4. Kingdom of Buganda, 19th century
Buganda is one of the largest traditional kingdoms within the borders of Uganda. The nation is ruled by a leader called the Kabaka. Throughout the 19th century, the Kingdom of Buganda was incredibly permissive of homosexuality. Young men served as greeters in the royal courts and provided sexual services to visitors and the country’s elites. Kabaka Mwanga II who ruled in the latter half of the 19th century was widely recognized as gay by the citizens of Buganda, despite marrying over a dozen women. Towards the end of Mwanga II’s reign, the Imperial British East Africa Company began exerting greater and greater control over the kingdom. Mwanga II was deposed for the second and final time in 1897, and homosexuality was criminalized only five years later.
Uganda, and by extension Buganda, continues to be an extremely homophobic nation. Homosexuality has carried legal penalties since 1902, with a 2014 act, signed by President Yoweri Museveni, adding the death penalty and including lesbian sex for the first time. Thankfully, the Constitutional Court of Uganda declared the law invalid later the same year. Sadly, these laws fly in the face of numerous tribal cultural conditions of pre-colonization Uganda, including the “mudoko dako” effeminate men of the Langi tribe who were allowed to marry as though they were women and the homosexual priests of the Bunyoro people.
