Newslex Point News in Uganda, Uganda news
The two Immigrants David Senabulya who was an engineer and rising techno-pop musician, and Keith “Roscoe” Ssekabira who was a pastor and former boxer are the two surprising humans that found them selves LGBT activits.[9]
Check also: A group of gays attacked Pastor Kiganda at the church in London
Well, the immigrants said that they never intended to become human-rights activists.
As increasingly hostile and violent attitudes toward gay,[4] lesbian and transgender residents swept across their East African country of Uganda, the two felt compelled to stand up for themselves.
“We wanted to turn the message of hate into one of love,” said Senabulya, a former civil engineer who now works as a machine operator in Columbus, [1]one of about 20 LGBT(Lesbian Gay Biosexual and Transgender) Ugandan refugees who have resettled in central Ohio over the past few years.[8]
In 2008, the duo and two other friends formed a gay-rights group and began documenting the beatings,[1] lynchings and stonings of LGBT Ugandans by angry mobs.[10] They also video taped the harassment and arrests by police.
“It all started when I was invited as a representative of my church to attend a leadership training seminar at Makerere Community Church (in Uganda)and heard American pastor Rick Warren,[9] author of ‘The Purpose-Driven Life,'” said Senabulya, who is now 38 and, with Ssekabira, recently started educating the central Ohio community about the plight of LGBT refugees.[2]
He said Warren told the group that the American LGBT movement was bringing its agenda of “immoral and liberal culture” to destroy Ugandan society. In subsequent years, other U.S.[3] pastors also stirred up fears that gays would target children for abuse and recruitment, Senabulya said.[5]
Warren has called such accusations “lies and errors and false reports,” saying he’s never supported Uganda’s anti-gay efforts.[11]
After releasing a book characterizing Uganda as a “hunting ground” for those who want to hurt gays, Ssekabira was thrown out of his family’s home and church, [4]and Senabulya was threatened with imprisonment for promoting homosexuality and publishing seditious material.
A bill signed by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni in February 2014 made homosexuality already a crime punishable by life imprisonment.[3]
“Like people in a war zone, we had grown immune to the idea of dying,” Senabulya said. “But things got too dangerous, [2]even for us.”
Uganda’s first and most outspoken gay-rights advocate,[9] David Kato, was beaten to death with a hammer in January 2011, three months after a tabloid ran an anti-gay story with Kato’s picture under a banner urging, “Hang Them.” Police say he was killed in a botched robbery; activists say he was the victim of a hate crime.[14]
To avoid a similar fate,[3] the pair, with aid from the Dutch embassy in Kampala in May 2014, slipped onto a bus headed for neighboring Kenya, where they hoped to find some peace.[6] As agents at the Ugandan-Kenyan border were confiscating Ssekabira’s passport, Senabulya said he threw himself into the 100-foot-wide stretch of “no man’s land” that separates the two countries.
While the guards were preoccupied, Ssekabira also jumped,[8] and they ran into Kenya before anyone could stop them. They rejoined their bus and were allowed back on, Senabulya said, after paying the driver the equivalent of $10.[12]
After a few days at a Nairobi compound run by the UNHCR, the United Nations’ refugee agency,[1] the two were taken to a camp in the inhospitable desert of northwest Kenya named Kakuma.[8]
A human warehouse, Kakuma is home to nearly 200,000 refugees — mainly from Ethiopia, Somalia and South Sudan. It proved no more welcoming than the home they had left, said Ssekabira, who is now 29,[2] and shares a North Side apartment with Senabulya.
“We found as much, [6]if not more, homophobia here than we had back home in Uganda,” said the former boxer, personal trainer and youth pastor who now works in a distribution warehouse.
Because Uganda was not at war, the other refugees,[9] many of whom become immigrants to the fled countries where homophobia was rife, wanted to know whether they had left their country because they’re gay.[4]
“We were seen as a taboo,[10] a threat,” Ssekabira said. “They wanted to kill us.” It was so volatile, the UNHCR erected a fence within the campto protect them, said Senabulya,[3] who added that it wasn’t long before LGBT refugees from other countries joined their group of about 20 people.
In August 2014, a Ugandan court overturned the country’s anti-gay law, [1]but that seemed to polarize people even more, the immigrants said.
With tensions rising in the camp, the two decided to take their chances in Nairobi, [7]the capital of Kenya.
But the city, plagued by beatings, kidnappings and extortion, proved no better, and the duo spent more than a year in UNHCR safe houses. Because of their unique security challenges, [12]the two were resettled in December 2015. Senabulya came to Columbus; Ssekabira went to Miami, Florida, eventually coming to Columbus to join Senabulya.[1]
The two are extremely grateful to be in a city that welcomes the LGBT community and a country where same-sex marriage was legalized.[2] But they say they’re still dealing with the trauma of what they’ve been through and concerned about how people, especially other immigrants and refugees here, perceive them.[6]
So Angela Plummer, [3]whose resettlement agency, Community Refugee & Immigration Services,helped Senabulya start a new life here, reached out to Stonewall Columbus, the local gay-rights group.
The two groups asked the immigrants Senabulya and Ssekabira to join a joint LGBTQ refugee speakers’ bureau.
They gave their first talk to an audience of more than 80 people on May 14. “David and Roscoewere extraordinary,[5] and passionately told their moving stories with power and courage,” said Lori Gum, Stonewall’s program and Pride coordinator.[2]
They’ll also help cut the ribbon at the Pride festivities this month with some of the original marchers from 35 years ago, she said.[3]
Accidental activists or not,[9] the two hope that central Ohioans will be more willing than some in their homeland to embrace the lyrics of one of Senabulya’s songs that we all are “one people” and “children of planet Earth.”[4]
source: dispatch
Check also;
- Gays: Hunting Down Gays in Nigeria Is On Going
- You will not impose same sex marriage in Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta tells Barack Obama
- Ntare school closes over gay protest
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