Re-Membering Mwanga, Mourning the Martyrs

The most authoritative textual accounts of the ‘Uganda martyrs’ pivot around the commission of ‘sodomy’ by Kabaka (king) Mwanga with his pages in the 1880s. This chapter asks how commemoration of the martyrdoms coexists with the claim that same-sex intimacy is alien to Ugandan culture. The chapter begins with a methodological discussion of the distinction and overlap between memory and history. It offers a historical account of the production of memory about the martyrdoms from the time of their occurrence to the present. It then offers an ethnographic account of contemporary memorialisation, arguing that Ugandans today relate to the question of sex in the story of the martyrdoms in the modes of disinterest, displacement, denial, and disidentification. Through a mapping of public memory and a historicisation of its narratives, the chapter makes visible the genealogies of homophobia as well as the possibilities for sexual dissidence that lurk within public culture.