Whilst I deplore the anti-gay law in Uganda, I think this piece by Jeremy Seabrook, written in 2004, gives us some understanding of the part played by English colonisers in embedding anti-gay laws in the countries they invaded. Museveni is a tyrant and a dictator, under his rule thousands upon thousands of people have been murdered, yet he has, up until relatively recently, been very much in favour by the British government.
Comment
It's not natural
The developing world's homophobia is a legacy of colonial rule
The cancellation of Jamaican reggae artist Beenie Man's concert at east London's Ocean Club because of "concerns for public safety", in view of lyrics inciting attacks on gay men, raises once more the tangled relationship between homophobia and the legacy of colonialism.
In Jamaica, the offences of buggery and gross indecency were framed in the Offences Against the Person Act of 1864, derived from the English Act of 1861. The wording is chilling: "Whoever shall be convicted of the abominable crime of buggery, committed either with mankind or an animal, shall be liable to be imprisoned and kept to hard labour for a term not exceeding 10 years."
When the constitution for the newly independent territories of Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados was drawn up in 1962, its architects honoured their former rulers by preserving colonial values which would themselves be abolished in Britain within five years. These laws had their roots in Victorian morality, but they were embraced enthusiastically by the black nationalist middle class; and, like many illiberal attitudes in the world, these filtered through society, and were transmuted into a virulent machismo among the poor; a consequence, perhaps, of people having been stripped of everything else, including the promises of a better life after independence. It is out of this culture, fortified by contemporary evangelical Christianity, that the culture of music-driven homophobia has grown.
Jamaica, of course, is far from the only country coming to terms with the imperial bequest of hatred of same-sex relationships. The Naz Foundation, which works on Aids prevention in India, recently challenged the constitutionality of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. This forbids "sexual acts against the order of nature". The response of the central government was that homosexuality cannot be legalised in India as the society disapproves of such behaviour. "The purpose of Section 377 is to provide a healthy environment in the society by criminalising unnatural sexual activities against the order of nature."
In fact, such laws were often inspired by imperial anxieties about homosocial cultures among their subordinate peoples. Even today, it is common for westerners, observing young men holding hands, and mistaking the meaning of this non-sexualised touching, to marvel at the "openness" of gay relationships in India.
Colonial laws still stand in many other countries, too. Indeed, it is clear the British had an off-the-peg penal code, since in Malaysia the same law is also called Section 377. The only difference is that in India it is almost never used, whereas in Malaysia it was employed recently, and to great effect, against the former deputy premier, Anwar Ibrahim.
In Africa, the number of the article varies, but the wording of the offence is virtually identical. In Zambia "carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature" is punishable; in Uganda "any person who has carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature is guilty of an offence and is liable to life imprisonment". The Nigerian Penal Code states that "any person who has carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature ... is liable to imprisonment for 14 years". So, too, in Botswana, in Zimbabwe, in Tanzania; but not in South Africa, which has one of the most progressive records in the world in legitimating homosexual relationships.
"Carnal knowledge" evokes missionaries shocked by bare breasts as they strove to bring decency to the wayward children of empire. The colonial legislation first named something which, although familiar in all societies, had not previously been cast in the terms in which the Victorians framed their own experience. "Carnal knowledge" sounds so much more portentous than the enjoyment of sexual relations.
Swahili has no equivalent for "homosexual" - although a word for feminised man exists, and the word basha indicates a male penetrative partner. Boy-wives were recognised in Zande, Arab/Bantu and Siwi cultures, often with family approval. The boy would later be married to a woman, the former "husband" paying the bride price. The anthropologist EE Evans-Pritchard's informants among the Zande of central Africa in the 1930s stated that men had sex with boys "because they liked them". Sometimes such relationships were said to occur "by accident", when people were sleeping; but as long as social fictions and propriety were maintained, these remained unspoken. "Carnal knowledge" and "the order of nature" sharply redefined customary, unnamed or marginal behaviours, and brought to bear upon them the blinding knowledge of their inherent sinfulness.
Same-sex love has had a highly significant place in Indian tradition, too. In most Indian languages there are words for feminised men ( kothis ) and for their partners ( giriyas or panthis ); they describe behaviour, not identity - what people do, not who they are. To label customary and complex relationships as "homosexuality", as colonial officials did, was the work of characteristic and arrogant reductionism; while the subsequent essentialising of identity by their enlightened descendants in the form of lesbian or gay man strikes even more violently against the multiple competing aspects of the human person in traditional societies.
The violent homophobia in Jamaica, which saw 16 men killed in prison in August 1997, because it was believed they were homosexual, the murder of the gay activist Brian Williamson last month, and the emergence of a popular culture whose principal characteristic seems to be to rid the world of "battyboys", is simply a more extreme example of a familiar cultural oddity, whereby colonised peoples often internalise and perpetuate values which pass away in the countries which originally imposed them; just as mid-Victorian leg-of-mutton sleeves still cover the bare shoulders of many African women, and as red tape is still used to bind up documents in Indian government offices. When the west revisits Africa or India, declaring that gays - not homosexuals - raise questions of human rights, who is to wonder if what they hear is the fundamentalist preachings from the mouths of local bishops fulminating in the frozen blood-curdling rhetoric of the early missionaries, or the urge, through pop culture, of distorted - and largely powerless - masculinity to kill "chi-chi men"?
The penitent imperialists have, by and large, revised their earlier repressive sexual attitudes. (Not exclusively so, as the case this week shows, of the guest house in Scotland which refused a double bed to two gay men.) We are confronted by voices from the grave, the far from still tongues of our long-deceased predecessors. And we do not know how to respond to them.
Work against oppression and violence has to rely to some degree on notions of "universal human rights", although these are as much a matter of faith to this age as the divine prohibitions on illicit carnal knowledge were to the age of empire. But even more important than this, there has to be a collaborative and equal labour between activists of both north and south. Since both our past colonialism and our present globalisation are inextricably bound up together, so the work of emancipation can only be achieved jointly.
· Jeremy Seabrook is working on a book about cross-cultural dialogue between Indian and western gay men.
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