Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera, the lesbian activist who risks her life in Uganda

Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera. Luis Grañena

Ugandan feminist, LGTBI activist and a proud lesbian.

This is the exact formula that Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera (Uganda, 1980) uses when she has to introduce herself, but they are much more than words.

In dozens of countries around the world, this expression does not have major consequences;

in his, she can take him to jail or to the grave.

If being homosexual in Africa is usually an ordeal of stigma, concealment and violence, in Uganda it is a real risk to life itself.

Many of the comrades with whom he started his gay rights movement two decades ago have been murdered, beaten to death, or have fled the country.

She is a survivor.

And she knows it.

As a child, in her native Kampala, she wrote love letters to other girls.

Romantic, passionate.

She was expelled from several schools because of her sexual orientation, but it was not until she arrived at the University that fear, humiliation and violence broke into her life.

She was forced to sign a paper in which she promised to dress "appropriately" for a woman and was prohibited from wearing baseball caps and coming within 100 meters of the female dormitories.

Suddenly, she had become a threat.

About to be expelled again, her mother intervened.

“She is sick and she has no cure.

Let him finish his studies."

She was a ploy.

Her parents, an economist and computer scientist, always supported her.

As in 38 other African countries, homosexuality carries jail terms in Uganda.

At just 19 years old, Nabagesera understood that his life was going to be a fight.

In 2003, together with a small group of activists, she founded the FARUG association, the first to defend the rights of the LGTBI collective in her country.

Since then he has not moved an inch from the idea that has always inspired him: "Loving cannot be a crime."

The publication of his name and his photo in a newspaper along with dozens of gays under the headline "Let's hang them!", the hammer murder of his partner David Kato in 2011 or the approval of a law in 2014 to include life imprisonment among the punishments for homosexuals were harsh blows.

Several times they attacked her or tried to rape her.

But she kept going.

She lives in an isolated place with the utmost discretion and her car has tinted windows so as not to be recognized.

She always moves with a bodyguard friend and for years it was impossible for her to find work.

Still, she opened Uganda's first gay bar and launched the

(“kuchu” is the Swahili word for homosexuals) and

, LGTBI-themed.

She is now in Boston, United States, where she is undergoing medical treatment, but his life is in Kampala.

She was once asked if she was willing to leave: “It is a great sacrifice, but there is no other place that I really want to live and call my home other than Uganda, (…) if I left, I would be abandoning the LGTBI community.

If they know you're close, it gives them some security… It's a kind of solidarity”.

His appearance is a trompe l'oeil.

Slim, petite, fragile, she radiates a kind of deep shyness.

Until she takes the floor.

It is there where the Ugandan activist lets out the torrent that she carries inside, the deep conviction of a path adorned with awards and international recognition in Europe and the United States, but, deep down, always accompanied by the fear of a new humiliation, of a

rape

(lesbians raped by several men to make them recover their heterosexuality), to be killed or disappear one night.

Because homophobia is still rampant in her country.

Last March, the Ugandan Parliament passed a new anti-gay law, yet another, which is actually a twist on existing legislation.

Not only is the punishment tougher, reaching in some cases the death penalty, but the "promotion of homosexuality" is classified as a crime.

In other words, you can spend 20 years in prison just for saying publicly that you are gay, or your whole life if you defend this group.

“This law is much worse than everything before, just for talking about it you can go to jail.

In fact, parents are forced to report if their children are gay, just like neighbors or teachers," says Nabagesera from Boston, "the entire community is terrified."

After major international pressure led by the US and human rights organizations, the Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni,

this week returned the law to Parliament to introduce some changes, but agrees with the substance of the matter.

"What is clear is that our society does not accept homosexual behavior and actions," he said.

The activist points to religious extremisms coming from abroad as those responsible for the wave of homophobia that is sweeping through Africa.

“There are Western evangelical churches that land in Uganda to explain to our leaders how to protect family values.

Our country is the spearhead, but it is happening all over the continent”.

Despite all the violence and fear, Nabagesera does not lose hope.

"We have grown and are strong as a community, today our voice is heard around the world."

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