A hidden shelter in a working-class area of Kampala, Uganda’s capital, provides shelter for the most vulnerable members of the LGBT community. It is a reception house with several dormitories as rooms. Most of the 13 residents, like Jeremiah, were kicked out by their families because of their sexual orientation or identity.
“I had problems outside when my family learned of my homosexuality. So I preferred to leave to go to a safer place”, confides the young man.
“For my family, it was an abomination.”
Jeremiah, resident at the Kampala shelterat franceinfo
“And the first time I came here, I found a new family, he continues. There were transgender men and women, I had never been surrounded by this community before, and that’s good, because we are under the same flag.”
In Uganda, members of the LGBT community, in addition to being often rejected by their relatives, also face some of the harshest laws in the world against homosexuals. In 2014, Parliament even passed an amendment condemning acts between people of the same sex to the death penalty, the year of the organization of the first Gay Pride in the country. If this amendment had finally been suspended by the Constitutional Court, homosexual relations are still prohibited in the penal code, and punishable by a prison sentence of up to life.
And these homes that welcome members of the LGBT community are also sometimes targeted by the police. The shelter where Jeremiah is hiding was the target of a police raid in March 2020. 23 residents had been arrested, filmed by local media, and presented on television and in the press as homosexuals. Achoka was one of them. He remained in detention for a month and a half. “When I was in prison, my family found out I was gay and kicked me out of the house.he says. I was working with my brother, so now I have nothing, and I’ve lost hope.”
“I always stay indoors, I’m always scared, and that’s why I don’t feel safe, even around other LGBT people.”
Achoka, jailed for 45 days for homosexualityat franceinfo
Ashoka has little hope that LGBT rights will improve rapidly in Uganda. Since these arrests, the shelter has moved, and the residents avoid showing themselves in their new neighborhood, in order to try as best as possible to keep the existence of this shelter secret.