Uganda on Tuesday outlawed the Nyege Nyege electronic music festival on the grounds that it degrades children’s morals in the East African nation.
The festival, which in earlier iterations drew some 10,000 people, including tourists from abroad, was scheduled to take place in the town of Jinja for four days starting on September 15. (southeast).
A few days before the event, which had been postponed due to Covid-19 limitations for a number of years, the Parliament said on its Twitter account that it had “banned the Nyege Nyege festival.”
The festival “promotes immorality and we do not want this immorality in our country,” Rose Lilly Akello, the Minister of Ethics and Integrity, told reporters.
Her colleague in charge of tourism, Martin Mugarura, told AFP that the ban on the festival would have a negative impact on the economy, which is struggling to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic.
“More than 8,000 foreign tourists have already bought their tickets and were due to stay in the country during the festival, and even afterwards,” he said, saying he hoped the authorities would reverse the decision.
The festival was previously banned in 2018 by former Ethics Minister Simon Lokodo, a devout Catholic and notorious homophobe. “We will not accept the loss of our morals, homosexuality will not be accepted,” he said, arguing that the festival “is close to devil worship and therefore unacceptable”.
In the Luganda language, the phrase “Nyege Nyege” refers to an overwhelming desire to dance, but it can also have a sexual connotation in other regional dialects.
In Uganda, where so-called “unnatural” partnerships are punishable by a life sentence under a law that dates back to British colonialism, homophobia is pervasive. Homosexuals in this country, where evangelical Christianity is particularly antagonistic to the LGBTQ movement, frequently face harassment and intimidation.
Uganda enacted a new law in December 2013 that criminalizes the “promotion of homosexuality” and mandates the condemnation of homosexuals.
