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Saturday, January 30, 2010

Caught In The Act

Scene:
Courtroom in Kampala, September 2010

Defendants:
Ten university students, six men, four women. One business owner, a middle-aged woman

May it please the Court.

The accused are charged, individually and severally, under Section 195 of Uganda’s Penal Code, with:

Conspiracy to engage in homosexuality;
promoting homosexuality;
operating a brothel for homosexuality;
failure to disclose homosexuality;
aidingandabettinghomosexuality;
touchinganotherpersonwithintentofhomosexuality;
and terrorism, sedition, the eating of swine, the shaving of beards, wearing cloth of two fabrics, all abominations unto the Lord……

I beg your pardon, Your Honour. Yes, I understand. The Laws of Uganda, not the Laws of Leviticus.


You can read the rest of my courtroom satire on Uganda's proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill in The Last Word column, in February's issue of The Africa Report. It comes out on Monday.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Travel well, Howard Zinn (1922 - 2010)

Thank you for your life, and your work.

Your People's History of the United States taught me more than all the years of my degree in economics and politics. Gave me a lifelong set of tools to excavate the untold histories of my own country - and the world.

When I first saw the news yesterday, what rose in my mind was Denise Levertov's poem, September 1961:

they have told us / the road leads to the sea / and given / the language into our hands


September 1961

This is the year the old ones,
the old great ones
leave us alone on the road.

The road leads to the sea.
We have the words in our pockets,
obscure directions. The old ones

have taken away the light of their presence,
we see it moving away over a hill
off to one side.

They are not dying,
they are withdrawn
into a painful privacy

learning to live without words.
E. P. "It looks like dying"--Williams: "I can't
describe to you what has been

happening to me"--
H. D. "unable to speak."
The darkness

twists itself in the wind, the stars
are small, the horizon
ringed with confused urban light-haze.

They have told us
the road leads to the sea,
and given

the language into our hands.
We hear
our footsteps each time a truck

has dazzled past us and gone
leaving us new silence.
One can't reach

the sea on this endless
road to the sea unless
one turns aside at the end, it seems,

follows
the owl that silently glides above it
aslant, back and forth,

and away into deep woods.

But for us the road
unfurls itself, we count the
words in our pockets, we wonder

how it will be without them, we don't
stop walking, we know
there is far to go, sometimes

we think the night wind carries
a smell of the sea...
 
         
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