Arianna received the call when she was out shopping. Her neighbour had seen a TikTok video falsely alleging that Arianna, a transgender woman, was forcing young men to take hormones and demanded an explanation.
She came home a few hours later to find an angry mob gathered outside her front door. “When they saw me, they started grabbing me and shouting that I needed to die,” said Arianna. “The only thing I remember next was waking up in hospital.”
Arianna still has bruises on her legs and body from the attack in October. She was beaten so badly she spent two weeks in a coma. Now she is staying at a safehouse with 20 other transgender people on the outskirts of Kampala, Uganda’s capital.
It is a cramped space with mattresses spread out over the bedroom floors and tattered pictures of happier times decorating the walls. The residents avoid the garden and talk in hushed voices to not arouse the suspicion of their neighbours, whose homes overlook the safehouse compound.
“We have no freedom,” said Arianna. “I can’t go to the market, I can’t work, because if I go out, I will be a target.”
The LGBTQ+ community has long faced abuse and attacks in Uganda, a deeply religious country with a history of passing homophobic legislation. But LGBTQ+ people and activists say the level of harassment has soared since the country’s president, Yoweri Museveni, signed a new draconian anti-gay bill in May.
The US State Department has described the bill, which received strong backing from church groups, as “one of the most extreme anti-LGBTQ+ laws in the world”. In addition to imposing the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality”, the legalisation includes a provision for life imprisonment and requires citizens to inform the police if they suspect someone “intends to commit the offence of homosexuality”.
Not only has the law emboldened homophobic vigilantes, who feel free to attack LGBTQ+ people with impunity, it also means members of the LGBTQ+ community with HIV and other conditions no longer access healthcare because doctors are too scared to treat them, said Ruthra, a transgender man who runs the shelter.
“We are being beaten, we are being chased out of our houses.” Pointing to the rainbow bracelet on his wrist, Ruthra said: “If they see even this, the police will arrest you.”
The Human Rights Awareness and Promotion Forum (HRAPF), a civil society group, says landlords have evicted hundreds of LGBTQ+ tenants since the bill was signed. HRAPF has also recorded over 140 attacks and threats against LGBTQ+ people over the same period.
“LGBT persons have never been at peace in Uganda, but the act has given the green light for attacks by homophobic people,” said Saida Nakilima, a lawyer with HRAPF.
The latest came last Wednesday when a young, openly gay activist named Steven Kabuye was attacked with a knife by motorbike-riding assailants. Before he was rushed to the hospital, Kabuye recorded a video of himself lying on the street, his forearm slashed wide open and the blade still lodged in his abdomen.
The bill has drawn sharp international condemnation. The US has imposed visa restrictions on Ugandan officials and the World Bank stopped all finance to the country. But it has found support elsewhere in Africa, where several countries are weighing up similar pieces of anti-gay legislation. There was a spike in violent rhetoric, police harassment and attacks targeting LGBTQ+ people across the continent in 2023, which activists say Uganda’s bill helped to fuel.
Last month, Burundi’s president, Évariste Ndayishimiye, said gay people should be rounded up and stoned in sports stadiums. Ghana’s parliament is debating a bill that carries 10-year jail terms for LGBTQ+ rights activists. In Kenya, the president, William Ruto, is embroiled in a row with his supreme court over a ruling allowing activists to legally register LGBTQ+ groups.
Last year, police arrested activists in Zambia for promoting LGBTQ+ rights, while gay men in Ethiopia faced violent attacks amid a torrent of abusive videos on TikTok calling for homosexuals to be stripped naked, publicly whipped and burned.
African political and religious leaders have repeatedly branded homosexuality a western import that does not align with their traditional values. Yet activists allege that American evangelical Christian groups are playing a prominent role in fanning anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment on the continent, where many countries still have colonial-era laws against sodomy.
In 2020 an investigation by the media outlet OpenDemocracy found that US Christian organisations spent at least $54m influencing laws against LGBTQ+ rights, access to contraceptives and sex education across Africa over 13 years.
In Uganda, several religious American groups have set up and provided funding to local Christian organisations “to carry their message” against LGBTQ+ rights, said Nicholas Opiyo of Chapter Four, a Ugandan civil rights group. Family Watch International, an Arizona-based organisation, has faced accusations it has helped influence and even draft Uganda’s bill, as well as homophobic legislation in Kenya, which it denies. The organisation’s founder, Sharon Slater, is thought to be close to Uganda’s President Museveni.
Another American Christian group, the World Congress of Families, allegedly contributed to Ghana’s homophobic bill, but has denied having an input.
“It’s part of their culture war,” said Opiyo. “They’re losing the debate in the US and they are looking for fertile ground where they can reignite this debate. Uganda is the perfect place because the evangelical movement is very strong here.”
Chapter Four and HRAPF launched a legal challenge against Uganda’s anti-gay law last month. In 2014, the country’s courts overturned a previous piece of homophobic legislation on procedural grounds. This time the lawyers are arguing the law violates constitutional rights to equality, dignity and privacy.
A ruling is expected soon. Even if the law is overturned, conditions for LGBTQ+ people are unlikely to improve, said Opiyo. “The damage has been done. People have been militarised against the LGBTQ+ community. There is complete social terror. So whether the law is upheld or nullified by the courts, that will do very little to change the now deeply-rooted exclusion of LGBTQ+ individuals in Uganda.”
At the safehouse in Kampala, the residents shared stories of relationships breaking under the strain of living under the bill and of endless police harassment. “The police officers treat you like a bank – they know they can take money from you and you can do nothing,” said one.
Vinka, a transgender woman, described how she was beaten by her neighbours in July after they had seen a video on social media “outing” her. She fled to another safe house in August, leaving behind her belongings.
But a mob of about 20 people discovered the safe house in September and turned up with ropes and cans of petrol. They burned the place down and marched the residents to a police station. Vinka subsequently spent a month in jail, where she was gang-raped several times by other inmates. It was her seventh stint in prison.
She fears another raid. She is scared to go outside but sometimes ventures out to do sex work, the only way she can pay for the hormones she needs to transition, a process she is undertaking with no medical guidance.
At 23 years old, her dream is to finish school and then study psychology at university. Instead, she is trapped inside, dogged by suicidal thoughts. “We are treated like we are nothing,” Vinka said. “But I am human. I have blood.”
