Reporting on Wrongdoing

Patience Akumu

Excellent article in The Guardian about Ugandan journalist Patience Akumu.

I've had hate mail and lost friends – but I will not stop writing about gay rights in Uganda : Patience Akumu has written about the lives – and deaths – of gay activists for five years in the Kampala Observer. Here she explains how a deep-rooted discrimination blights her country

I never meant to write about gay rights in Uganda. The issue just crept up on me as I got lost listening to the cries of battered women and holding the hands of dying children.

These faceless, mysterious, ominous homosexuals tagged at my skirts and beckoned my heart to look their way. I looked for a moment and knew it would be cruel to turn away again. I never meant to give up the possibility of a lucrative career in the law just to be an advocate for the accursed and rejected – and to be accursed and rejected myself. I never meant to spend two hours before my computer, thinking of ways to explain why on earth I meddle with homosexuality just to break the hearts of my kinsmen, disappoint my father and worry my fiancé; to cause my mother and daughter to be pitied.

Homosexuality is illegal in Uganda and in 2009 a bill that suggested the death penalty for certain homosexual acts was tabled before parliament, highlighting the brutal, government-sanctioned discrimination against sexual minorities that blights my country.

Courageous lady, of which the world needs more. 

You can find her blog here.