Richard AmmonKampala city is home to about a million and a half people most of whom are manual laborers tending to the huge food markets, driving worn buses, cementing new structures together or demolishing old ones with sledge hammers. It is a workers’ city that hardly sleeps; it is ambitious in commerce, eager in education, aggressive in HIV prevention, connected by cell phones–and yet much of the population is poor and lives in dilapidated quarters. The city’s middle class is growing slowly; SUVs are status symbols and fine houses are built behind tall walls with electric fences.
And the government of president Yoweri Museveni has held power since 1986 and has questionably improved Ugandan life for some, certainly for those on the inner circles of power–but not for LGBT citizens.
