Into the frying pan

I had to get a 3am flight to Nairobi for an upcoming week in Uganda, which should be a very useful exchange with several colleagues working on transboundary landscapes. WWF has one such landscape in the Greater Virunga region between Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, hence the venue.

A 3am flight time is brutal as it involves leaving home at around midnight with no sleep. The woman on the plane next to me, subject to my snores, grunts and head lolling, noted ‘you seem very tired.’ It was an accurate observation.

Uganda’s immigration department has the tagline ‘facilitating legal and orderly immigration’. It sounds like a slogan the UK Home Office would use, if it was strengthened with more dog whistle rhetoric. In Entebbe arrivals hall there was a power outage which shut down the system, so nothing was particularly orderly. When the electricity returned, the camera for snapping visa images over-compensated by blinding all the travellers like a floodlight.

It’s an unsettling time to be visiting Uganda. I have only been once before in 2010, around the time the government started making a song and dance about homosexuality. My very rare visits seem to time well with persecution of LGBTQ folks as there has been another recent uptick in hostile rhetoric. Uganda's parliament has passed a law making it a crime to even identify as LGBTQ, punishable by death or life in prison. One may call it an outlandish overreaction if one was feeling sarcastic, or the most intolerant bigoted move in many a long while, if one was being honest.

The horror of being a Ugandan struggling with sexuality. The internalised homophobia and trauma don’t bear thinking about. Congratulations to the lawmakers of Uganda for messing with the mental health of countless thousands.

In Tanzania I’ve talked to some lads who are scared of the regional ramifications of other governments following suit. In Tanzania I don’t think it’s likely now with the outward-looking President who is not keen to alienate international links, compared to the authoritarian former President who died in 2021.

We gathered with colleagues at a hotel on Lake Victoria, from where we departed in a bus to the west of Uganda, arriving in the early evening. My Lake Victoria picture won’t win any photography prizes but it was good to perch on the shore of this vast inland sea, checking out the birdlife.