CLGS

Resource Author: Kenneth Hamilton

Kenneth Hamilton
Presented to the American Academy of Religion,
"Gay Men's Issues," Toronto, Canada

ABSTRACT

The story of the 1886 martyrdom of Charles Lwanga and his companions takes me to the intersection of diaspora studies, queer theory, critical race theory, performance studies, and radical Catholic historiography. It is the founding missionary narrative of Christianity in Uganda, East Africa which equates that founding with the uprooting of same sex practice on the "Dark Continent."

It raises suspicions around the demonization of "darkness", which includes "Africa", African male same sex, African traditional religions and Islam, African masculinity, and the feminized African land. Moreover, the sublimation of this narrative into Roman Catholic canonization further defines same sex desire as that which is not Christian and not Ugandan.

Given the implications of the story of the martyrs and their martyrdom, one wonders how it, for instance, might affect public attitudes and public policies even now. I am thinking, as an instance, of how AIDS is viewed, located, and treated in Uganda!

PART I: THE STORY

Invocation:

Yes, we honor you, our sisters and brothers.
Yes, we remember and recognize you have gone before us.
Without you, we would not exist here today.
Through us, you live on from generation to generation, from everlasting to everlasting.
And so we commit ourselves to a spirit of resistance and life.
We raise our light, our lives, our hope, our love, and we say boldly
and without fear, "Never again!" [Equal Rites, 27]

A. Reading the story

What follows is the beginning of the passion of the Uganda martyrs. We join the story as the young pages, assembled outside the kabaka-king's ivory court, are about to process into African Christanities' most celebrated martyr-passion narrative. The year is 1886, four years before the British annexation of Uganda. The leader, a certain Charles Lwanga, "in a firm voice," turns to the other pages and says:

"Let us go in." Followed by the pages, Lwanga went through the gateway to the ivory court, the one adjoining the Kabaka's private courtyard. Their passage, through this court was accompanied by taunts and cries of derision from the hundred or so executioners already gathered there. When the last of the pages had greeted him, Mwanga asked, "Are they all here?" Being assured that none was missing, he ordered the gates to be closed and then, pointing towards the reed fence to his left, said, "Now, let everyone who follows the religion of the white men go over there...Those who are not Christian must remain near me.

At once, Charles Lwanga stood up, saying as he did so, "That of which a man is fully conscious he cannot disavow." . . .Then, taking Kizito by the hand, and closely followed by the other Christian pages, he walked calmly to the spot indicated by the Kabaka [Faupel, 150].

Then began the long march to the hill of execution--Namugongo hill. The rest of the story reads as a classic passion, with all the characters and scenes: the final courtyard confrontation with a demonized king, the refusal to submit, torment and torture, visions of Christ, pious affirmations, last words, encounters with special people along the way, stripping of clothes, final exhortations and calling out to God, and the execution. And then there are the stories of the witnesses afterwards.

The following final scene of the martyrdom is as read in The African Holocaust: The Story of the Uganda Martyrs by Fr. John S. Faupel—a Josephite priest. Written in 1962, it is a revision of the 1941 book by Mill Hill Father John Thoonen, simply entitled Black Martyrs. And it is based largely in the research of White Father Rene LeFebre, whose monograph [Monagraphies sur les bienheureux martyrs de Ouganda] could not be published due to the invasion of Holland.

The final scene unfolds thusly:

On the morning of Ascension Thursday, 3 June 1886, the executioners, their faces smeared with red-ochre and streaked with soot, swooped upon the huts in which their victims were confined. On their heads were fantastic wigs, fashioned from the tails of small animals and bird's feathers and, to complete their attire, they wore the skins of leopards or other animals around their waists, strings of amulets round their necks and bangles of bells on their ankles.

Later on the hill (paraphrasing Faupel) it is said an "astonishing scene was enacted, unique in the history of the Namugongo execution site," because the scene resembled "for all the world a Sunday school outing," with people applauding the youth as they came forth! And then the final words poignantly spoken by the prime witness, Dennis Kamyuka (who himself only survived the fire at the last minute):

We were stretched on the reeds held together with fibre thongs, our hands tied firmly behind our backs, and our legs strapped together...[and] we were rolled in [the reeds] so as to make movement impossible...Then lifting the human faggots they had prepared, they laid them on the pyre [Faupel, 191, 194-5].

The modern story of the martyrdom of the royal pages, Charles Lwanga and his Companions is a story of heroic faith. But it is much more. It is also a story about the uprooting of same sex practice on the "Dark Continent." This paper is only meant to present some preliminary information and ideas about what this means to Africa now.

The incident itself occurred shortly after Christianity was reintroduced into Buganda—later Uganda—during the reigns of kings [or Kabakas] Mtesa and his son Mwanga. In his book The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-male Sexual Behavior Outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination, 1750-1918, Rudi Bleys revisits the scene of the crime thusly:

Alarmed by the well known images [of sodomy] of the Dahomey of West-Africa, British missionaries…felt compelled to (also) sanction Mwanga, the leader of the Baganda (Ganda, Uganda) from 1884-1897. He maintained a "harem" full of pageboys and resisted Christianization as it became clear that anal intercourse had to be renounced. As gradually more and more boys, who had converted to either Protestantism or Catholicism, refused sexual services to Mwanga and his entourage, a conflict arose. When his favourite pageboy Mwafu resisted as well, Mwanga went into paroxysm of rage and several boys were killed. It is said that about one hundred boys, later turned into the Martyrs of Buganda, had died [172].

And so, the establishment of Christianity—particularly Roman Catholic and Anglican Christianity—in Uganda directly coincides with a narrative about transgressive same sex desire. This makes for a provocative beginning for Christian discourse in Eastern Africa; and the subsequent canonization of the martyrs inscribes dark, dangerous desire into the very skin of Christian Uganda. The canonization, indeed, is a preached message; the narrative of the "martyrdom" now becomes part of a canon of new narratives: the ones about sodomy, race, desire and conquest.

B. A compelling tale:

What drew me to this story? Well, first of all, this story, though canonized, is also an erased story, an untold story, not really a full narrative at all....more like a fragment. It is a story denied, a "subtext" that can be a whispered story. Yet, whispered or not, it spoke loudly to me! I identify myself as an Afri-guided, postcolonial, queer, ordained, Catholic missioner. I am a member of a missionary society that now counts Africans and other men and women of color as its significant majority. And I belong to a team of two other Afrimerican confreres who are wishing to "recover" from the oppressions of Afri-phobia, binary opposition, hetero-patriarchy, AIDS-phobia and, most of all, Catholic erotophobia. That's a lot of recovery! But I had to mention them all because at this interstice lies the heart of our own "dark" oppression.

The story of the Uganda martyrs is a story about "othering." Both literally and figuratively, it is about the "dark side" of missionary encounter: a story about "sodomy" among black African men. Once canonized, the story then demolishes old identities, constructs new ones, and then obscures the double entendres of desire with spiritual overtalk.

Moreover, the official narrative raises real historical questions and suspicions as to if and how the depiction of sodomy, particularly the depiction of the "debauched" king {Kabaka Mwanga}, aligned itself with both British colonial and Christian missionary intent. If these suspicions are grounded, then the spread of the gospel of Christ comes under the shadow of colonialist espionage. As Rudi Bleys, Kobena Mercer and others have said, there is an intimate connection between the rise of three ideologies: imperialist, racist, and homophobic. But we know that, don't we? Was not, after all, the Christian need to "uproot" sodomy—by whatever means necessary--an important aspect behind the telling and retelling—indeed the selling—of the story? When you speak some parts out loud, allow other parts to be whispered, does that not come down to, in effect, a kind of shadow doctrine, and even a bit of hagiographical silencing?

I am interested in such a story, or a matrix of a story here, where, in the words of Ibrahim Farajaje, diaspora studies, queer theory, critical race theory, performance studies, come together with a radical Catholic historiography. For I want to try to understand the martyrdom and canonization of the boys and men of Uganda as a black, gay Catholic Christian. What are the implications for black lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgendered, intersexed, questioning Roman Catholics (those from south-central Africa and those around the African diaspora) of a story about--what pope Paul VI called--an "infamous crime?"

It shows us by sufficiently manifest reasons that new people need a moral foundation, to see to affirm new spiritual habits to transmit to the posterity; this crime expresses almost symbolically and promotes the passage of a simple and rough way of life, - where did not miss remarkable human values but which was soiled and weakened and as slave of itself - towards a more civilized life in which prevail of higher expressions of the human spirit and of better social living conditions ". (AAS 56 [ 1964 ], 906)

In this remarkable quote the pope makes all the connections: between what is moral and immoral, what is civilized and what is "rough," what is best for African posterity and what is not, what is clean and what is "soiled," what is strong and what is "weakened and as slave of itself." And it all, amazingly, revolves around sodomy.

My concern is not so much to deconstruct yet another hijacking of the gospel of Jesus. It is to help expose the "othering" of "darkness," perversion, and "heathenism" still being used to oppress and displace black bodies and exploit "dark" geographies. Uppermost in my mind now is the alarming rise of homophobic speech from African leaders such as Zimbawean president, Robert Mugabe. This demagoguery continues to use homosexuality to distract attention from governmental corruption and its inadequate response to the growing AIDS pandemic.

Excurses; "Colonial Desire"

Robert Young, in his study, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race, "indicates the extent to which colonialist discourse was pervaded by sexuality"; and he believes that "the idea of colonization itself is grounded in a sexualized discourse of rape, penetration, and impregnation [Ashcroft, 40-1]."
Like so may before him, his research forces him to conclude that "sexuality is the direct and congruent legacy of the commercial discourse of the early colonial encounters, the traffic of commerce and the traffic of sexuality being complementary and intertwined [Ibid]." That is, he speaks of colonial desire as sexuality bound up with the traffic of commerce and politics:

As in that paradigm of respectability, marriage, economic and sexual exchange were intimately bound up, coupled with each other, from the very first. The history of the meanings of the world "commerce" includes the exchange both of merchandise and of bodies in sexual intercourse [Young, 182].

Charles Rzepka, among others, have discussed the relationship of slavery and sodomy in the commerce of desire. The commerce of desire, which is the essence of capitalism [Rzepka, 36].

"Colonial desire," in Jeffery Kripal's words, is about "excess," the result of a (R)omantic "effeminate luxury [Young, 34; Jordan, 3]," an excess which is present in both capitalism and sodomy. That's perhaps why both are recurring tropes in British "national allegory [Lane, 3]."

I oversimplify, of course, but colonial desire is about money, and vice versa. And when desire is commerce, it plays out on both geopolitical and imaginary scales. As Judith Plotz writes, colonial desire is about "imaginary kingdoms with real boys in them."

The energy, exuberance, oral avidity, solipsistic idealism, and solitary autonomy imputed to children in the Romantic discourse of childhood were all held to predispose the young to the empire's work [Plotz, 131].

Moreover, colonial desire is seen in the scientific gaze of religious "comparatavists," which is a discipline born in the nineteenth century "as a means of ordering the numerous religious worlds that Europe was encountering in her political, economic, and missionary ventures." These, writes Jeffrey Kripal, are the inner worlds of comparative religion, filled with:

Shamanic identifications with totem animals, ecstatic trips to the world of the dead, mystical unions with God, with the cosmos, and with the self, macabre visions of dismembered gods and disemboweled holy men, cross-dressing saints, ascetic practices that seem to alternate between the horrible and the ridiculous [Kripal, 4].

Just look at the long list of famous Europeans--artists, writers, poets, officials, military men, etc--bringing the "dark erotic other" to life [Lane; Kripal, 1-2]! I was struck the other day when I came across William Butler Yeat's poem "The Second Coming [1921]." There is that line, that famous line: "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold." I wanted to talk about the subversive part of this text and revisit Chinua Achebe's work. But I got taken up with the emotion of the poem—as I am sure Achebe did.

Though his imagination pours forth Eurocentric images, the omens that really trouble him [the "troubles in his sight"] come from a land "somewhere in sands of desert" where resides figures like a "lion body and the head of a man." This land of doom is blank and pitiless as the sun. It:

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again.

The mythologies in which his fears most resided were about "blood-dimmed tides," "ceremonies of innocence drowned," and "passionate intensities." Those are lines in the famous poem.

Those words evoked something in me. Maybe it's the fascination-repulsion Yeats had to the spiritual and occult world. I'm not sure what it was, but I felt somewhat like Toni Morrison did when she read about the novelist Marie Cardinal's first encounter with jazz at a Louis Armstrong concert. Cardenal literally "tripped out" over Louis' improvisations. She says her "heart began to accelerate, becoming more important than music...compressing [her] lungs...[Then] [g]ripped by panic at the idea of dying there in the middle of spasms, stomping feet, and the crowd howling, I ran into street like someone possessed." Morrison writes, "I remember smiling when I read that...partly because of what leaped into my mind: [Child,] what on earth was Louie playing that night [Morrison, vii]! "

It is a passionate fright that Cardinal and Yeats feel, perhaps. And the "coming darkness" literally frames the Irish laureate's faith, his world, his apocalyptic anxieties, his pessimistic politics, his sense of time itself.

Likewise, I believe that it is the journey into the "heart of darkness"--Joseph Conrad's novella--that frames the encounter that became the story of the martyr-boys of Uganda. It too is about "the moving thighs," "the dropping darkness," "the monstrous beast," "the drowned innocence," "the passionate intensity," Stanley's "deepest darkest"...colonial desire. One now understands here that Achebe had it right. For the things that the center cannot hold anymore is a superior, isolated and cohesive Victorian identity; and that the things that make it fall apart are all things luminously dark and traditionally African.

Colonial Desire: "Sotadic Zone"

The story of the martyrs is, among other things, an erotic mystical text that can be creatively mis-read through "colonial discourse analysis [Young, 163]." And, according to Jeffrey Kripal, this mis-reading can be used as a "rhetorical portal" into our own consciousnesses about male subjectivity, masculinity, patriarchy, gender," religion [Kripal, 5-6] and, I might add, imperialism.

It can't be a coincidence that the mystic French Catholic Islamacist and textual scholar Louis Massignon was a great advocate of the canonization of the martyrs. His mystical-religious consciousness was framed by the martyrs.

He celebrated daily Mass for them and they were canonized two years after his death. His fixation on the martyrs was connected to his linking of death with homosexuality. In a clear inverse relation of crucifixion and sexual sublimation, Massignon felt that the canonization of the martyrs was the solution to his own sexuality struggles.

Canonize a group of converts who had opted for a literal death over a homosexual act and then use their example as a bulwark against one's own (and some of the church's) innermost proclivities [Kripal, 109].

These and other examples explain how this tale is a journey for many Europeans into a "Sotadic Zone." Though southern Africa doesn't fall into Sir Richard Burton's "43 degrees north of the equator to 30 degrees south [Aldrich, 31]," it is still very much a narrative Sotadic Zone; for it involves a story of "pederasty" and has elements of alleged Arab influence, a "tropical" climate, cultures full of mysteries to the ethnographer or traveller, courts with French priests and their accounts (the second-hand sources of much of Burton's "knowledge"), etc.

C. The familiarity of the story:

How familiar is this story? Is it another Ganymede and Zeus, or another dismemberment of Orpheus simply played out now on African soil? Does it, more appropriately, remind us of the tenth century martyrdom of St. Pelagius? Recounted in Mark Jordan's The Invention of Sodomy, the beautiful Pelagius is brought—like the African pages—before a savage Muslim ruler, tempted by the salacious and "pimping persuasions [Jordan, 13]" before him, and given an ultimatum in which sodomy and Islam seem identical. In the court of the kabaka—himself nominally Muslim—the same sex practice was also offered to the male guests of the king. Tales of the "long-standing idolatry and 'luxury' of the Muslims [Jordan, 19]" are familiar ones. The language is inflamed by the very presence of Muslims. The audacious rebuff of the proto-martyr, Joseph Mukasa, to the kabaka demonstrates this:

O my Master, I beg and implore you, do not act like that, because God detests uncleanliness. Leave my Christians alone, and, rather, leave to the Muslims the vileness with which Satan inspires them [Faupel, 83].

And what of the juxtaposition in the story of a well-established celibate clergy? That the Catholic priesthood is charged with homoeroticism is now a fact disputed only in an environment of total denial. Jordan writes:

Before there was 'homosexuality' in the church, there was 'sodomy'; before 'sodomy,' layers of other terms: 'sin of the Sodomites,' 'irrational copulation,' 'crime against nature,' 'softness,' 'corrupting boys,' 'copulating with men.' Each phrase has been used in Christian moral writing, and all have been used to describe the clergy [Jordan, 113].

And, after all, the oral and literary pornography of sodomy, anti-Semiticism, and Islamophobia is largely the invention of priests! You need but read one lurid sermon of the cardinal-bishop and monk Peter Damian [Jordan, 45f] to get the import of this.

More specific connections remain to be seen in archives of missionary letters and in interviews in Uganda. But, if we understand that "invention" called "sodomy," and also know something of that invention called "race," and if we consider them as functions of a "desiring machine," then we might even assume that the stories of Pelagius and the Ugandan martyrs are still being enacted in ongoing sodomitic Christian discourse.

D. What's new and different about this story?

What's new and different about this story is Africa: Africa at the rise of nineteenth-century European imperialism and African same sex practice being encountered and rethought in the light of racialist discourse. If sodomy is a confusing and layered category [Jordan 9, 20], then it can be re-mapped to fit the particular geography desired. When sodomitic discourse leaves European soil, it must and will change. For it cannot quite take in everything that it sees on African soil. For instance, if sodomy in Europe is a sign of diabolical yet aesthetic sophistication, then the "diabolic" in a story of sodomy in Africa, especially alongside the economic construction of "race," can take on an even more intense form of diabolic: such as the one we know of as "the black predator." I'll come back to that with Kobena Mercer's essay.

Adapting Sodomy.

But, from a materialist point of view, it might be said that when sodomitical discourse leaves Europe, it will take its particular adaptation according to the form and flow of capitalistic imperialism and colonization. That is, like capitalism, "sodomy" will adapt. One example is of this adapting is the ever-changing discourse regarding African masculinity and femininity. In general, these categories represented a "kind of repository for various anomalous behaviors [Bleys, 172]," such as an apish Caliban [Lott, 9]. Yet, it was then and is still largely believed that same sex behavior is not indigenous to Africa.

But, as early European travelers and explorers (etc) began to "observe" African behavior, the claims that "same sex relations were unknown grew out of tune with the growing conviction that [Africans] too were often not spared from...this 'moral pestilence' [Bleys, 171-2]." Nineteenth century Victorian novelist W. Winwoode Reade, as early as 1863, started to describe African men like Asian men had been described: "effeminate and with small feet, whereas African women were aggressive and overly masculine [Bleys, 172]." African "gender disorder," like its perceived deviant sexuality, implies, for Reade, "lasciviousness." And, would you believe it, he offered this as an anti-abolition reason to civilize or make the African "virtuous" through slavery!

Rather than indulging in dance, sexual lasciviousness and abuse, the African black ought to be put to work on plantations and in the mines, which would not only make him more virtuous but would also increase his longevity. [Bleys, 172]

Reading through the various texts, it's hard not to be amazed at the depth and self-delusion behind the "white man's burden." But the real burden, which is capitalist imperialism, is shouldered by those who are to be saved from themselves! John C. Hawley, in Postcolonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections, quotes a line by Joe Ortega in which he wakes up feeling "as though the whole of creation was conspiring to make me happy. I hope no doom strikes [Hawley, 1]."

This is borne out in a classic example of how sodomitic discourse changed to suit the colonizing needs of the conquering Europeans: the case of the murder of the Sodomites under Balboa. Jonathan Goldberg reports in "Sodomy in the New World: Anthropologies Old and New," an incident that happened at the dawn of colonization in the so-called New World, two days before Balboa laid eyes on the Pacific.

After killing the leader of the Indians of Quarecqua and six hundred of his warriors, Balboa fed to his dogs forty more Indians accused of sodomitical practices [Goldberg, 4].

What Balboa intended to do was not conquer—he'd already done that—but to "seek to infuse [his] acts with moral purpose [Goldberg, 5]." Balboa's slaughter of the sodomites is "mobilized as a kind of quasi-democraticc device; this, of course, a ruse of power [Goldberg, 5]." Balboa eliminates and supplants the Indian rulers while appearing to be the liberator of the oppressed.

"Imperial Anxiety."

What's new is what Rudy Bleys calls "imperial anxiety [Bleys, 147f]." This anxiety is a worry about the cultural and moral integrity of the empires represented by the European powers assembled at the Berlin Conference--1884-5--partitioning Africa. It is an anxiety present in Christianity also as "missionary efforts to 'civilize' the indigenous people often proved inadequate [Bleys, 148]." These "anxieties arose about the potentially demoralizing effects of local prostitution, concubinage, or higher sexual tolerance among the European population in the colonies themselves [Bleys, 148]."

This is the problem of the so-called "tropicalization" of the Europeans. For example, there was alarm about the "apparent increase of homosexual contacts within the army or between soldiers and indigenous men [Bleys, 148]."

At the same time, with the abolition of the slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean, there is need for more control. And so "imperial anxiety" projected itself into:

...far-reaching regulation of the social and sexual life was given high priority in the new African colonies as well as being a means of preventing social disorder and maximizing economic gain [Bleys, 148].

And, sadly, Bleys believes that, for the most part, "Christianization aligned itself with "administrative and punitive policies to turn the African population into a pool of cheap labor [Bleys, 148]"

PART II: IMPLICATIONS?

Of course, "sodomy" is not what same sex really means in Africa. And, moreover, as Mark Jordan explains, "the question of same sex desire" is not settled [or] captured entirely by common notions of "queer theory [Jordan, 5]." Rather, the meanings of same sex practice in Africa are as multiple as are the cultures, erotic spiritualities, and "languages of desire" of the people themselves. So the implications of the story of the Ugandan martyrs are much bigger than the particular men and women in the story--including the missionaries.

Considering this story at the intersection of queer and postcolonial theory might move like improvisational jazz. The riffs or ostinatos are found in the telling and retelling of the story with the queer erotic as the recurring phrase….the queer erotic as the recurring gaze….the queer erotic as the imperial fantasy. It calls for a "suspicious hermeneutic" in the exegesis of "canonization" [Greek: "rule"] and imperialism.

Further questions surround ideas about bodies: "mapped bodies", tortured bodies "marched to the flames", virginal bodies and "visionary ecstasy" [as in the homoerotic gaze of Sufi "witness practice"], sodomized bodies and imperial spectacle, etc. Questions surrounding the metamorphoses of the boys are also provocative. One thinks of these [black African] boys as ones who "become-white," or are frozen in eternal boyhood in the process of canonization, etc.

I'd like to consider three theoretical implications that might be considered in what Marcella Althaus-Reid calls an "indecent theology." These three topics are "sex with divine boys," "fear of a black penis," and "hybridity."

A. Theo-(he)retical Questions or "Incedent" Theology

1. Sex with Divine Boys

The Ugandan boys are located in a ritual of masculinity. They are the objects of masculine desire and the pawns of masculinist forces. Like women, their bodies are written upon by "Christian" ideology and then placed by male power into the heavens. The act of canonization metaphorically "veils" their desire [God forbid that they actually were "same gender loving"!] and literally veils their penises.

That, by in large, the official witnesses, writers, instigators, perpetrators, and final canonizers [sic] of the naked execution of the divine boys were male reminds me also of Charles Eliborg-Schwartz's observation about the myth of Moses, Aaron, Nadab, Alihu's ascent to the top of the mountain. He implies that "the Israelite leaders [i.e., the males] were permitted to see the naked deity directly from the front [Eliborg-Schwartz, 68-9]." This intimacy privileges their gaze and, therefore, their authority. It, when you remember the homoerotic drama of the biblical story, also privileges their desire.

Similarly, when men use the divine boys to speak morally, it is "phallic morality." The phallic quality comes from seeing frontally. Their executions both evoke and condemn homoeroticism. And these feminized divine youths [just like, Eliborg-Schwartz believes, the Great Male God] both contest and confirm the masculine authority [read hetero-normativity] of the white men around them.

Their execution is a controlled performance. They are veiled from public sight in that, for instance, their Ugandan countrymen see them; but they are "not seen" as who they alternately are: demigods, "martyrs." Their bodies are "clothed in glory" for Christian observers. And then their bodies are literally (or artistically) clothed when presented at the Vatican ceremony...even though their passions are explicitly, like St. Perpetua's, naked passions.

This clothing may be considered necessary for "propriety;" yet, the boys' clothing is also about the Catholic Church's erotopbobia, its closing off of the disputed sexuality of the boys. The act of canonization (Paul VI never mentions homosexuality in his address) erases their desire and reifies the demon king.

This is characteristic, in my opinion, of many canonizations: They clothe otherwise naked, sexually violated bodies. Clothing, it seems, restores the "dignity" that the rape or execution stole; but it also mutes any discussion on the meaning and origin of sexual desire that might—just might—have been implicit in the martyrdom.

Eliborg-Schwartz adds another dimension to the Sodom story in the bible, as well as to the debate regarding its treatment of the issue of homosexuality [Eliborg-Schwartz, 96]. Recent exegesis has variously interpreted this story as condemnation of Canaanite culture, homosexual rape, and as breach of hospitality. But Eliborg-Schwartz appends that:

The story is not just about...impropriety or homosexual rape,
[it is] also about men desiring "divine men."[Eliborg-Schwartz, 95]

As the Ugandan tale is told over and over--repetitively and ritually--the transgression of the king deepens. The men of Sodom and the King of Uganda would have similar desires, and both are demonized as deviants bent on the rape of innocent men of God! Sodomy, then, is cast not as a desire of choice, even transient choice. It is transgression, "homosexual rape," even upon divine men. It is ritualized and inscribed like that, both in biblical interpretation as well as in Ugandan church history (via the canonization). And this male rape/male transgression story continues to help in the construction of otherness in Uganda.

B. "Fear of a black penis"

The penis of Kabaka Mwanga becomes the focus of religious anxiety in Buganda in that he couldn't be controlled by the Muslims because he had a "repugnance to circumcision [Faupel, 30]. And he also wouldn't give up his multiple wives, which was an obstacle to his becoming a Christian.

Of course, the penis is the locus of power in all patriarchies; yet, as black queer cultural critic Kobena Mercer observes, there is a specific fear that might be called—that he calls—the "fear of a black penis [Mercer, 121]." This fear evokes concerns about white male violence and power, white male anxiety, and white conflicted desire. It is perhaps the most important "alibi" for the wielding of white male "terror" expressed in the violence of racism. The "fear of a [not 'the'] black penis," for Mercer, can be observed in that:

...visibly frenzied...death-bearing fusion of erotic and aggressive desires, [seen in] the violence that breaks against the black male body [Mercer, 121.]

It breaks out as a "violence that white supremacy both abhors and yearns for." It is that total "collapse into the lawlessness of the transgressive violence ascribed to the Other." It is what happens when the Mandingo or the King Kong is evoked. And it betrays itself as a:

certain timeless compulsion to repeat—a deathly repetition, underlining the relative autonomy as well as the mutual articulation of psychic and social relations [Mercer, 122].

Mwanga is described by a travelling missionary in 1888 as markedly different from his father, Mutesa.

A man with a weak-looking mouth, and a rather silly sort of laugh and smile; he raises his eyebrows very high, and twitches them in surprise, or in giving assent to a statement. He looked a young and frivolous sort of man, very weak and easily led; passionate and, if provoked, petulant. He looked as if he would be easily frightened, and possessed of very little courage or self-control [Faupel. 67].

One wonders how thus seeming feminization and demonization of the Kabaka, combined with that prevalent nineteenth century "myth of the black rapist," which had arisen most poignantly during the lynching times in the United States [Lott, 28], intensifies the sodomitical discourse here. Sodomy can now be linked with lynching and rape through the penis of the black male predator. That it was a "black dick" that "raped" and murdered the "divine boys" makes the scene at the Mwanga's court as hot as a lynching scene.

Is the Kabaka the beast to the beauty of the boys? If so, then the story of the Ugandan martyrs reads like a horror movie, a thriller, a genre known for its power to induce fear....fear of the monster....fear of the dark....all the while inscribing a fascination with sexuality and, of course, entertaining us to the hilt.

The conventions of horror inscribe a fascination with sexuality; with gender identity codified in terms that revolve around the symbolic presence of the monster [45 Mercer].

The added layer of a feminized black dick evokes the black queen too, herself a threat.

C. Hybridity

More than anything else, the story of the martyrs is another story of punished African sexuality, homosexuality in this case. From the exegesis of the second creation story of Noah and Ham--that both reinforced heteronormativity and "cursed" the latter's descendents forever--all the way down to this crazy, lascivious African sodomite king, the "mission" of the European was clearly one mixed with desire, even obsession. As the British Empire grew, the expression "once you taste brown sugar" becomes more and more palpable. The desire for the "other"—the desire to "eat the other [hooks, 24]"-- mixed the emotions even as the populations themselves became mixed: "hybridized." The intensity of the desire was marked by the anxiety to keep the races separate; and, naturally, this intense desire is betrayed by the volume at which it is denied.

On the face of it, hybridity is about heterosexual "mixing." In fact--in historical terms--"concern about racial amalgamation tended if anything to encourage same-sex sex" [Young, 26] because:

The norm, deviation model of race as of sexuality meant that "perversions" such as homosexuality became associated with the degenerate products of miscegenation [Young, 26].

So Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray haunts the exotic demi-monde of London and, inevitably, has an ambiguous encounter with a "half-caste."

The identification of racial with sexual degeneracy was clearly always overdetermined in those whose subversive bronzed bodies bore witness to a transgressive act of perverse desire [Young, 26].

In other words, strange as it may seem, queer sexual desire also reinforces fictions of purity, the "norm," and the "natural"! And the fact of hybridity proves once and for all the "fact" that all desire is dangerous, "dark" desire.

D. Indecent theology

Christianity's "contribution" to imperialism involves a taking over of interior land, sacred land. In the case of Africa here, it has traditionally begun with the total destruction of African "pagan, heathen" heavens and earths. That is, the deities are depicted as too black, and/or too black male, and/or too black female (read "too sexual"); so this pantheon must go! Listen to this 1917 children's sermon and notice that it will say, perhaps more honestly, what is contained in the European imaginary about Africa. This excerpt is taken from one entitled "A Giant Question Mark and a Giant Ear":

You have a map of Africa on your take-home card today. I want you to notice three things about the map. 1. That it is black. 2. Can't you see that the shape of the map looks like a great big question mark? And, 3.Can't you also see how the shape of Africa is very much like a giant ear…..The reason our maps are colored is to remind us that the people of Africa have black skins, and that their beliefs are just as black as their skins [Applegarth, p.109]!

This children's sermon goes on to point out how black people believe in black spirits, how the culture was abominable, the practices crass superstition, the faces of African religion "ugly."

Yet, the "big ear" is ready to hear something new, something civilizing and "true." Once the African heavens and earth are spiritually bankrupted and vacated, they are able to receive images—often subliminal and passed on through art and constructs of the "good"---sermons, laws that, even if sincere, further the imperial and post-imperial agenda. This theological demonizing would not be necessary if Europe was simply made up of thugs and thieves. But it is entirely necessary for the setting up of complex colonial situations and "new world cultures." It is one of the foundations of the European settlement outside of Europe from 1750 to the recent past.

To counter this demonization, we should not fall prey to the temptation to recreate the sacred with "vanilla" theology. My task as a storyteller is to re-tell the "story" of the Uganda martyrs as an "indecent" story. I have come to discover (albeit late) that any shame I have is not evoked by "indecent" pictures, but by constructions of "decency." Postcolonial feminist thea/ologian Marcella Althaus-Reid, in her book Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics, believes that all theology is sexual theology. That is, every theology is based in somebody's sexual story. It just usually ain't mine.

Depending on who's telling the story, these sexual stories might be, for instance, about chosen sexual positions in the cosmos, a top/bottom trinity or a top/bottom soteriology or a top/bottom church. It could be about locating the sexual "G(od) spot of virginal reflections," or about divine-mandated adultery [Althaus-Reid, 139], or about Mary the transvestite's Drag Queen [78]. It could be a story about Latin America-the- Sleeping Beauty, or a story about Fr Mario, a beloved justice-centered gay priest murdered by in Buenos Aires [137] by his "piece."

For Althaus-Reid—herself an Argentine—a truly liberating thea/ology "problematizes and undresses the mythical layers of multiple oppression..." and questions "the traditional...field of decency and order as it permeates and supports the multiple (ecclesiological, theological, political and amatory) structures of life...[Althaus-Reid, 2]." She wants to detangle present Liberation [theology] from colonialism [9]. She wonders, for instance, what the relationship is between a theology of sexual stories using a per/version methodology and the economic assumptions and facts of the life of poor people [Althaus-Reid, 8].

So, why should I do (because we "do" theology) a conscious theology of sexual stories? Well, for one,

Without a theology of sexual stories, the last moment of the hermeneutical circle, that is, the moment of appropriation and action, will always have a partiality and a superficial approach to conflict resolution [Althaus-Reid, 131].

Telling the indecent story allows us to work through past and present appropriations, violences, erasures, etc.
Why consciously do a theology of sexual stories? Because theology just might discover that there are more stories than categories [132]! "Indecent/decent," for one, is an overdetermined binary filled with possibilities!.

Why do a theology of sex stories? Because the S/M scene, for example, invokes a methodolgy, a way of seeking ourselves in the way a fetish does, by approximate locations, non-traditional associations and improbable neighbors [Althaus-Reid, 150 re: Deleuze/Guattari].

How can the Ugandan story sit next to its "improbable neighbor(s)?"

The Ugandan martyrdom is a sexual story normalized "through prayer" that does not sit alone. Rather, it conveys "social memories of sexual stories recycled and repeated in community [132]." The stor(ies) of the Ugandan martyr-boys (and, to say it that way is more indecent) is more like a matrix--related to the Latin for "womb" (dark...like the African continent). But not just a womb of origin that is left behind, but a womb that negotiates its meaning in a world of unheard stories [135].

And this martyr-boy story too must, with a quickness, find its place, and its voice, and its power in a land—still a "Dark Continent"-- filled with sexual tragedies and triumphs: AIDS "success stories" but also the tragedies of AIDS in Africa, African same sex practice, homophobic speech, etc.

In asking the question of "sex stories," I am asking how the official version can also function as a per/version? How can the "obscene" --that which "renders the flesh as flesh [Althaus-Reid, 110]"-- allow the bodies of those boys [and the bodies of the forgotten harem girls] to be what they are, right now, for Africa? In other words, what are the sex story possibilities in the story of the Ugandan martyrs? Recently, certain bishops, in both the Anglican and Catholic camps, have tried to "un-closet" the story of the martyrs [see Ward and Hassett]. Until recently, the sexual aspects have only been whispered, have only been a part of official "ignorance [Sedgwick, 5]." Now, in their rush to bring it out and condemn it, these bishops legitimize the retelling of the martyr-boy story as a sexual one.

How could, for instance, it be used as an examination of other African sex stories, like the story of the "shrinking penis" and "witchcraft mentality" that breaks out even now in Ghana and has direct correlation with disease treatment, economic shrinkage, and homosocial solidarity [Althaus-Reid, 182-4]?

More internationally, how are the Ugandan boys like and unlike the "street children" around the world, whose stories of survival are not often told? Does the story of a refusal of sex speak to commercial sex workers—too often children---in Rio and Buenos Aires and Accra and Kampala? Or, how are these children being used to advocate the causes of stolen and enslaved children, children affected and infected with AIDS?

Yet how can it--as a story about children--be framed differently than the "save our children" approach, an approach that usually serves policies of global development regarding children. These policies seek to "save the children," but they often neglect the multiple and meaningful traditions of the larger community. Does a western Christian phallogentric theology really serve the whole child, the child in the midst of her or his village? Or does it make for bad dreams about Nike and Nestle?

Another possibility: How can this narrative of punishment for a heterosexist "sin" be subverted to offer a larger sense of justice and salvation? Can it become a parody [Mercer, 43-4]?

AIDS

And what about AIDS in Africa? Is this not the crucial moment for retelling sex stories, and, for that matter, all African stories in a postcolonial way? Samuel R. Delany says AIDS has "come as close to unifying certain strands of sexual discourse as it has come to freeing certain others [Delany, 34]." What strategies will we employ to raise consciousness in and about African AIDS and, as result, become HIV-ABLED?

Finally, I am worried that the so-called "success story" of Uganda (regarding AIDS) will be short-lived because all the sexual practices of Ugandans are not included, are vehemently denied [http://www.buganda.com/bazungu.htm], simply because of heterosexist versions of stories, like this one, written onto the bodies of Ugandans. And, I might add, economic questions, like how much money are the drug companies and Protector Condoms making [Paul Kollman, email], will always be included in the ways we now retell the story of sodomy in Africa.

Conclusion: Positive Spiritual Articulations for Afri-diasporic Catholics: Pictures on the Walls

I am concerned about how this story is told and passed on by Afri-diasporic Catholics. We need positive spiritual articulations in a time as the AIDS pandemic still ravages African and Afri-diasporic peoples. A Catholic African American friend of mine told me that her son was going to use the Uganda martyrs as his contribution to an All Saints Day program. I wondered what he'll find out about them when he goes online. And how will the story of a black sexual predator come off to him? Does he hear "rape" or "child molestation?" Will he associate the story with Catholic priests? Will the reasons for the executions be reported simply as the unwanted advances of a gay man? Will he ignore this or will he end up growing up with disdain and abhorrence of homosexuality?

On the other side of the globe: I was shocked when a few months ago I received a picture sent to me of the new chapel at Our Mother of Peace AIDS Orphanage in Zimbabwe. Looking at the picture of the chapel, I noticed that there was not one, not one, black saint on the walls, not even the martyrs of Uganda who died only a country or two away! Using [Roland] Barthes' idea of "punctum," Marcella Althaus-Reid presents Fetishist Theology as "a theology of photographs [162]," and accuses Christianity of fixing "its pictures of submission and control without the consensuality of S/M."

S/M'ers, according to some sexual stories, get pleasure in reversing and reorganizing the lines of top/bottom relationships or Master/Slave [Althaus-Reid, 162].

She goes on to talk about the way that people see Jesus. Some, like the late Libertion Theologian Juan Segundo, are frustrated with his "ideological mistakes," his failure to organize clear strategies. Indeed, "Jesus' politics were based on passivity, or submission to the political order of his time [163]." As time as passed, he often voyeuristically appears

more like a fetishist photograph than a text, and as such is punctum, disturbance, scandal although not a planned action [163].

For Barthes,

The punctum is the detail that catches the eye, jogs the memory, arouses tenderness. The punctum has the power of expansion, while remaining a detail [Dorfman, 4].

Moreover, the punctum is that detail which allows the pornographic image to rise to the erotic. It is the necessary detail which adds the aesthetic.

African literary critic, Gaurav Desai, in "Out in Africa," wishes to

...join hands with those African(ist)s who are interested in opening up spaces for considerations of African sexual practices in all their fluid forms [Hawley, 140]

He talks about how homosexuals are also pictured as "dangerously desiring bod(ies)[142]" by Africans too. As such, they are caught between two Western "perversions": "homosexuality" [157] and homophobia. In my opinion, we can sometimes subvert this discourse, not just against-the-grain of the texts, but also against the grain of the practice. In the story of the martyrs we have one of the most "well-documented" accounts of "homosexual practice" in Africa [Ward, 4]. As such, it can only serve us well, but not just as a text. It is an indecent picture too.

So that's why I want the picture of the saints on African walls. I believe that when the picture is hanging up, black children will notice, at the side of the eye, "the fact of blackness [Fanon]." They will notice that these boys are really African, with clan names, and that they are wounded but healthy, like Africa. And they will note that the boys are erotically beautiful, and that they are available to Africa.

I want to get more pictures of the martyrs into African chapels and online. I know it's the "studium" picture: the carefully placed, fully clothed, spiritualized bodies from the canonization. But the pornography of the picture, for me, is the violence of sodomitical discourse, aligned with Afriphobia, Islamophobia and, I suspect, neoliberal discourse [Rzepka]. What will it take to take the literalist "edge [Dorfman]" off the pornographic picture? I'm not sure, but....

I want the pictures on the walls because I want the bodies in them to matter.
Ibrahim Farajaje has written of a "celebration of the body erotic." Using body piercing as a signifier of a de-colonizing body, he writes:

Erotophobia has tried to lock us all up because our bodies matter too much to be free. ....[I]f we challenge erotophobia, we challenge all white supremacy, classism, homo-hatred, hatred of women...all that stems from it. But then that would [have to mean] that your body matters [Farajaje, 15, 14].

I want more pictures of the martyr-boys on our black Catholic walls. These are the bodies and clans that now inhabit the heavens. But they do so like the slaves did: as a subversive presence, smiling in your face, but always ready to revolt and set each other free.

SOURCES:

Aldrich, Robert. Colonialism and Homosexuality. London: Routledge, 2003.

Applegarth, Margaret T. Missionary Stories for Little Folks. New York: George H.
Doran, 1917.

Althaus-Reid, Marcella. Indecent Theology. Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics. London: Routledge, 2000.

Ashcroft, Bill with Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tifflin, eds. Key Concepts in Post-colonial Studies. London: Routledge, 1998.

Bleys, Rudi C. The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-Male Sexual Behavior Outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination, 1750-1918. New York: New York UP, 1995.

Connor, Randy. Blossom of Bone: Reclaiming the Connections Between Homoeroticism and the Sacred. San Francisco: Harper, 1993.

Delany, Samuel R. "The Rhetoric of Sex/The Discourse of Desire." Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliturgy. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1999.

Desai, Gaurav. "Out in Africa." Postcolonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections. Ed. John C. Hawley. Albany: State U of New York P, 2001, 139-157.

Dorfman, Elsa. Rev. of Camera Lucida. Roland Barthes. The Journal of Photography in New England. Vol. 3: 3. http://elsa.photo.net/barthes.htm.

Eliborg-Schwartz, Howard. God's Phallus. Boston: Beacon, 1994

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Sydney: SBS, 1997.

Farajaje-Jones, Elias [Ibrahim]. "Invocation of Remembrance, Healing, and Empowerment in a Time of AIDS." Equal Rites: Lesbian, Gay Worship, Ceremonies, and Celebrations. Eds. Kittredge Cherry & Zalmon Sherwood. Louisville, KT.: Westminster, 1995.

Farajaje-Jones, Elias. "Piercing Analysis/or In-to-body Travel/ or What is All That Piercing Stuff?" Talk. The American Academy of Religion. Philadelphia. Fall. 1995.

Faupel, J. F. African Holocaust: The Story of the Uganda Martyrs. New York: J.O. Kenedy and Sons, 1962.

Goldberg, Jonathan. "Sodomy in the New World: Anthropologies Old and New."

Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. Ed. Michael Warner. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.

Hassett, Miranda K "White Hands Up: The Anglican Geopolitics of Sexuality." Chapter 4, Unpublished dissertation.

Hawley, John C, ed. Postcolonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections. Albany: State U of New York P, 2001.

hooks, bell. "Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance." Black Looks. Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.

Jordan, Mark D. The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology. Chicago: The U of Chicago, 1997.

Kripal, Jeffrey J. Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001.

Krishnawamy, Revathi. "The Economy of Colonial Desire." The Masculinity Studies Reader. Eds. Rachel Adams & David Savran. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002.

Lane, Christopher. The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.

Lott, Tommie. The Invention of Race. Malden, MA: Blackwell P, 1999.

Mercer, Kobena. "Fear of a Black Penis." Artforum International Magazine XXXII. 8 (April 1994) 44.

--. "Monster Metaphors: Notes on Michael Jackson's Thriller." Welcome the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Mercer, Kobena and Isaac Julien. "Race, Sexual Politics and Black Masculinity: A Dossier." Male Order, Unwrapping Masculinity. Ed. R. Chapman and J. Rutherford. London: Routledge, 1988.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark. New York: Random House, 1992.

Plotz, Judith. "Imaginary Kingdoms with Real Boys in Them (or) How the Quincey Brothers Built the British Empire." The Wordsworth Circle 27.3 (Summer, 1996): 131.

Rzepka, Charles, J. "Slavery, Sodomy, and De Quincey's 'Savannah-La-Mar': Surplus Labor Value in Urban Gothic." The Wordsworth Circle 27.13 (Winter, 1996): 33.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.

Ward, Kevin. "Same-Sex Relations in Africa and the Debate on Homosexuality in East African Anglicanism." Anglican Theological Review. Winter 2002.

Young, Robert J.C. Colonial Desire. Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race: London: Routledge, 1995.