Ketifa's uncle kept her tied up until the morning. After he finally released her, he ordered her to do housework. She was cleaning when she saw them coming: the same members of the community council who had murdered Sharon. Ketifa ran out the back gate and fled by bus straight for Uganda's border with Kenya, believing nowhere in the country would be safe. At the border crossing at Malaba, she learned that to get to Nairobi, Kenya's large capital city, would be expensive, and to live there even more so. Ketifa recalled how, as a child, a Kenyan classmate of hers had mentioned that Kenya accepts people who are chased out of other countries, letting them live in large camps. Along the side of the road, she spotted a food vendor; she lied and told him that she was on her way to visit a friend in one of these camps. Could he direct her?In March 2014, a group of 23 LGBT Ugandans showed up outside a UN office in Nairobi, Kenya, seeking refugee status. They had come to a country that remains deeply homophobic and still punishes same-sex activity with up to 14 years in prison.
With the anti-gay fervor growing in Uganda, Ketifa wasn't the only one to leave the country. A few weeks later, on March 11, a group of 23 LGBT Ugandans appeared on the front lawn of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees' (UNHCR) office in Nairobi. They wished to register themselves as lesbian, gay, and transgender refugees. Most were in their late teens or 20s, and most were men. They came from all over Uganda—some were working class, others were university educated. A Ugandan priest and LGBT ally in Kampala had directed them to the office.The priest had been a secret adviser to the gay community since 1999. After local newspapers reported that two men had married each other in Kampala, he published an op-ed condemning the wave of homophobia erupting in Uganda. At the end of his article, he listed his phone number. LGBT people started calling, and his home soon became a haven for Ugandan gays. "It was a safe place where people could speak about their orientation in a way they never could before," he said. "My approach was to help people to accept who they were and to be aware of homophobia in society and ensure that they didn't get themselves lynched."
After the decision to expedite the refugees' claims, the UNHCR, in partnership with HIAS, placed some of them in apartments in a poor neighborhood of Nairobi, where they lived in small rooms and sometimes shared beds. The ability of refugees to remain in Nairobi depended on the traditionally lax enforcement of Kenyan law, which requires all refugees to live in either Kakuma or Dadaab, another large refugee camp in the north.But the Ugandans arrived at a time when refugees in Kenya were in the crosshairs of the country's security forces. After al Shabaab terrorists sieged Nairobi's Westgate Mall and killed more than 60 people in September 2013, the Kenyan government needed to at least appear to be taking steps to root out the group. Refugees became the easiest targets for the country's war on terror. In April 2014, the police swept hundreds off the streets in the Somali quarter of Nairobi, temporarily detaining them in the Moi International Sports Center, a soccer stadium built in the late 80s for the AllAfrica Games. Soon, the refugees were relocated to the camps.In late March 2014, police raided the apartment holding the LGBT refugees and jailed them. The UNHCR negotiated their release before they could be shipped out of the city, and with no other choice, placed them briefly in an upscale hotel. It wasn't long, though, before the police discovered them. The officers threatened to deport the whole group back to Uganda. Once again left with limited options, the UNHCR persuaded the cops to bus the refugees immediately to Kakuma, the refugee camp in northern Kenya Ketifa had fled to.
When I visited Kakuma last October, De Langhe, who was transferred from the camp to Nairobi in May, greeted me in an open-air room filled with old wooden benches. Every asylum seeker arriving at Kakuma in the past two decades had passed through that room. De Langhe led me to a small office. Covering the walls, shelves held fat, three-ring binders. Inside, they contained the names from a 2011 census conducted to determine who, among the tens of thousands of people qualifying for food rations, actually still lived in the camp.
As De Langhe and her team worked through the asylum claims of Uganda's LGBT refugees, she expected that their arrival was just a brief anomaly in her refugeeheavy corner of the world. But soon, more LGBT refugees arrived—one or two each month at first, then at least a dozen at a time, fleeing not only Uganda's anti-gay legislation but also homophobia in Burundi, Ethiopia, and elsewhere in East Africa. By last spring, more than 200 LGBT refugees had ended up at the UN's doorstep, all demanding swift asylum. Speaking to a researcher with the Global Philanthropy Project, one new arrival said, "I expect to be in Kenya for three months and be resettled to the West."Suddenly, De Langhe found her staff overwhelmed by LGBT refugees, and she worried that her own decision to prioritize these LGBT refugees over others was partly to blame. By giving LGBT refugees expedited processing and small cash stipends, the UNHCR and its partners may have created a pull factor that enticed even more people to flee to Kenya.Some people also sought the advice of Western allies as to how to seek refugee status in Kenya. One was Isaac, a 25-year-old gay man living in Kampala. In April 2015, a local paper outed Isaac for "sodomizing" another man—his boyfriend, Patrick. Afterward, unsure of what to do, he sought advice online. He came across some articles on a human rights blog written by Melanie Nathan, a South African lawyer and activist who moved to the United States in 1985 to open a clinic that advocated for the rights of LGBT immigrants. Nathan had been following the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Act and the wave of homophobia that ensued, and by 2014, she was in touch with numerous LGBT Ugandans. She began blogging about their plight. Sometimes Nathan would advise Ugandans who had decided to flee for their own safety. When Isaac emailed Nathan, she responded immediately. Later that month, he and Patrick left for Kakuma.This article appeared in the March issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.
In contrast to refugees from South Sudan or Somalia, most of whom are extremely poor, the Ugandan refugees came from a variety of financial circumstances. Many came from Kampala. Some worked jobs at restaurants, while others held university degrees. There were students, and some of the youngest ones hadn't even completed high school.There are 24,000 people in Kakuma and 8,000 in Nairobi on the waiting list for an appointment to determine whether or not they even qualify for refugee status—a six-month backlog. And sitting around for your turn is just the first step in a process that normally takes several years.
Homophobia is an ingrained part of life in the camp. Not long after Ketifa began teaching at the school, rumors spread about her homosexuality. Although she wasn't out, she could be seen living with people who appeared stereotypically gay, and she didn't have a husband or boyfriend. "We hear students say 'shoga! shoga!,'" which means gay, she said. "Some of them come to your face and say, 'Mwalimu (teacher), you're not going to teach me! Because my parents told me a shoga cannot teach me because shoga is bad.'"In November 2014, parents, most of whom Ketifa said were Somalis, called a meeting to complain to the school's principal. Soon after, the principal called a meeting with Ketifa and two other gay Ugandans. "He said either we have to change from who we are, or we will lose our jobs," she told me. Three weeks later, the teachers received letters from the school: They had been let go.
It's not just in Kakuma that LGBT refugees receive certain privileges. While some of them, by choice or from force, settled in the camp, the majority opted to live in Nairobi. Particularly for Ugandans who grew up in metropolitan Kampala, the city was a logical choice over a refugee camp. Those who went to Nairobi received help that other refugees did not: cash. HIAS, the international refugee resettlement agency, secured funding from the UN to offer LGBT refugees in Nairobi monthly stipends of 6,000 shillings—about $60. It was barely enough to pay the rent, much less purchase food or cover the transportation back and forth from resettlement interviews. But it was better than nothing at all. Those stipends were, in many ways, exceptional. HIAS offered them seemingly without limit, whereas traditional refugee stipends are only offered for a prescribed period of time. Even unaccompanied minors usually received only four months of financial assistance. But the level of giving wasn't sustainable. According to the Global Philanthropy Project, one UNCHR partner spent its entire 2014 budget for refugee stipends in just two months.
Still, the idea that some people might fake being gay to get assistance or to get resettled abroad spread fear inside the UNHCR last February, when more than 76 people claiming to be LGBT refugees showed up at the Nairobi office on a single day. The mass arrival conjured worries of an organized trafficking ring. De Langhe said she received a tip from the Ugandan priest who had ushered the first group of refugees to be careful about the newcomers. "When you have 70 people at your door in one day, something is happening," De Langhe told me."What you are doing is not good," said an LGBT activist from Kenya's Turkana region. "You give them a gated compound, and you give them water inside this compound. All these are good things. But what do you expect to happen when these other communities begin asking questions?"
The LGBT refugees in Nairobi are perennially being chased out of their homes. One sunny Saturday in February 2015, a group of LGBT refugees gathered at a house in a densely packed neighborhood for a celebration. One of them was leaving. Francis, a gay man from Uganda, had been granted resettlement in Sweden less than a year after he arrived in Kenya. His good fortune gave hope to the rest."Sometimes I would go say hi to him, and I would find him in a skirt, a dress, makeup. I'd say, 'You're in Nairobi, remember? They are homophobic here.'"
Francis was still one of the lucky few. Though LGBT refugees had been expecting swift processing of their asylum claims, not many saw the kind of attention that the initial group of 23 refugees had received. With more refugees arriving, the process slowed, and people like Ketifa, who had been among the first LGBT people to flee Uganda, were forced to wait. "Right now I'm not aware of my refugee status," she said one day last fall. "I'm still in doubt."By the end of 2014, the UNHCR couldn't expedite all the cases, so De Langhe's superior, UNHCR Assistant Representative for Protection Catherine Hamon-Sharpe, decided to consider each of them individually. The UNHCR simply didn't have the time or resources to expedite so many claims. Africa's LGBT refugees would no longer be on the fast track to resettlement.
On a hot Sunday morning in Kakuma last October, a group of about 20 people gathered in a makeshift church in the gay refugees' compound. The humanitarian tarps that cover the ground between two of the huts looked pristine. Four thin pews had been crafted from mismatching planks of wood. As they took their places along the benches, the churchgoers sang a Ugandan hymn.Eventually the priest, Solomon Mugisa, joined them. Born to a Pentecostal pastor father and a studious, Anglican mother, Mugisa attended Christian schools and Bible colleges his entire life. He knew well that the Anglican Church has a reputation as one of the most homophobic in all of Africa. But somehow that fact didn't stop him, a gay man, from becoming an Anglican priest. "I know that God doesn't discriminate," he said. "He loves you whoever you are."The same cannot be said of the Ugandan police. In March 2014, photos began circulating on the internet that depicted Mugisa celebrating at the 2012 World Pride Festival in London—a momentary indulgence he had made during two years he spent on a Christian exchange program in the UK. But back in Kampala, police arrived at his home one evening. Officers took him to jail, where he spent the next five nights. On the sixth morning, he was let out on bail. He immediately fled to Nairobi, and the UNHCR soon bused him to Kakuma, where he became a leader of the group of Ugandans—both practically and spiritually.At first, on Sunday mornings, Mugisa would take the refugees to the existing churches in Kakuma to pray, but they were always chased away. So Mugisa decided to create a church of his own, within the homestead the LGBT refugees share.If Christianity and homosexuality were ever at odds, you wouldn't know it from the Sunday morning service at the gay Ugandans' compound in Kakuma Camp 3. On this particular Sunday, people gave thanks. One woman thanked God for helping her complete "medical"—that is, the medical portion of the resettlement process to get to the United States. One man said he was thankful for having a church where he can pray. ("He never could have imagined he'd attend a church that accepts him," Mugisa explained. "He even started to hate God.") Another man stood up: "I thank God for my protection. Last night I was walking by some shops and I was attacked. But thank God I survived them."Even Ketifa, a Muslim who had never stepped foot inside a church before arriving at Kakuma, attended. She said the local mosques refused to accept her because she is a lesbian. Standing attentively in the back row, she joined the Christians around her in the singing.More than an hour into the service, after the songs and the prayers ended, Mugisa gave his weekly sermon. "God has a book of life," Mugisa told his worshipers. "He remembers your name. But to be written in this book you need to do good." Mugisa turned to his congregants. "Mulondo, Lujja, Kasule, Nansamba: You want to be able to say, 'God, I served you when I was in Kakuma camp.' You want to be able to say, 'I served you in Uganda. Remember me. This is what I have done, remember me.'"Suddenly, Mugisa stopped. During the unexpected silence, one could hear screams of "amen" coming from the yellow church down the road—one of the churches that had chased out the LGBT refugees before they started their own. Mugisa glanced around his congregation of LGBT worshipers, catching the eyes of a few of them. Unable to ignore the trepidation on their faces, he comforted them. "Trust me—one day we will be out of this place."This article appeared in the March issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.* Names have been changed throughout this article to protect the identities of subjects who face threats of homophobic violence.