Members of International House of Prayer (IHOP) pray over Africa: A still from Roger Ross Williams 'God Loves Uganda'
*Interview by Maryam Kazeem & Derica Shields
Roger Ross Williams is perhaps better known for getting Kanye'd at the Oscars than for being the first black filmmaker to win an Academy award in the Documentary Shorts category, but we have a feeling that's about to change. The producer-turned-director's latest, God Loves Uganda, is an uncompromising look at a particularly sinister element of U.S. engagement with Africa: the implication of American citizens in fomenting and funding violent homophobia in Uganda.
Shot by sumptuous shot, Ross Williams makes the argument that Christian evangelicals are using Uganda as a proxy for waging the culture war against "sexual immorality" that they lost in America. Anti-abortion, anti-feminist and anti-homosexuality, American ministers flood the country with money and missionaries who spread the fundamentalist message. By exposing this link, Ross Williams' first feature length documentary blows apart the assumption that Africa is somehow 'naturally' homophobic (in contrast to Western nation's progressive. evolved politics), instead showing the various dynamics that inform attitudes to homosexuality in Uganda. He shows how U.S. Christian Evangelicals provide the money and invective that sustains Uganda's state sanctioned homophobia.
Excavating and explaining the complex relationship between U.S. fundamentalist Christian Evangelicalism, Uganda's anti-gay legislation, homophobic attitudes, and the boom of Christian evangelicalism in that country is God Loves Uganda's primary achievement. But the film is also pertinent to the continent more broadly. God Loves Uganda feels particularly urgent in a moment when an Anti-Pornography Bill has joined MP David Bahati's "Anti-Homosexuality Bill" (aka the "Kill the Gays Bill") on the table in Ugandan parliament; when queer people have faced trial in Cameroon and Malawi; when Western nations have cut aid to countries with laws prohibiting homosexuality; and when legislation has proved powerless to protect queer people from harm in South Africa.
We sat down with Roger Ross Williams to discuss the giddying confluence of money, sex and power in Uganda, and what he wants to say to U.S. evangelicals.
OKA: Why did you decide to make God Loves Uganda?
Roger Ross Williams: I grew up in the African-American Baptist Church, my father was the head deacon of the church, my sister is a minister, my uncle was a pastor of another church so it’s basically the family business. Growing up was very difficult - being a gay man - so I have always been fascinated with the power of religion. When I was making my last film, Music by Prudence in Zimbabwe, one of the things I noticed was the deep-seated spirituality, and the hold the church had; there’s a church on every corner and all-night prayer vigils. When I heard about what was going in Uganda I was curious because of my personal background.
OKA: Before you were a director you were a producer did you produce anything on the continent? What drew you to make Music by Prudence?
RRW: No. All I just woke up one day and decided I wanted to make a documentary in Africa. I had never been to Sub Saharan-Africa so I was fascinated by it. You see a million films, but most are made by white Americans - not that there are many African-American documentarians anyway - but I wanted to bring an African-American perspective to the continent. I wanted to have that unique dialogue, find the commonality between me and the subjects, and let the subjects tell their own stories. There are so many white savior films - it’s always a white guy saving brown people - and when I heard about Prudence I wanted to make a film where the hero was an African.
OKA: Is there a common thread in the kinds of stories that you tell?
RRW: It’s definitely the outsider perspective. Because that’s what I am: I’m a double minority. To some extent making films is playing out your childhood: not feeling part of a community yet being in that community; being in the church and not feeling part of the church. It’s funny, because in the suburb of my town we were the only black family living in a white suburb but the church we went to was black. So I lived on the white side of town and went to the black church with all the people from the other side of town. I’ve always identified with the outsider, with stories of alienation. Those are the stories I’m looking for and trying to tell.
Bishop Christopher Senyonjo at Uganda Pride in 2012
The Film: God Loves Uganda
OKA: There’s a scene in God Loves Uganda where you’re interviewing an American couple and you manage to make them look pretty sinister, shooting them from a distance and with a wide angle. Throughout the film there are subtle aesthetic choices that advance the argument you’re making in the film in understated ways. Can you talk about some of these choices?
RRW: In every shot that I set up I want to tell a story in that shot and show the irony. With Jesse and Michelle, the couple you mentioned I shot on a golf course because when you think of Uganda you don’t really think of golf courses. I used to call them Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie because they’re very good looking and having them sit there, it’s almost like they’re at a country club. So it was definitely a choice to kind of allude to imperialism. In addition, I was obsessed with the street preachers because they are everywhere. In their repertoire, they’re always preaching about sexual sin, and they definitely helped show the atmosphere in the country.
OKA: You make a strong argument for the connection between imperialism and contemporary U.S. activities in Uganda and that’s particularly captured in scenes like the one at IHOP where they are praying and laying hands on particular parts of the globe.
RRW: I felt very strongly about communicating that connection, and that’s a huge part of what that scene is about. It’s also about Uganda which evangelicals feel has this Biblical significance, being at the head of the Nile. There’s also the idea that Uganda is the “pearl of Africa” as Winston Churchill called it, and that “it is now time to have that pearl harvested”. The same way we mine minerals, they were mining souls. Uganda is a place to go and build an army to do their bidding. Without saying it explicitly, I wanted to show that Uganda is the number one destination for American missionaries. And within Uganda they are welcomed because they are this white face of hope and power - everything America stands for.
OKA: What about the prayer rally scenes? Did you feel any ambivalence to showing these scenes of fervent worship on camera? What were you trying to communicate?
RRW: I definitely wanted people to think about what it feels like to be in that situation. It’s very intense in Uganda, but also at IHOP (International House of Prayer) in the States. At IHOP they have Christian rock playing 24/7, which hasn’t stopped playing in 13 years, and it gets really intense. In the prayer rallies, people become almost possessed, they’re getting demons out and it’s such theatre. When we went, people were on the floor, sweating, rolling around and speaking in tongues. But it was shocking to me because they were young, hip and passionate people. A lot of the young people come from troubled backgrounds and through religion they found something “healthy” to be passionate about. People accused me of sensationalizing things but actually after the Sundance Labs I toned down some of the footage because it was too intense for the audience.
OKA: Can you talk us through the decision to have two ministers - Reverend Kaoma and Bishop Christopher - framing the film’s argument?
RRW: It was important that the voice of reason came from Africa, that Ugandans were coming up with their own solutions. I wanted to show that there is already a discussion going on, and work being done. Earlier on in the filmmaking process I’d become so focused on the anti-gay pastors in Uganda and people at IHOP that there was almost too much of them. At the Sundance Lab someone said the film seemed like a big ad for IHOP. So for balance, I added in Reverend Kapyah Kaoma and Bishop Christopher Senyonjo. Kapyah’s story stands out, particularly the subject of his research and the fact that he’s a Zambian in the church who identified a problem and spoke out against that problem. Bishop Christopher was thrown out of his Church and ostracized. This is a man who is so sweet and truly believes that he has to stand up for LGBT people because it’s what Jesus would do. He strongly felt that this was wrong and that he couldn’t just sit and watch.
OKA: When you showed the footage from David Kato’s funeral we got a peek at activists but didn’t really get to hear from LGBTQ Africans in the film. Did you interview any black gay Ugandans?
RRW: I interviewed lots of activists and ultimately I decided not to make that film. I wanted to make a film that was an argument about faith. I could have made an entire film about activists I didn’t feel that was going to enable the kind of dialogue I wanted to encourage within the Church, rather, it would immediately alienate the Church. My goal with this film was to create a dialogue between the two sides, the affirming and non-affirming sides of religion. Essentially, what’s going on in Uganda is faith-based: that is where all the justification for the Bill and the hatred comes from, and not just LGBT people, but single unwed mothers, and anyone who falls outside of this very strict Biblical interpretation of morality. So it was really important that the narrative was about faith.
OKA: So the first time you were in Uganda the people you interviewed didn’t know you were gay and the second time you went, someone outed you. What was that experience like?
RRW: Some people I’d talked to before, refused to talk to me. I had in my mind the BBC crew that had been run out of town. They were making a comedic BBC documentary ‘The Worst Place In The World to Be Gay’ and Scott Mills would interview the scary anti-gay pastors asking ‘do you know a gay person?’, and they’d say ‘no’ and he’d say I’m gay and they’d freak out. But they tried to do this to David Bahati who called the police and the BBC crew were basically forced to leave. There was a terrifying incident where I was surrounded and the people who ambushed me were saying ‘we know you’re gay’. They decided that they were going to pray for me rather than do anything else, but one of the really scary, powerful pastors held up the Bible and “this book says these people must be killed.” I later found out that he sent an email saying “don’t worry we’re going to take care of him ourselves,” so I was afraid. But then there are activists living this everyday, fighting this every day. I’m American, I’m in and out, I have security, so I really had no right to feel scared when there are people living this, fighting this.
Pastor Solomon Male at an Anti-Gay Rally in Mbarara, Uganda in 2010. Image Credit: Benedicte Desrus
The Scramble for Uganda
OKA: So how is homosexuality being instrumentalized in Uganda specifically?
RRW: Pastors are competing for power in Uganda, and it’s extremely complicated. At one point Martin Ssempa accused Robert Kayanja - the most powerful pastor - of being gay. Ssempa held a press conference and brought out eight boys who he said were molested by Kayanja. The boys are taken into custody where they change their testimony to say that Ssempa paid them to say that they were molested and then Ssempa gets accused of framing Kayanja and Ssempa goes on trial. I filmed all of this but it was too much to include. But I wanted to show that they use this hatred against each other to bring each other down. The government brings out the Bill whenever they want to distract people and bring out a bogeyman. And it’s right out of the American playbook: you use a wedge issue to drive people to the poles. The government doesn’t want you to think about the corruption. The Bill is back on the table in Uganda because of the oil scandal right now surrounding the oil reserves. And they have successfully distracted everyone: the Western media is all focused on the Bill, again using homosexuals and minorities as scapegoats.
OKA: From the street preachers to the pastors showing S&M gay porn to congregants, the film captured a seemingly prurient fascination with ‘other’ sexualities. And in communicating that supposed repulsion there’s a real sense of performance and theatre.
RRW: The pastor showing porn is Martin Ssempa, and Martin Ssempa is all about theatre. Whenever cameras come around he’s so good at playing it up. He demonstrates on the stage. He takes a piece of paper and rolls it up while saying “so they insert it” he’s showing it on stage he’s demonstrating “and the intestines come out and they are ruined, they usually die and if they don’t it’s because they are flown to South Africa to have their butts sewn up.” Another pastor, Solomon Maleheld a rally in David Kato’s village to send a message that this should not become a place of pilgrimage - this while David Kato’s mother looked on from her house. Male is the one who says that lesbianism causes breast cancer and ovarian cancer and that women in the country can’t find tampons because all the gay men are using them to plug themselves up [laughs] And I had to sit there with a straight face, like “really!? That’s interesting”. It’s tough spending time with these guys.
Martin Ssempa demonstrates the mechanics of anal sex using fruit and his hand on NBS news
OKA: What do you think about the relationship between socioeconomic status and the church? Because, let’s not mince words, it’s a lucrative business, and the church provides access to wealth.
RRW: Right. At first I wondered “Why does he flash his watch?” And then I realized, it’s the same as Creflo Dollar and Reverend Ike back in the day. There’s this whole idea that “if you follow me you can be rich too”. It’s the prosperity gospel. In a sense Kayanja’s old school. What a younger Pastor like Martin Ssempa has realized, is that you can be rich by playing up to Western expectations of what you should be doing. They all realise that every pastor has to have his niche and if you climb to top then you can be rich like Kayanja. So one guy’s niche is orphans, and another guy chooses homosexuality. As an issue homosexuality is lucrative because you can get money from the Americans who will support you financially. In the film Bahati admits that his donations from Western churches tripled when he introduced the Bill. They’re cleaning up. Ssempa had a church at Makerere University and all his money was coming from this mega church in Las Vegas. Even when Uganda had clearly gone too far, the Western funders took a long time to denounce Ssempa. When they finally did, Rick Warren did a YouTube Video denouncing the Bill and Martin Ssempa did a response – and there was a back and forth. We wanted to have that fight in the film but in some ways the already complicated story was getting too complicated.
2010 - Kampala, Uganda - Ugandan Pastor Martin Ssempa warns press against what he calls the danger of homosexuality at a press conference in Kampala Photo Credit: Benedicte Desrus/Sipa Press
Uganda's Powerplayers
OKA: Can you expand on the idea that U.S. evangelicals are taking the lost war against homosexuality to Uganda? How specifically - aside from providing donations - are they making this happen?
RRW: Ugandans are fed the Western/American media diet too. If you go to Uganda and watch TV it’s the Christian channels that have the strongest signal [laughs]: PTL, Trinity Broadcasting and God TV. And all the superstars of televangelism are loved Joyce Meyer, Benny Hinn are so popular in Uganda (worldwide black people love Benny Hinn!) it’s crazy. So when he goes to Uganda he’s like a rockstar, it’s like Bono, wait, it is Bono! Benny Hinn does that thing where he’ll touch someone and the whole church falls down, even Kayanja falls down. And here’s Kayanja who is the most powerful, wealthy pastor and owns the biggest single family residence in Uganda. His entire career has been formed by Americans. TL Osbourne who is the father of the prosperity gospel and Joe Olstein who took Kayanja under their wing when he was 17 years old preaching in his village. They came in and were like “this kid is gonna be our superstar.” They created him. And now he has the biggest church, 3000 satellite churches, he’s one of the biggest faith healers in all of east Africa with homes in Dallas and Kampala. People aspire to be him.
OKA: You’ve said that the film was made specifically with the Christian community in mind, but what about the American LGBTQ community? There can be a tendency to patronize queer Africans. Does the film speak to that at all?
RRW: We’ve been working with a lot of LGBTQ people and that’s important because it’s a global struggle, it’s not American, Ugandan, Nigerian or Russian. It’s global. That voice needs to band together in an organized fashion. On the other side the fundamentalist evangelicals are well organized, they have an amazing ground game, and you can’t even compete with the money. They have a head start so it’s really going to take a coalition of LGBTQ organizations, and moderate and progressive churches to say here’s the alternative.
OKA: This isn’t just happening within the Church. Do you have any thoughts on the way that African leaders are hijacking pan-African rhetoric to frame their anti-gay legislation as resistance to Western dominance?
RRW: Right, and there are a couple reasons for that in Uganda specifically. During the time of Idi Amin evangelical Christianity was outlawed. So the Pentecostal church went underground and became connected with the pan-African movement because they were both underground. The revolution happened, and Idi Amin was ousted and the evangelical movement immediately co-opted the pan-Africanist message. Mike Bickle (the founder of IHOP) tells this story about being on the ground the day Idi Amin was ousted, with bullets flying past his head and all that. And as he puts it, he was there with other American evangelicals to take that country. So I wanted to expose the real imperialist forces as American evangelicals. They’re saying that homosexuality didn’t exist in Africa or that it’s a western import, which is not true. The King of Buganda was openly gay and everyone accepted that. Before the arrival of Scott Lively, there were gay bars In Kampala. The evangelicals were very smart to co-opt that language.
Roger Ross Williams at Sundance London.
Photo credit: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for Sundance London
The Reception
OKA: How did you get access to some of the people featured in the film? Have they seen the film and how did they respond?
RRW: Persistence. One of the things that Mike Nichols (the founder of IHOP) is that any press for IHOP is good. For people like Kayanja I represented this American coming there to make a film about him. When I went to meet Kayanja he sat down on his throne and said “I knew you were coming, God told me you were coming”. He would do his giant crusades and drag me onstage and say “I have an Oscar winning director following me making a film about me!” It shows that it was about ego and a deep belief in what he was doing. We flew Jono Hall (the media director of IHOP who’s in the film) and Stuart (who went to Uganda with Lou Engle) to NY and showed them the film. We sat down afterwards for four hours and had a conversation about the film. It’s probably very tough for them because they’re in the film and it’s hard not to be defensive. But the glimmer of hope came when Stuart said to me “this makes me think a little bit about how we’re spreading our message in Africa.” I think that Jono was very disappointed. He was the reason we got the access we did – he convinced Pickle and Lou Engle to talk to us – and he couldn’t help but be disappointed, because he wanted this to be a propaganda film about IHOP. But they have their own resources for that: they have a dedicated media department with a thousand employees at IHOP and a $30 million year operating budget; they turn out an incredible amount of media every year.Kayanja hasn’t seen the film. He lives in a very isolated bubble and he would have no way of seeing it because we haven’t screened in Kampala. We did screen at the Dallas International Film Festival, but he didn’t come.
OKA: When are you planning on screening it in Kampala?
RRW: I don’t know because you can’t really – we would probably be shut down pretty quickly and arrested. David Cecilwho did a play in Kampala was recently arrested and deported. We are screening April 30th in Kenya, where we’ll also have a panel with the Chief Justice of Nairobi and Bishop Christopher and we’ll be bringing some of the activists over. So that’s our big east African premiere.
OKA: What were you hoping they’d take from the film?
RRW: I’m not saying that IHOP is responsible for the bill or played any role in the bill but the foot-soldiers and kids on the ground who don’t understand the culture and are preaching a message of intolerance – they need to take responsibility for that message and how that message gets translated into violence. And that’s what I explained to them, and he (Jono) was like “we’re not responsible for that”. That’s also what I said to Jesse and Michelle who said the Bill was ‘not a big deal’.
OKA: Have audiences been able to process the various aspects of the film?
RRW: No single audience member is going to digest everything. But what we’ve been finding in screenings is that people walk away really engaged in the issue and want to know more. Our Q&A’s are always really great because the whole theatre stays and I will stand outside in the lobby for an hour and a half because people want to talk and know more. So we’ve developed these discussion guides for Christians, evangelicals and they give you timelines, a history, links, definitions so you can become more engaged. And so that when people host screenings at their churches they can have information and can have discussions in their own communities about the issues.
OKA: It’s great that the project anticipates discussion. Obviously nothing’s going to happen overnight, but it feels at the moment that not many people (and certainly not the mainstream) are thinking about how all of these elements work together to create this situation.
RRW: Right, and when we went to Sundance we took part in the annual Windrider Forum. This organization brought 150 theology students to Sundance and we had a panel in Park City. We were nervous but it was a really good discussion. It was clear that the film is affecting people here and making them think about their own relationship to the evangelical church. It’s an uphill climb but it’s happening. And I think that when people watch this film they see such extremes that they think about their own communities, because this is an extreme case but it makes people wonder whether that’s where they’re headed too. This is what would happen if the evangelicals took over America; this is what intolerance and hatred look like because when you unleash it, it devours everyone.