When people perish for lack of knowledge and blind hate
Tyneside and Northumberland Mind are an anti-racist, anti-prejudice, and equity-led charity. We are here to support all humans, no matter who you are, where you’re from, or how you identify. We are allies to marginalised and minoritised people and are constantly working to actively include people to influence our work.
Educating ourselves on other people’s lives and experiences is fundamental to being an ally. If we believe the world is unjust and want to make it fairer, then we must start by learning where injustices lie. In that spirit, we present you with an article written by one of our volunteers Kato. Kato is seeking asylum here in the UK, because his work has attracted condemnation and violence in his home country of Uganda. Kato reflects on some of the differences and similarities between the UK and Uganda and educates us on some pressing human rights issues. This article is written from Kato’s perspective as a Human Rights Lawyer. As an organisation we feel it’s important to share stories such as Kato’s to raise our collective awareness while empowering people to stand up for what is right.
At the bottom of the article, we’ve included quotes from the Tyneside and Northumberland Mind team about our ongoing work centring the voices and experiences of people who are excluded.
Trigger Warning: This article contains mentions of violence and murder. If you are personally affected by any of the topics raised in this piece and would like some support, please contact us via our website or our phone lines: 0191 477 4545 | 0330 174 3174. We are here for you.
When people perish for lack of knowledge and blind hate
By Kato Mukasa.
I have spent the last two decades working with minorities that include LGBTIQ, pregnant young mothers, victims of sex and gender-based violence, alleged witches, sex workers and teenagers living in slums of Kampala, Uganda. I appreciate how hard it is to live in a setting where one feels discriminated, unclean, unloved and not good enough.
When I became an active member of the Uganda Humanist Association in 2002 I realised that my country Uganda had a society that is too puritanical to the extent that people have set their own standards to define what is morally right and wrong regardless of the law of the land, the laws of nature and or the dictates of scientific logic and reasoning.
I will briefly explain the plight of minorities citing a few examples from Africa to enable us to appreciate more the achievements that have been made in the United Kingdom, the efforts being done by activists in Africa and most importantly to create more awareness for the need to have safer environments for the most vulnerable people whenever they are.
Whereas many people in Europe do not think about witchcraft as something to worry about but rather as mere superstition and therefore do not take it seriously, there are so many people in Africa who think and indeed have a belief that witchcraft is real and it is the source of their misfortunes.
In countries such as Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, Malawi, Burundi and Congo, dozens of people are killed each year for being the alleged witches. It is common to see a house set ablaze, gardens destroyed and people hacked to death because they have been branded as witches who are the main reasons why there is bad luck and so and so is failing to conceive and have babies. A certain person dies in the village and one person is singled out as the one who bewitched the deceased!
People – and more especially the elderly- are accused of engaging in witchcraft and assaulted by mobs of people that include their own relatives. It is common to have a person accused of witchcraft when a person with whom they were never on good terms dies after a brief illness. Even where the cause is known and can be scientifically proven, a gullible people will find someone to blame and even where an autopsy is done and results from a post mortem report would show the cause of death, a superstitious people will still find a person or family to blame for another persons’ death through the said witchcraft.
Three days ago – 10/01/2023- an innocent man was killed in Dedza, Malawi having been accused of making a child sick by allegedly taking the child on his witchcraft plane. This story is similar in several other countries in Africa and matters are not helped when religious people, the said men and women of God use their pulpits to inform the people how witchcraft is real and is the cause of all problems.
Africa is full of fake miracle workers, scammers who work as politicians and charlatans who use the pulpits to brainwash the masses and divide a would be united people to the extent that today homophobia is on the rise in many African countries than ever before.
Whereas in precolonial Africa there were homosexuals and lived harmoniously with others in society the introduction of foreign religions and laws made homosexuality a moral and mortal sin and it was criminalised.
It has been over fifty years when many countries in Africa got independence from the colonialists but the laws that still criminalise homosexuality have remained not taken off the statutes of many countries in Africa even when the colonisers including the United Kingdom have decriminalised homosexuality to allow all people live happily regardless of who they are, who they love and how they love.
In many countries in Africa, there is a big confusion in people’s appreciation of Gender Identity, Biological Sex and Sex Orientation. Society has been fine tuned into thinking that your biology must define your identity and that your sex orientation is of little importance.
Thus if you are born female, you must identify as female, you must make love with a man, you must behave, walk, talk, love, dress and play every assigned role as a woman because you were born with a female genitalia.These very standards are expected from a person born as male too. Sex is your biology and how you identify during the course of your development must be in tandem with your biological sex.
Each society has a carefully known bundle of behaviours and social roles and expectations that are used to identify a person as masculine or feminine and your sexual attraction to a person of your gender is not considered as a part of your gender if you declare feelings for a person of your gender. Falling in love with a person of the same sex is largely considered abnormal, it is a disease and a sin.
It is hardly possible to find a people in our local villages who appreciate that a person can be straight, gay or bisexual. Society for example expects that because you are a man, you must be attracted to females and never to men! Your sex orientation must be aligned to your biology and identity hence your sex attraction must be kept under check and to be normal, you must be straight and there is no room for being gay or bisexual.
A person’s inner feeling, psychological set up and genetic composition does not matter, what matters is the sex assigned to you at birth and you are expected to keep in the line, be straight or be declared abnormal. The mismatch between identity and biology has always been a source of confusion in many conservative societies world-wide. To a biased society, what you feel does not matter but rather, it is what society has assigned to you basing on your observed sex.
In practice, there are people who are gay despite the gender assigned to them at birth and by society. More often gay people reject society’s demands and struggle to express their nature and internal identity being their true feelings and this has been the source of untold suffering for hundreds of people over the years.
Homosexuality is illegal in Algeria, Angola, Botswana, Burundi, Cameroon, Comoros, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Liberia, Libya, Malawi, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Namibia and Nigeria. It is criminalised in Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leonne, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Homosexuals in these countries face untold suffering, long term imprisonment and death. The crime of any homosexual in such countries is to love differently, is to live in a society that is ignorant of science and the realities of the time.
We note however that there are societies in Africa that have allowed homosexuals to live in peace and it is legal to identify as a gay person. Homosexuality is legal in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo Brazzaville, Cote D’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda and South Africa.
It is important to note that respect for human rights takes a committed people that ensure that the voice of the vulnerable and the voice less is heard. United Kingdom was in a similar position over sixty years ago and it took sustained campaign to lobby the politicians, educate the masses and ensure that pro people laws are put in place to guarantee the rights of the homosexuals. Similarly, countries that are making efforts to respect human rights in Africa have small but very committed teams that have made all the difference in the betterment of lives of the marginalised.
The absence of fairness and respect for human rights globally has worsened the numbers of people running away from their countries to seek asylum in safe places. Global insecurity definitely increases refugee numbers and these affects both the countries that lose people and those that receive the asylum seekers. It is therefore vital that the greater good done by organisations such as Tyneside and Northumberland Mind are not only reorganised but supported to continue providing the important services they offer to the most vulnerable people.
Thousands of people perish due to ignorance and blind hate. It is therefore important that more efforts are put towards educating masses, empowering them to think more independently and more critically, to be more compassionate and tolerant and to respect the winds of progress that respect humanity, human rights, science, reason, logic and rationale.
Kato Mukasa is a Human Rights Lawyer and Chairperson of Uganda Humanist Association.
“In 2022 Tyneside and Northumberland Mind made a commitment to become a fully anti-racist, equitable and inclusive organisation. Part of this commitment was to appoint our very first dedicated Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Manager (DE&I Manager). The remit of the role is to help ensure that equity and inclusion sits at the heart of all we do from our strategic plans to our grass roots services. It also ensures that we drive long-term culture change in our organisation, create reach into communities who are underrepresented and don’t have the privilege or access mental health services and to learn alongside our local system to make substantive and significant changes in our combined approach.” Alex Wilson, CEO
“Part of our centring approach is to engage with specialist partners to collaborate on providing accessible mental health and wellbeing support where and when it’s needed. We listen with empathy, foster learning as a culture, and encourage community participation to develop our work long term, especially in service to those who are marginalised, minoritised, and experiencing health inequalities.” Carly Lovedawn, DE&I Manager
“We’ve been working in partnership with Rainbow Home and St Vincent de Paul, providing emotional and mental health support to those seeking sanctuary in the UK. This work is incredibly humbling, and we constantly learn from it. The rights that some of us have because we are fortunate to live in countries with more progressive laws must never be taken for granted. Kato’s words and those of the sanctuary seeking community remind me of that each day. It is these interactions and experiences that make us even more determined to develop our services to support those from racialised and marginalised communities.” Lisa MacDonald, Head of Wellbeing and Resilience
We work with organisations to assist refugees and people seeking asylum. If you’d like to know more about our work, please get in touch via our contact page and reference ‘the wellbeing team’. Alternatively, you can contact Rainbow Home (LGBT+) here: https://rainbowhome.org.uk/ and Saint Vincent De Paul here: https://www.svp.org.uk/st-vincents-newcastle
