Ugandan lesbian activist Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera was honored October 1 with Sweden’s Right Livelihood Award, also known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize.”
Nabagesera, 35, has been a powerhouse LGBT activist in Uganda founding Freedom and Roam Uganda, an LGBT rights organization; Uganda Beach Pride; opened Kampala’s first openly gay bar; and this year she launched Bombastic Magazine and Kuchu Times, an online radio and television station. Kuchu is slang for LGBT in Swahili.
The magazine was distributed widely throughout Uganda and the online radio and TV show has had 1.3 million views, reported Reuters.
“Other parts of Africa have really fallen in love with the idea,” she said in the release. “They are sending us their work to share. It’s the only [LGBT] platform we have now on the continent.”
She has been beaten, threatened, and arrested for her LGBT campaign work, noted members of the Swedish Parliament.
A majority of Ugandans, 96 percent, disapprove of homosexuality, according to a 2013 Pew Research Center survey, reported the Human Rights Campaign. In 2014, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni signed the so-called Jail the Gays bill that was later struck down by the country’s Constitutional Court due to a technicality.
HRC noted that, despite the odds against Ugandan LGBT rights activists in a country where homosexuality is criminalized and a social taboo, the community has shown resilience and strategic skills as it courageously works for its rights.
Nabagesera has been able to make strides for LGBT rights through legal avenues, noted the parliamentary leaders, reported Reuters.
Nabagesera, along with her colleague the late David Kato, successfully sued Uganda’s Rolling Stone newspaper for invasion of privacy in 2011 after it outed them as gay under the headline “Hang Them.”
Weeks later Kato was brutally murdered.
Other 2015 award winners include Tony de Brun and the people of the Marshall Islands; Sheila Watt-Cloutier (Canada); and Gino Strada/Emergency (Italy).
The awards, founded in 1980, are presented annually in the Swedish parliament.
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