•  
  •  
 

Abstract

Hamilton’s paper, delivered during the 2008 Annual Meeting in Chicago, uses the hagiography of Charles Lwanga and the Martyrs of Uganda to reveal an unrelenting problem of the Church – the ways in which the assumptions of heternormativity and sodomitical discourse drown out the voices of those who do not fall into heteronormative sexual and/or gendered identities, and lead to the open persecution, imprisonment, and torture of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons in Uganda, and in fact all over Africa. Casting those with ‘othered’ sexual identities as evil, or even simply turning a deaf ear to the persecution faced by those persons, has both explicitly and implicitly added to their suffering, including ignoring the plight of AIDS victims. The solution may lie in our efforts to understand the deities of Africa.

Comments

In 2023, all issues of the Journal of the Black Catholic Theological Symposium became available electronically on this site with the permission of the original publisher, Fortuity Press/Hamilton Publishing. All articles now carry the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivatives License (CC-BY-NC-ND).

COinS