When you ask Ronald Ssenyonga, a 21-year-old Ugandan, to tell you about his arrest, he asks: “Which one?” Like many gay people struggling to survive in a country that has used Covid-19 as an excuse to clamp down on human rights, Ssenyonga is used to arrests and raids.Even before the pandemic Uganda was labelled the worst place to be gay after its parliament proposed the death penalty for some homosexual acts.
The constitutional court annulled the law in 2014, but security agencies continue to hound gay people – relying on information from community vigilantes to attack and smoke them out of places they thought were safe.Ssenyonga has just returned from his second spell in prison in three months.