When I was growing up in the 1950s, two things happened to my brain that have persisted: knowledge of the English language and knowledge of God. Learning English, which was the language of imperialists of those days – the British – was like setting on a journey from Africa to England. Internally I felt great doing something more than speaking Lusoga, which I was also just learning. I wanted to be different.

I memorised poems and recited them to my father. He would listen carefully to detect any mistake. If I made a mistake he would intervene with loving care and correct me over and over again until I would make no mistake. In appreciation he would say “Good” and clap with a smile on his face.  That encouraged and spurred me on to memorise more poems.

My vocabulary in English improved very early in life. Then in 1959, he told me that the Kyabazinga of Busoga, who was known as Henry Muloki, was to visit Ikumbya Subcounty of Luuka County, and that many people would congregate at the subcounty headquarters to welcome him.

“I have talked to the headmaster of your school, Ikumbya Primary School. He has agreed that you are going to recite a poem for the Kyabazinga and his audience”, he told me.

Instead of fear there was happiness and excitement in me. The thought of reciting a poem for the Kyabazinga and all the people of Ikumbya made me feel great even before the actual fete. I was confident I could do it. When the day came, oh yes, I did it with courage and confidence and without fear. I became even more happy when I shook the hand of the broadly smiling Kyabazinga.

Internally I said to myself, “So this English language can make one rise and interact with the great? I should learn it, not just to know it, but to muster it so that I can use it everywhere”. I think my courage, confidence and hatred of fear have a lot to do with those influences of my father.

Beyond learning English in the class, I made a little book my little friend. That book was an English dictionary, which we used to refer to simply as Michael West because this was the man who compiled it. I wanted to have command of the English vocabulary as effectively as possible. I did not care if I understood the words or I came across well. All I wanted was to have as many of them as possible. It was like when many years later, at Busoga College, Mwiri, I would carry Chinese Chairman Mao Tse Tung’s little red book, just to have his quotations in my head.

Those days at Ikumbya Primary School, and I guess at other primary schools in the British Protectorate of Uganda, as it was then called, words which we got from Michael West, and which were not known by others, were called ‘bombastic’ words. For the most times they did not mean anything to us.

All that we wanted was to be different. After all, life is about nothing but difference; not similarity, although stupid Man, Homo sapiens, prefers everything, everyone to be similar, to his detriment. Difference conserves, preserves; similarity exterminates, annihilates. Difference is a virtue. Similarity is a vice. Difference is complexity. Similarity is simplicity. There is value in complexity.

One word that attracted my attention very early in my school life was the word “Queer”. I heard the bigger pupils in upper primary classes using it, but did not imagine what it meant. Consulting Michael West I found out that it meant unusual. So, whenever I heard, saw or interacted with something I was not familiar with, I would just say “Queer”. The more I used the word queer the more it stuck in my brain.

Many years later, when my preferred English dictionary was the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, I expanded the meaning of the word queer. The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary uses the word “strange in addition to unusual to define queer. Another word for queer could be peculiar. From a biological, ecological or environmental viewpoint, a suitable word in place of queer is “unnatural”. However, from the spiritual viewpoint, the suitable alternative meaning is “ungodly”.

The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary gives another meaning to the word queer. It states, “an offensive way of describing a homosexual, especially a man, which is, however, also used by some homosexuals about themselves”.

So, as you can see, the queer of my primary school is vastly different from the queer of today. It is the queer of homosexuals that I want to expound on.

While Catholic orthodoxy still regards homosexuality as a crime against nature, the sexual deviation from the more biologically, ecologically and environmentally recurring sexual practice among diverse species of animals and plants – heterosexuality – the deviant sexual practice has been documented as far back as the times of ancient Greeks.  Germany was probably the first country in modern times to legalise the practice almost 30 years ago.

Historically, the homosexuals who refer to themselves as queers have almost left no genetic inheritance. Their genetic lines have through time become extinct. It is rare to hear that so and so is a descended from such and such a queer. Therefore, queerism is nothing but extinction or extermination. If we have terminal seeds in genetics (i.e, seeds that cannot be planted twice), we have terminal homosexuals in the world of sex (homosexuals who leave no descendants). Queers are like they never existed on Earth.  They are like a young man who dies at the age of 30 or below or above without leaving his genes in the gene pool of humanity.

There have been people called the Great Queers of History whose genealogy after them is difficult to establish. They lived, influenced and disappeared with no trace because there is no evidence that they engaged in heterosexuality alongside their homosexuality. More recently such Great Queers of History include John Maynard Keynes (one of the founding fathers of the World Bank), Micheal Foucault and Marquis de Sade.

It is highly possible that most of our ancient philosophers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, who spent most of their time thinking and philosophising, and who are not known to have had wives, but were human enough to have them, were queers. At least I have not come across their children in my extensive reading. Queerism is real historically and currently and is promoted by people and institutions committed to proliferating the culture of money.

Among the queers of history that have been mentioned for sure as the Great Queers of History are Alexander the Great, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Julius Caesar, Michelangelo, Louis XIV, Louis XV. All these were highly influential men who had a lot of power as well over those who fell in their circles of influence.

Today many countries in the Euro-American axis of power and influence have legalised homosexuality, including queerism in form of same sex marriages, and are using the power and influence of money to ensure that what was once a personal choice of those who practised the vice is everyone’s enforced choice. They are using the money they have pooled in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to coerce the poorer countries in which human reproduction by natural means (heterosexuality) is still entrenched, to universalise homosexuality.

The ultimate aim may be to create a huge cadre of queers, especially among the young generations of people. It is like a global crusade to undo nature, which is the same as saying it is an anti-God crusade. Many young men have been recruited into queerism and publicly declare that they will never marry. It is not because they cannot marry and produce children but because they have fallen prey to wicked money. With this money they live affluent lives; the reason the myth of gay affluence has gained in currency. It is indeed a myth because there are many poor who are also being recruited into queerism.

If, therefore, history, repeats itself, queerism is a recurrent phenomenon. Unlike before, however, when it was more of a personal choice than corporate, today the choice is made elsewhere and imposed on unsuspecting peoples.

Clearly dark forces are in a fierce struggle with the forces of light (i.e, God). It is not a new struggle. It is a continuous struggle. What makes it different is that the dark forces have corporatised themselves. Many corporations and megacorporations are committed to sowing the seeds of queerism in a globalised manner. The most targeted continent is Africa, where wicked forces have convinced the rulers that it is far more useful to depend on loans from the metropole than to spur domestic production. Now that overdependency of the continent has been achieved by the dark forces, the string of queerism is being pulled.

Uganda today may be feeling the pinch far more than any other country in Africa. The rulers were convinced to open up its economy completely and sacrifice it to the corporate interests of the West through its World Bank and IMF. The country took loans to be the way forward. Now after passing a not so effective Anti-Homosexuality Law 2023, the status quo is belatedly discovering that it sacrificed the country to very manipulative forces bent on proliferating the culture of homosexuality (as queerism) as a human right. Within the status quo itself there are people who fell to queerism long ago and are themselves exerting pressure on government to give in to the culture and include it among the human rights.

The president of Uganda is openly angry that the World Bank has exacted pressure of its own on his regime by withdrawing the loans window from the regime. He is writing to reassure the Bank and Ugandans that his country can survive without its loans. However, it is unlikely that he understands the full impact of disengaging himself from the Bank that he has done business with almost since he captured the instruments of power with the help of the Anglo-American Axis of global power

Instead of doing the right thing of responding to the new reality, the president is continuing as if nothing has happened. He has included three people, a few hours back, in his overloaded cabinet rather than downsizing it. He has retained an extremely overloaded Parliament and is still looking forward to expanding it without a clear strategy to expand or create channels of enhancing the country’s income.   He has allowed an extremely expensive tour by his son of Eastern Uganda to sow the falsehood that he is competing with him for power yet when time for electoral politicking arrives, he will appeal to the youth to vote his father’s party while his father is elected by Parliament, pending his own rise to power thereafter in conformity with hereditary politics.

He has allowed his adherents to organise what is likely to be an even more expensive birthday party than the one his son organised for himself some time back. The president’s birthday party is the first of its kind since he captured power in 1986, probably because in his book, The Mustard Seed: the Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in Uganda, he wrote that he did not know when he was born. Well, even Christians don’t know when Jesus was born, but chose December 25 as his date of birth.

The West as a whole and homosexuality in particular thrives on the poverty of nations. The more Uganda becomes poorer the more the West will buy our people into queerism. With an increasingly impoverished youth population of more than 80 per cent of the total population of nearly 45 million, the homosexuality net will spread further before the very open eyes of the rulers, who will be as helpless as a newly born baby.

The queer and queerism will respond with increased vigour as poverty penetrates and interpenetrated the youthful population. Queerism in an expanding sea of poverty might end up being the legacy that President Yoweri Tibuhaburwa Museveni will leave behind when he finally leaves the helm of power in Uganda.

Clearly, the conflict between President Yoweri Tibuhaburwa Museveni and the World Bank is the continuing conflict between the dark forces of the World and God. We can take a sigh of relief that when the struggle has raged on God has always won. He will intervene on behalf of Ugandans to prevent the new Great Queers of History being bred or nurtured in Uganda.

Glorified queers (those who never marry to produce offspring) never leave descendants. However, when the end of time arrives, Man, of , will be there to witness the end time. That man will most likely be an African in Africa. The wicked crusade of queerism will have failed to eliminate him from the face of the Earth. If it is true that the first man on Earth was in Africa, then it is also true that the last man will also be in Africa before the heavens and the earth intermingle to form a new world.

• A Tell report / By Prof Oweyegha-Afunaduula, a former professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences of the Makerere University, Uganda