the country of Amin. Then we were the country of Kony. Now we are the country of the Kill The Gays bill. But if we are going to take the shame of the acts of our government, let it be the truth.

If you are looking for homophobic rhetoric, then yes, that’s us. But if you are looking for violent massacres of gay people, move on to another country. It is not us who do that.

Try America.