This time last year, Namara* had finally opened her small massage parlour in Jinja, a major tourism city in eastern Uganda, after years of hard work and saving. In August, all that changed when the police raided her business and arrested her. They questioned her: “Why are you not married? Why do you employ only women and where do you get your money?” They accused her of “recruiting girls into homosexuality”.
She was charged with “homosexuality” and “promotion of homosexuality”, offences under Uganda’s 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act (AHA) that can fetch life and 20-year jail terms respectively, upon conviction. A few weeks into the four months she spent in prison on remand, her parlour was trashed and burgled, and the landlord issued her an eviction notice.
Namara is one of hundreds of people whose lives have been upended by the AHA, and whose hope lay in a court petition filed last year challenging the constitutionality of the law. But that hope too has been decimated.
