As a newly minted doctor, I moved to France where I worked in a major hospital.
I worked with another first year resident as well as another more senior one who was doing her subspecialty training. In addition there was a more senior fellow who had completed her training in Paris at some of the best University hospitals in France. My consultant, a professor, did his rounds twice a week.
I and the other first year resident, covered one half of the ward while the other more senior oncology trainee covered the other half. We would be done by lunch time and would all go for lunch together. The fellow would come around to check and we would present to her. I and the other guy soon divided our patients into two and each one of us saw half. He soon realised that we were both at the same level and that he did not have to supervise me.
While the rest of my team were very friendly, the fellow was hostile. She would not listen to my presentations and would instead go back and see all of my patients herself. I had to seek clarification from the consultant and head of department who had to clarify that he expected me to be involved in patient care at the level appropriate for my training.
A few weeks into my time there, French doctors went onto a national strike so all my colleagues did not turn up to work. They were too busy marching in protest including some girls naked with only a stethoscope … but I digress! Until the strike was resolved, it was left to the senior staff to do the rounds. This meant that the fellow was required to do the rounds on the ward.
For reasons of my own I do not do strikes. I am happy for other people to represent me and that has always been my practice on the 3 continents I have worked on. So, I turned up to work to the surprise of the fellow.
On day one, she did the round on one half of the ward while I did the other. At lunch time, we went for lunch and came back to the ward. She ignored my ward round and refused to listen to my presentation and insisted on repeating the ward round on my side as well as seeing all of the new admissions that afternoon. I let her break herself.
On day two, I did the same thing. In the afternoon, I asked her whether she wanted to go over the patients I had seen that morning whom she hadn’t seen. She said it was not necessary. I saw the new patients and presented to her. For the rest of the two weeks of the strike, I became a full member of the team.
At the end she brought up the subject and stated how surprised she was at my skills. I asked her why she was surprised. She stated that she did not believe that a doctor trained in Africa could be as good as one trained in France. I asked her why she thought so. Her response was that doctors trained in France had access to ‘more advanced teaching and technology’!
I asked her if she had ever worked with an African doctor and she said one, a Tunisian. Her opinion? He was actually very good! I pointed out to her that her whole opinion of African doctors was based on zero experience with working with African doctors and negated her only contact with one who she admitted was excellent. I also pointed out that at an undergraduate level even in France, there really was little difference in the technology as technology in the practice of medicine is really more at a graduate and postgraduate level.
I have since travelled to and lived in other places and found that prejudice is most times not evidence of racism. It is common for people to refer to racism as a cause for discrimination but really ignorance, a lack of exposure, a lack of travel and even a low intelligence are more prevalent causes. I found that in some places, some people had never ever had experience of a black person in what they perceived to be a position of authority and in another small minority had actually had lifelong experiences where they were in a position where they in the words of one retired country policeman, had the power of “life and death” over the lives of any person of colour in their jurisdiction!
I have found that ex-colonials from South Africa, Zimbabwe which they insist on calling Rhodesia and Anglo Indians particularly struggled with the concept!
In many countries most people do not own a passport and have never ever travelled outside their country, let alone their state. The French can travel to the Caribbean on holiday in the sun without needing a visa to islands they insist are French and so do the Dutch. The French also travel to the Indian Ocean islands on holiday and are still in France and do not have to learn another language! The British can steal oil from Argentina in the Falklands and still claim it as English and be British in the middle of a Latino continent … and they do not have to even speak Spanish or Portuguese!! They have never had anything to do with ‘furriners’ except on their own terms. Their countries were either apartheid states like South Africa, Rhodesia or Israel or they had discriminatory local or immigration laws until relatively recently like the “White Australia Law” in Australia that was only repealed in 1978.
In many of these ex colonial states, they still deal with the rest of the world on their own terms, other people speak their language giving them the false sense that the whole world thinks like them and that their culture and values are universal and in their eyes and opinion reinforced by regular soundbytes of dark skinned people trying to sneak into their countries on boats running away from poverty in their own countries. Their politicians whip up public frenzy and ride to power on anti-immigration policies. Governments from as far away as Australasia to virtually the whole of western Europe have all ridden to power on an anti-immigration frenzy (read no darkies in my backyard), for they never point out the fact that most illegal immigrants and people who overstay their visas are actually white people from western nations and illegals who come on boats are only a small minority who are usually too busy hiding from authorities to rot the system!
The bit that is missed out of the narrative is why they run away …. from countries where most of the time some sort of dictator or thieving elite is in bed with the self-righteous donors who own corporations, busy sponsoring war while stealing all of the countries’ resources and rock bottom prices while making billions which they transfer to their “rich” countries that have no resources of their own!
This brings me to the whole point of this long story … “homophobia” and Ugandan’s recent anti-homosexual laws!
Uganda has once again made the headlines. The country, its leaders and people have been labeled ‘homophobic’ whatever that means. Ignorant westerners, some gay activists but many just racist, ignorant or xenophobic people have come out with other even more colourful insults directed at Ugandans. The World Bank, and even the POTUS have all come out to be seen to be saying something about Uganda, never mind most of these people do not have a clue where Uganda is and do not really care! But it is a bashing party against some dark skinned ‘furiners’ from somewhere in deep dark Africa! so its Ok.
Many other people do miss the point however. Just like most white people in western countries who discriminate against or are prejudiced against black people aren’t really racist but just ignorant, unexposed, people who have never travelled anywhere and do not even possess a passport, many Ugandans have got zero experience of homosexuality or gay people apart from what they have had over the last few years of this debate.
Most Ugandans wouldn’t be able to recognise a gay person, if he fell in their lap! Most have never ever had a personal experience of dealing with a gay person and neither have they got a clue as to what goes where. Its part of the reason why they are so fixated on sodomy and the mechanics of sex between same sex couples as most cannot even imagine anything other than penile-vaginal sex in the missionary position.
Thats not to say that Ugandans do not have sex. Going by their having one of the highest fertility rates on the continent, Ugandans actually do have a lot of sex. In addition they are not inhibited by things like monogamy even when they are mostly nominally Christian and most marry in church or will consider themselves unmarried even when they complete all traditional marriage rituals but fail to make it to the pulpit! Ugandans even have their own variants on the sex act like ‘western jazz’ that are probably superior to many western sexual practices from a woman centric perspective.
I would be very surprised if my parents can get their heads around what homosexuals do with themselves nor if they know of any homosexuals. I grew up in Uganda and do not have any personal knowledge of a gay Ugandan except those I have come to know, well, online. I attended a boys only boarding school where a majority came from a feeder boys only primary school run by christian brothers. The catholic church has been in the news for the last few years with stories of priests and brothers molesting young boys. I do not know any such story …. but I do know many involving adult women and even did all of my high school with a love child! There was only one unconfirmed rumour in my high school about gay experimentation and both of those guys have since got married and are not to my knowledge gay. Yet I am better travelled than the average Ugandan and indeed outside Uganda I know and have worked with many gay people.
This is not the same as saying that there are no gay Ugandans. As a matter of fact, that hen has already flown the coop! They are out, they are in your face and like having a gay child, that genie is never going to go back into the bottle! My parents do not have to deal with it as its kind of too late for them unless one of their children or grandchildren comes out of the closet! They are not homophobic … just has never really been relevant to them as in their lifetime if homosexuals really did exist, they were invisible. As a matter of fact, I only really ever heard the word bisiyaga as a luganda word in the last decade and had never ever heard of it before. Of course there will be those who will claim it has always been a part of the culture and claim Kabaka Mwanga was gay and the Uganda martyrs only crime was denying him booty … but the point is that if it ever was true that homosexuality was prevalent, it for whatever reason went underground and disappeared for virtually a century until now.
In understanding my parents, I actually understand Museveni’s problem for they are in the same age group. Need I point out that Museveni would not have had to deal with this issue if he had retired to his farm a decade ago…. but that’s his funeral not mine! He as a politician has got to deal with it … and he made the wrong decision which is of course going to bite him in the bottom. It’s no less moral than the political calculations of European politicians who tell lies about foreign mainly third world ‘illegal’ immigrants just to win an election! He too is capitalising on fear and ignorance of the unknown!
Fear, prejudice and ignorance are well known accelerants that fuel hate. They have been used since time immemorial to fuel all sorts of hate manifesting as racism, bigotry, gender discrimination and homophobia.
To be penetrated and to be a penetrator are at the centre of the core differences between men and women. So women are conned, seduced, ‘lied to’ with the ultimate aim of inducing them to ‘surrender’ ‘give in’ ‘be conquered’, ‘be taken’, ‘be deflowered’, ‘be shafted’, ‘to bend over’, ‘to be taken advantage of’, ‘to be done’ all adjectives used to describe a power relationship between a penetrator and the submissive female being penetrated! These are power words used to denote the superiority of one gender and the submissiveness of the other. To be ‘effed’ is an adjective that has made its way into colloquial speech to denote a man or woman being disadvantaged in some way!
In a macho society, to sodomise a man is to render him a powerless and use him as you would use a woman! I will not dissect this statement as to what it says about gender Narratives from the war in northern Uganda suggest that male sodomy may have been used to humiliate men in the ultimate macho society … a society that had been over represented in colonial and post-colonial armies in Uganda. There is little evidence that this would have represented evidence of homosexuality in Uganda but seems to have been some sort of sadistic psychological torture aimed at humiliating a community or individual men who were perceived to have committed atrocities in other parts of the country too.
In order to whip a frenzy of hate among a now fearful public, words like ‘bum shafting’, ‘bum terrorism’, ‘bum tearing’, ‘fistulae, male rape, and pedophilia have been used by the media as well as pastors pushing this agenda. People who didn’t think that what an invisible minority did in the privacy of their own bedrooms affected them now rightly think that it’s their problem as they have been told that there is an epidemic of male rapists out there raping their male children and depriving them of their manhood while tearing their behinds and leaving their entrails hanging! But one really needs to wonder, where are these people with torn bums and fistulae? Are there any figures or are we using anecdotes even if real to whip people into a frenzy? These invisible bum shafters going around raping and destroying young people’s lives, where are their victims? How many are in hospital? Are they more than the tens of thousands of children and women who get raped regularly? Why do we need a new law when the “crime” if we could agree that it’s a crime is already covered in the penal code?
I have come to the conclusion that these torn bums are as mythical as those thousands of invisible miracles that Kampala pastors perform every day! I have never ever come across anyone with a real physical deformity like severe polio who has ever been healed by these pastors yet they have apparently been doing it for the last 30 years or so! Miracle healing is a gross industry in Kampala grossing billions in untaxed income delivering unquantifiable and immeasurable results like making the lame walk or curing HIV without verifiable medical proof of cure! I would love to see a report that is short on rhetoric and anecdote and ‘heavy’ with data and numbers! That the myth is being peddled by the same people says a lot. I cannot find a single study with figures from Uganda on the magnitude of this ‘epidemic’ yet it is driving public debate and even spawned its own bill never mind it’s a duplication of existing laws in the penal code. Even more telling is the silence on the tens of thousands of women and children raped by heterosexuals who go unpunished every year. To add insult to injury a misogynist law regulating what women wear has just been passed and sponsored by the same priest who sponsored the AHA under his portfolio. He went on to suggest that it is ok to rape a female child as that was against the order of nature but sodomy among consenting adults of sound mind was illegal and punishable by a jail term! This was soon after another minister in the same government suggested that the police should first investigate what women were wearing before entertaining their reports of having been raped!
Another statement peddled in support of the bill is the claim of recruitment by foreign NGO’s in schools. I would suspect that there is a reason for this which is not as nefarious as that claimed. The government of Uganda has for long abdicated its responsibility to provide social services including healthcare services and education. NGO’s both local and foreign have taken over this space. Many western NGO’s do not follow the same rules they would be obliged to follow if they were operating in their own countries. In many western countries, parents would be up in arms if somebody walked into their children’s school and gave their children sexual education they knew nothing at all about. This is exacerbated by the fact that some foreign NGO’s seem to think that they are perfectly within their rights to walk into a school and teach children about anything they wish to. It may be true that in many western states now parents have little control over what kind of sexual education and concepts their children are taught in school but these are state sanctioned and sponsored programs. In Uganda it’s not the same thing. Some NGO will design its own program including whatever concepts it wishes to teach or feels should be taught to kids and walk into a school and act surprised when parents object. i suspect that this is what really happened and spawned the myth of recruitment! I would object to some NGO walking into my child’s school and exposing them to sexual education under whatever guise including public health that I knew nothing about and do not believe that NGO’s local or foreign have got that right even if they may believe that it’s important that Ugandan kids be taught about homosexuality!
Apart from inciting the public to discriminate against others they perceive to be gay with or without evidence (the bill seeks to turn the whole populace into voyeurs), this bill is going to turn people into murderers and rapists all fueled by self-righteous anger directed at the people they are now afraid of and see as pedophiles living in their midst!
The good news is that the bill was illegal in the first place unless the speaker is willing to fudge the figures to claim there was quorum when it was passed. it is comical that the president signed a bill he previously said was passed without quorum! If it stands, it’s not likely to survive a challenge in court. And if it does get past that hurdle, one can trust the NRM’s capacity for embarrassing climb downs in the face of impulsive self-destructive decisions made on the spur of the moment, … to do a bum shuffle!
As for those foreigners hyperventilating this bill and using it to fuel their own ignorant prejudice and sometimes going by some comments racism, some understanding of the context of this bill and the society they are dealing with would be a good thing. Homophobia is not quite the right word to describe Ugandans attitude towards gay people!
Both this Anti Homosexuality Bill as well as the Mini skirt Bill has potential to result in unintended consequences and should be repealed before someone gets killed, assaulted or raped! And if any of this happens, God forbid, may their blood be upon Fr. Lokodo, Minister Kibuule and this government!
I came to the conclusion that my French colleague’s attitude towards African doctors was fueled by fear, ignorance and a lack of exposure to African doctors rather than racism … an observation I have made numerous times since!
Ugandans are not going to learn to tolerate gay people overnight as most have only just been introduced to the concept. This should not be fueled by homophobic laws but neither will beat them into the 21st century work. As a matter of fact it will only be counterproductive and feed into the idea that this is a foreign sponsored invasion of their culture!
Ugandans should be cut some slack.
“[katogoaward]”