Fighting Uganda's anti-gay laws
The History Hour
BBC
4.4 • 913 Ratings
🗓️ 25 May 2019
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2009 Ugandan MPs tried to introduce new laws against homosexuality that would include life imprisonment and even the death penalty. We speak to Victor Mukasa about his story of fighting for LGBT rights in Uganda, first as a lesbian woman and then as a trans man. Also, the early days of the environmental organisation Greenpeace, walking the Great Wall of China and fighting acid attacks on women in Bangladesh.
(Photo: Ugandan LGBT Activist Victor Mukasa May 2019. BBC)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson, |
| 0:05.2 | the past brought to life by those who were there. |
| 0:08.3 | This week how the environmental organization Greenpeace was launched in the 1970s. |
| 0:13.0 | We had a peace movement, we had a civil rights movement, there was a women's movement, |
| 0:18.0 | there needed to be an environmental revolution. |
| 0:21.0 | Also we've got the remarkable story of the first recorded trek along the entire length of the Great Wall of China. |
| 0:27.0 | Sometimes when I stand on the wall, I feel like I'm having a conversation with people from ancient times. |
| 0:38.0 | When I put my hand on the stones, I think about how hundreds of years ago this stone was carved out of the mountains and placed on the wall by someone. |
| 0:46.7 | And I try to imagine them and what sort of lives they had. |
| 0:50.5 | Plus we hear from the women who were fighting acid attacks in Bangladesh 20 years ago, and we go way, way |
| 0:57.5 | back in time with an investigation into the asteroid collision that wiped out the dinosaurs. |
| 1:03.0 | You would have had this extremely bright fireball for a few seconds and of course there's a shock wave progresses out for some distance and then a very powerful explosion. |
| 1:14.0 | That's all coming up later in the podcast, but we start this edition of the History Hour |
| 1:18.2 | in Africa because it's 10 years now since Ugandan MPs attempted to introduce life imprisonment and in some cases |
| 1:26.3 | the death penalty to punish homosexuality. Laws against LGBT rights in Uganda were already strict at the time and cultural pressure |
| 1:35.2 | from religious groups was immense. |
| 1:37.1 | Rebecca Kessby has been speaking to one activist who fought the system, first as a lesbian and later as a trans man. |
| 1:45.0 | Uganda already has a law that could be used against homosexuality but the new backbench |
| 1:50.2 | bill goes much further the penalty for gay sex could be death. |
| 1:54.6 | Anyone failing even to report homosexuality could be sent to jail. |
| 1:59.2 | Being a lesbian or gay man in Uganda hasn't been easy for many generations, but in 2009 the public |
| 2:06.3 | debate about same-sex relationships had reached dangerous levels of hostility. |
... |
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