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Lesedi: Bana Mwesige was raised in a religious household, but it was only when he joined the church choir at 12 years old that he felt a connection to the divine for the first time.

Bana: I love African Gospel for music. There’s a way like you connect with the music more than someone telling you that, oh, this Bible verse or this, and I feel like that was my point of connecting with the faith and connecting with God.

Lesedi: For Bana gospel music is everything. He listens to it every chance he gets. When he is walking down the streets of Kampala, you can be sure it’s gospel playing in his headphones.

Valerie: So what really happens to you when you sing the songs? How, how do you feel?

Bana: Maybe I would call it euphoria, a sort of excitement.

Lesedi: The person interviewing Bana is his good friend, a journalist. We’re calling her Valerie to protect her identity.

Valerie: Do you still have a strong connection to gospel music?

Bana: Yes, I do. I listen to it every day. Even right now, as I was coming, I was listening to gospel music.

Lesedi: As much as he loved it, Bana can’t bring himself to sing Gospel anymore.

Bana: So I think I kind of associate, uh, singing with church abuse and I have sort of not been able to detach my trauma, my past trauma from like music and, and church generally.

Lesedi: Hi, I’m Lesedi Mogoatlhe, and this is Radio Workshop.

Bana lives in Kampala, Uganda’s Capital City. He’s Christian, like many other Ugandans, about 85% of the population. Christianity arrived in Uganda with French and British missionaries in the late 1800s. The Christian Church has been a big part of people’s lives ever since, including Bana’s. Growing up, everywhere he turned, the church was there.

Bana: When you are at home, it’s all church, church, church, family, church, family, church. When you were home you didn’t watch tv. Of course that was a common thing around people’s homes. Mm. But I mean, when you watched TV it was either news or some weird white preacher.

Lesedi: As a kid, Bana lived at home with his two sisters and his mom and they spent hours and hours every week at the local Anglican church. Bana even joined Bible study.

Bana: My siblings like would read the Bible to me at night when you are going to sleep and you’d have to recite verses

Lesedi: Once, when Bana was in primary school, he invited a friend over. This was the first time he had someone over for the weekend.

Bana: I was about, uh, 11 or 12 years at that time, I was nervous because I kind of knew they were rigid and they were going to be like, is this person a Christian? Who are their parents? So they actually literally interrogated him. Um, so I saw that as a sign of like, don’t bring your friends home.

Lesedi: Bana grew tired of his family’s church. He hated the stuffy formal suits. And the four, five, sometimes six-hour sermons. And so in his early teens, he started sneaking out of the church to attend a more liberal, born again Pentecostal church. He felt he could explore his faith more freely there.

VCC YouTube: King of kings, Lord of Lords, mighty God. Glorious one. Oh, king of Israel, reign and rule…

Lesedi: This is the VCC. The Victory City Church in this video from their YouTube page. The pastor is an older white man with an American accent. He’s dressed casually in a loose-fitting blue shirt.

VCC: Set you’re spirit free. Holy Spirit, come. Come this morning…

Lesedi: Just in case you’re wondering, there are a lot of evangelical churches in Africa that are led by American pastors.

Bana: It was very lively. The music was lively. And then after service, there were games. They also had, like you knew that after service there were soda and there were snacks.

Valerie: [Laughs] Just like any kid.

Lesedi: Just like at home school days, always started with a prayer banner, did all the things you’re supposed to do. He made friends and took part in sports, but he knew he wasn’t the same as his peers.

Bana: Growing up, I, I kind of knew I was different, but I couldn’t point to it. Uh, like in school, like I had some feminine bits of me. So someone would call you like, quote unquote boy girl, or that you act like a girl or something like that.

Lesedi: In 2010, when Bana was 14, he realized what this difference was. He liked girls and boys.

Bana: There was someone that I really liked. I had a crush on this boy. And, um, I, I tried to approach them and they showed interest, but, and I don’t think they were queer. I think they just liked their attention that I was giving them. But we like told ourselves that we liked each other and that felt so good. I think that was my first like experience as a queer person.

Lesedi: When Bana realized he was queer, he couldn’t help but wonder…

Bana: Why doesn’t everyone feel the same way?

Lesedi: Bana couldn’t understand why boys didn’t talk about having crushes on other boys in the same way they’d speak about girls. Somehow, he knew he shouldn’t talk about it because people saw him as feminine. He didn’t want to bring up his attraction to boys. He was afraid people would treat him differently.

Bana: Even people are not queer or stigmatized for the way they look if they, they’re feminine or if just their body looks different. Like the, such we live in somehow trains you to like stigmatize people. So. I tried to really make up for it with being like successful in other forms.

Lesedi: Bana didn’t want to complicate things for himself. He had the choir school was going great. He even became a student leader, which was a sort of shield for him.

Bana: I was a perfect, I covered up for all like the stigmatization. Of course it was still there, but people were like, were more scared to like say to me in their face because I was an authority figure. Like you can’t now start abusing the clever kid in the class.

Lesedi: As a prefect, Bana had his ear to the ground. He was the first to find out what was going on at school. He heard all the gossip, and turns out he wasn’t the only one who was queer.

Bana: We had like a study group. So, um, they would be honest with me, like, oh, I really like that boy.

Lesedi: Bana’s study group was with a few other boys who shared the same secret as him. Bana could be himself. He was 16 and was just getting comfortable in his sexuality. And then one of his friends was outed.

Bana: So, uh, in my friend group, um, one, one of those boys had someone who was older and they were together and they caught them together in the dormitory. I don’t know if they were making out or what, I dunno, the particulars of the incident.

Lesedi: The student who called Bana’s friend in the dorm reported it to the dean. The dean gathered the school board and they turned to Bana and his study group for answers and proof. The dean wanted to build a case to expel the two students, so he pushed and pushed Bana and his friends for details, but the friends wanted to protect themselves and protect each other. So before going into the dean’s office that day, they decided they were going to deny everything.

Bana: He’s like, you know what? Now I’m going to suffer. All of you, you come back with a written confession of the truth. I was very, very, very scared. Very, very scared. I was almost about to break and I tell them, but also I realized that even if I tell them it was already done.

Lesedi: The school suspended Bana for two weeks.

Bana: They’re like, pack your bags and walk with all your property in front of the whole school and, and leave. It was a walk of shame. Everyone was looking the windows, where they going? That kind of thing. Yeah, so it was very, very bad. Of course, the point was to shame us to be able to like give in the person. But also to it ended up like re-stigmatizing us as well.

Lesedi: This changed everything in Bana’s life. After his walk of shame, he made his way home. His mom and siblings were waiting and angry. Bana says it was like he’d been accused of murder.

Bana: There is a saying in Uganda, [speaks in Luganda] like, if you’re a mom of a thief, for example. Uh, even if I was the worst person in the world, your mother or your family would still stand up for you.

Lesedi: In the past, his family made comments about him acting like a girl, but that’s all they’d ever done: comment. Maybe they had their suspicions, but they never said anything about his sexuality outright. But after the incident at school, his family didn’t want anyone thinking they had a gay son, so they took him to see a doctor.

Bana: Who carried out an anal examination to sort of prove that I was not gay.

Lesedi: Even the thought of a test like this is ridiculous. Human Rights Watch calls these anal examinations a form of sexual assault. And there’s no evidence that tests can prove that someone has engaged in same sex conduct.

Valerie: So you wake up one day, then they’re like, we are taking you to do a sexual activity examination. Did the school ask for it?

Bana: My parents were trying to just prove that our son is not what you think he is.

Lesedi: Bana says during the exam, the doctor asked him a long list of humiliating questions. He was only 16 and had never had sex, but that didn’t matter. The doctor gave him a lecture on the dangers of sleeping with men, the risks of sexually transmitted infections, and a whole lot of judgment.

Bana: One thing that I kept thinking was to like bottle everything down and like just go through this experience until I could get back to school with my friends and, and not have to deal with this.

Lesedi: But his family still wasn’t convinced. They wanted to make sure the quote unquote problem was solved, so they looked for other solutions to fix Bana.

Bana: My mom and my siblings were like, uh, we need to take him to a pastor and pray for him. So that’s how the whole conversion therapy thing began.

Lesedi: Conversion therapy. This is when Bana began to lose his singing voice.

So what is this so-called conversion therapy? It’s a range of bogus and harmful practices that attempt to change, suppress or divert one’s. Sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. It’s pseudoscience. Research consistently shows it can have severe psychological effects and that it’s not successful.

An investigation by Open Democracy in 2021 found that multiple clinics and hospitals in Uganda offered what they called anti-gay therapies. They’re often done through talk therapy, sometimes led by traditional healers, and in other cases, the therapist is a pastor.

Valerie: Like have, had you heard of it? Had you heard of conversion therapy before?

Bana: I hadn’t heard of it, but I knew that they were, because these, there were pastors who kept going on TV every day and saying that I come and we quote, unquote, rehabilitate your homosexuals.

Lesedi: Bana’s sister found a pastor who claimed he could cure Bana. Bana said the pastor would probe and probe and probe for hours. He was trying to get as much information out of him as possible. When he wasn’t in sessions with the pastor, they made him help out around the church.

Bana: I would go every day and have sessions, pray with him, and then, uh, he would sort of psychoanalyze me. Mm. Like sit down and say, okay, what is causing this? Why do you think of this? What do you think when you’re thinking of this?

Lesedi: Conversion therapy has been rejected by mainstream medical and mental health organizations for decades. But because discrimination against LGBTQI+ people continues, so does conversion therapy. In 2020, an independent United Nations expert called for a global ban on conversion therapy. They said the practices are quote unquote, wholly unscientific and contradict international human rights law.

Bana spent every single day of his two-week suspension in conversion therapy, that ended his relationship with his family.

Bana: I was used to them, for example, assuming that I have no friends. Yeah. Or being strict about my movements.

Valerie: Okay.

Bana: Restricting who I could watch on TV.

Valeria: Okay.

Bana: Or not believing me in much of anything. Yeah. But I really, I wished they, they stood up for me more.

Lesedi: Bana went back to school, but because everyone knew he’d been suspended. It changed how he was treated. What’s more, Bana stopped singing in the church choir. He couldn’t stand seeing the same pastor who led conversion therapy. Watch him sing. He felt broken.

Bana: I cut out everything social. Everything social, I cut it out. Weekends I would just be in my bed sleeping.

Valerie: Mm-hmm.

Bana: Or I would be reading.

Valerie: You became a loner.

Bana: Yeah.

Lesedi: When the school term came to an end, Bana was really looking forward to the holidays. He needed a break from the constant judgment. He thought he could put it all behind him, but his family wasn’t ready to move on just yet. The potential of conversion therapy to change Bana was still on their minds.

They sent him off to a camp for at-risk youths. It was run by the Anglican Church Bana attended with his family growing up. And there Bana said he was clumped with a bunch of other so-called delinquents.

Bana: Girls who have gotten pregnant when they were young, girls who have had abortions, uh, drug addicts, uh, of course, and caught unquote homosexuals

Lesedi: Every day started with prayers and then a session with the pastor. Bana says they’d ask questions like, who recruited you? They’d ask if he knew any other gay people. He realized that if he said no one, the whole thing would just drag on and on. So he started making up names and places just to get out of it.

Valerie: What was supposed to happen to you in this process of, of therapy and all, or who are you going to be when it’s all over?

Bana: They, they were not clear about that honestly. They are not clear about like whether I would entirely change and be straight. One thing I know that they were clear about probably is like, I’ll live a more Godly life and stop having thoughts about homosexuality.

Lesedi: They try to get rid of any trace of femininity in Bana. He had to walk a certain way, talk a certain way, and if he did any of it wrong, his accountability partner would report it to the pastor. The church took away his phone, so he didn’t have any access to his music, and Bana felt unchanged. What was changing was his relationship to the church, but his family weren’t budging.

Bana: They told me if we hear of any of these other incidents, we are not paying for your tuition. We are not doing anything. You go and live with your homosexual friends.

Lesedi: Baba’s family sent him to conversion camp eight times. Every school holiday for the next two and a half years. The weeks were long and even though it ate away at him, Bana kept going to please his family.

Bana: I felt guilty. They made it seem like they had invested so much in me as an individual, and I’d squandered it by turning out gay.

Lesedi: Fast forward to 2014, Bana’s final year of high school. It was also the year Uganda enacted an earlier, less oppressive version of the Anti Homosexuality Act. Bana said there were whispers of how it would become even more dangerous to be queer, but he says he was too young to understand what it truly meant at the time. His big questions were about God and those who call themselves God’s people.

Bana: I was like, you know what? If I’m to change, God will do it. He knows me and he knows my heart. If he really doesn’t want it, you want. I don’t need this pastor or this person trying to help me change. It’s between me and God.

Lesedi: Bana decided it was time to reconnect with his queer friends. The ones from the school study group. He told them about what happened. About the conversion camps and how difficult it was. Then right before the next holiday, one of his friends surprised him with an iPod, and Bana had music again.

Bana: So I would put on a hoodie and then I would put on ear pieces and be in church or be doing all these things. And like zone out. And that was like what, like, kept me going.

Lesedi: Bana graduated and left home, no more school, no one forcing him to go to conversion therapy. Finally, the ordeal was over.

10 years have passed and Bana is 28. He thought the days of seeing his pastor’s face were behind him, but just a few months ago, he saw him again on TikTok. The church was advertising the very same camps he went to. Those videos have since been taken down for hate speech, but other videos are still online.

At the top of one of them, in big, bold letters, it says, “The demon of homosexuality.” The video is captioned, “Let’s pray for our children and our country,” and the comment section is flooded with praying hands emojis. And flames. In the 2023 Anti Homosexuality Act, there’s a subsection on the quote unquote, rehabilitation of homosexuals.

Basically, if a person gets convicted of homosexuality, the court can order rehabilitation. Bana says the act has emboldened churches in Uganda regardless of what the rest of the world has to say.

As for Bana’s faith…

Valerie: Given the conversion therapies and then your complicated and difficult relationship with your family, have you ever felt like at that point God had forsaken you?

Bana: Not really. I felt like there were warnings of like, be cautious of God’s people. Be cautious of these people that, uh, that claim to believe in God.

Lesedi: Bana cut ties with his siblings. He says he needed to figure out who he is without them. He’s found peace surrounding himself with people who accept him. He started attending an online church. It’s non-denominational. They’re less restrictive, and since the services are online, Bana says he can avoid coming across nasty people.

Bana: Church people are flawed. Yes, but God is not flawed. God is understanding.

Lesedi: But he still finds it hard to sing.

Valerie: Do you think you can find it in you to just sing for us? Even if it’s 1, 2, 3 verses, can you sing it as Bana, the choir person?

Bana: I can’t, I can’t to, I’ve taken years without singing. I loved it, but, um, I dunno if it’s still, it’s still with me.

Lesedi: It is been more than 10 years since Bana sang Gospel music. He may have lost his singing voice, but he’s still got plenty to say.

Bana: I don’t know how to put it in a more kind way. The Ugandan church is the most weak. Church leaders are the weakest. So me as a queer man. I don’t think they have moral authority to speak up against my sexuality. Or homosexuality. The only one who has the moral authority is God.

Lesedi: This episode was reported for Radio Workshop by Valerie, an investigative journalist based in Uganda. Valerie used a pseudonym because she could be prosecuted and imprisoned for working on a story in support of the LGBTQI+ community.

Naomi Grewan produced the story. It was edited by me with support from Rob Rosenthal.

Additional production assistance from Sam Broun.

Jo Jackson is our managing producer. Mike Rahfaldt is our executive producer. Music by Qhamani Sambu at Edible Audio in Cape Town. Sound Engineering by Jo Jackson, Fayfay and Mike Rahfaldt. Script fact-checking by Brian Pellot.

A special thank you to Bana for agreeing to share his story and to Hindenberg for supporting Radio Workshop’s projects across Africa with audio editing software.

This episode and the work of Radio Workshop would not be possible without the support of the Stephen J. Hendrickson Foundation, the Ann Levy Trust, the Shin Creek Trust and the Ford Foundation. Find out more about what we do and donate to support our work at radioworkshop.org.