When the pandemic broke out last year, Shawn Mugisha shared his two-bedroom apartment with nine other people. They were other members of Kampala’s contested queer community that he had come to know through his work as a human rights activist and paralegal – people who had been expelled from their families or who got out of custody without going.
The lockdown posed particular problems for them, says Shawn: “What does ‘stay at home’ actually mean for someone who doesn’t have a home? What does it mean for someone who does sex work? “
Uganda was first locked in April 2020 and food security deteriorated rapidly. Supply chains collapsed, food prices soared, and people began to starve. In cities like the capital Kampala, fresh produce and vegetables were particularly scarce.
Shawn, 34, and transgender, says that while many people in the city relied on rural families to ship supplies, those ostracized because of their sexual orientation or gender identity were often left to fend for themselves.
Shawn grows fruits and vegetables in the garden of a block of flats in the suburbs
“We were waiting for the government to give us food, and some of us didn’t even get that food in the community,” he says. “So we had to think wisely, think about it: how do we survive?”
He decided to grow his own fruits and vegetables in the garden of his suburban apartment block. This was the beginning of a new organization, FAMACE, an acronym for Farming, Art, Mental Health Advocacy, Collaboration, and Ethical Human-Centered Design. The aim is to strengthen the resilience of Uganda’s queer community through sustainable agriculture and to help victims of abuse and discrimination to help themselves.
Shawn has studied permaculture and believes that sustainable food production can help victims of discrimination and abuse heal from trauma and build lives that do not depend on activities like sex work that could put them back into the hands of the police. “Ethical human-centered design really puts you at the center of solving your own problems and looking at the history of those problems,” he explains.
Uganda’s LBGTQ community faces violence and arrests
Uganda is a hostile place to its LGBTQ + community. In 2019, gay rights activist and paralegal Brian Wasswa was brutally murdered in his home in what human rights activists call a hate crime, reminiscent of the 2011 murder of David Kato.
Kato, also a gay rights activist, was beaten to death after winning a lawsuit against a local newspaper that named him among gay men under the heading “Hang Them Up”.
Some Ugandans have fled the country to avoid discrimination
In 2014 parliament passed the anti-homosexuality law. It was later declared unconstitutional by the Ugandan Constitutional Court. But in May the country’s parliament approved a bill on sexual offenses that, among other things, criminalized same-sex relationships with imprisonment for up to five years.
Earlier this month, President Yoweri Museveni said he would not sign the law. But Florence Kyohangirwe, editor on sexual minorities at Minority Africa, says the government, even debating this type of legislation, legitimizes homophobia and is “some kind of advocacy of harassment of the LGBTQ community.”
And activists say the pandemic itself was used as a pretext for harassment, with police searching homeless shelters for LGBTQ + people and arresting people who participated in acts likely to spread COVID-19.
Healing trauma with gardening
In June, police raided LGBTQ + accommodation on the outskirts of Kampala and arrested 44 people who allegedly attended a “same-sex wedding” for “spreading disease” – without saying whether they meant COVID.
Shawn, who has worked as a paralegal and for several human rights NGOs, helped secure her release. But he says LBGTQ + people who have been persecuted by the state once free go to shelters, where assistance is limited to basic services.
Shawn wants to incorporate community gardens into animal shelters across Uganda
“Whenever I thought, why can’t we find a sustainable solution to this person’s problem?” he says. “Much dignity is taken from the people who enter these rooms. They are given simple accommodation, a blanket and perhaps a mosquito net, and perhaps one meal a day.”
With FAMACE, Shawn wants to integrate community gardens into animal shelters across Uganda. For one thing, they could provide better nutrition – which is especially important for those taking drugs like HIV prophylaxis. But caring for plants could bring benefits both mentally and physically.
Tumukunde * ran away from home to live with Shawn after she was forced to marry a pastor because her family suspected she was gay. For them, the garden was a place of comfort and healing.
“It was also more comforting for me because I went through a lot during that time,” she says. “And maybe I needed something less human. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, I just wanted to be alone all the time.”
Shawn believes that sustainable food production can help victims of discrimination and abuse
In January the group was “accidentally evicted from Shawn’s apartment” – “just because we’re queer,” he says. Shawn moved into a large split maisonette, nestled in private property with flowers and chirping birds, and planted a new vegetable garden there. Here he can only feed one resident and has to move out by September. But right now the garden is bearing fruit.
And it brought a kind of peace for 39-year-old Charles *. Charles moved in with Shawn after he was outed and ostracized by his community for downloading gay porn. He survived three attacks on his life.
“It’s quiet and I’m becoming invisible,” says Charles about the garden, his eyes are tear-filled. “I think about life, I think about my decisions … Gardening gives you ownership of something, at least control of something. There are aspects of my life that I cannot control, but with gardening I can to do.”
Own solutions
So far, FAMACE has supported five people. Shawn speaks excitedly about plans for a queer eco-village and how the ethics and principles of permaculture and green agriculture could be incorporated into social change projects.
Right now he’s struggling to find money to rent permanent space. So far, the project has produced enough food for those directly involved, he says. With enough space he would like to increase production and sell some of the food in local markets. But he also sees potential in donating FAMACE products to help families in need.
“We live in a society where you have social protection as soon as you make a contribution to the community,” he says. “I think it is time we turned to our own homemade solutions to combat marginalization and discrimination.” Especially in urban areas where food is scarce, “we can get involved and create more social inclusion.”
* Names were changed on request for security reasons
