Tough sell: marketing Uganda to gay travellers

 

Tourists at Lake Victoria's Ssese Islands in Uganda. The country's tourism representatives and private sector businesses have rallied to assure gay and lesbian travellers that they have nothing to fear. PHOTO | FILE  

By AMY FALLON

In Summary

• The country's tourism representatives and private sector businesses have rallied to assure gay and lesbian travellers that they have nothing to fear.
• In a move that raised eyebrows, members of the Uganda Tourism Board (UTB) and other industry representatives from Uganda met recently with the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association (IGLTA), a gay-friendly global travel network.

Uganda is probably the last place a gay holidaymaker would want to visit, but tourism bosses in the east African nation are nevertheless trying to achieve the seemingly impossible.

Earlier this year the east African nation drew international condemnation after passing anti-homosexuality legislation — since struck down — that could have seen gays jailed for life.

The country's tourism representatives and private sector businesses, however, have rallied to assure gay and lesbian travellers that they have nothing to fear.

"No one is actually being killed," asserted Babra Adoso of the Association of Uganda Tour Operators. "We are not aware of anybody who has been asked at the airport 'what is your sexual inclination?' or been turned away," she said.

In a move that raised eyebrows, members of the Uganda Tourism Board (UTB) and other industry representatives from Uganda met recently with the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association (IGLTA), a gay-friendly global travel network. The September 8 meeting, organised by the Africa Travel Association (ATA) and held at their New York headquarters, came a month after Uganda's constitutional court struck down the anti-gay legislation on a technicality.

Still, under a standing colonial-era Penal Code, anyone in Uganda — including expatriates and visitors — can in theory still be jailed for "carnal knowledge against the order of nature". Ugandan MPs are also attempting to reintroduce the tougher bill in parliament.

Serious image problem

Two Britons living in Uganda have been deported in the past 18 months for homosexuality-related crimes. Adoso, however, is adamant that Uganda — known as the "Pearl of Africa" and before the outcry over the law designated by Lonely Planet as a top travel destination — is safe for gays and lesbians and that the country had been "misunderstood".

The legislation, she said, was for the "protection of children" against paedophiles.

"Children have been recruited into acts," Adoso said. "We've had stories of how children were forcefully taken to Kenya and recruited into the act and forced to actually, you know, pose nude and everything else."

Gay rights groups, she said, were "possibly using exaggerated stories" about their own predicament in order to get funding from overseas.

The Ugandan Tourism Board admitted the country was now battling a serious image problem. Sylvia Kalembe, the UTB's officer in charge of product development, said she and others who attended the meeting in New York were "in shock at how people perceive us".

"Someone has turned it around and used it against Uganda," she said of the international condemnation — which included US Secretary of State John Kerry likening the law to anti-Semitic legislation in Nazi Germany.

Selling Idi Amin

John Tanzella, the head of the IGLTA, said the body appreciated being invited to meet with Ugandan authorities, but added that their 90-minute discussion was a "starting point only" — signalling the country still had a way to go if it wanted to attract gay and lesbian tourists