C Street

by Jeff Sharlet

  Two hours after we’d left Buturo, Bahati called. “Jeff!” he said. “I hear that you are in Kampala. We must meet!” So we did, with no mention of the fact that he was supposed to have met me that morning. Robert drove me to the Serena Hotel. “Should I be worried?” I asked. As an American, I was nearly immune to government reprisals, but Bahati was a special case, a man determined to redefine crime and punishment for his nation. “Oh, no, I don’t think so,” said Robert. He was thirty, compact and gracious in style, a news director for a radio station, freelancing as my fixer. He carried himself like a man holding a microphone for someone else to speak into. He had twenty brothers and sisters and one little daughter, for whom he was building a school because the government wouldn’t bother. He planned on entering politics himself one day. “Honorable will find you useful, I am sure,” he said.

  The soldiers at the gate were top-shelf, no bribes necessary. Just a little frisking. Up a hill, then, away from the red dust and into the green of the Serena’s manicured grounds. Robert dropped me at the lower parking lot. “There he is,” Robert said—Bahati riding up the hill in the backseat of a silver SUV. He nodded through the window. And then, a few minutes later: Bahati, cool and calm in the lobby.

  Bahati was dapper, not a dandy but a man with a style. He wore a dove-gray suit, a tie of chocolate brown stripes, and an ivory shirt. He’d chosen our table carefully; it was on an elevated platform, in the middle of the restaurant but with a high wall behind him. He could take the corner but still be the center of attention. The maître d’ knew him; the other politicians in the room—identifiable because they were in the room, one of the most expensive in Kampala—wanted to talk to him. He offered them little flutters of his fingers. But for the waitstaff, or an occasional businessman, he’d rise up out of his seat and twist around over the wall behind him, clasping hands with controlled explosions of giggles followed by terse exchanges. People liked him. They were afraid of him. He wasn’t what I’d imagined: a bumpkin, a Tom Coburn, a country mouse come to the city and crying “gay!” at everything that offended him. He was something more compact, tougher: a Pickering with juice: a cannier George Wallace for Uganda.

  “David,” I said, “you’re a player.”

  He smiled, half-shy, half-pleased, and summoned a waiter with the same flutter he used on his colleagues, ordering for both of us in Lugandan, one of his three languages along with English and his native Rukiga, the language of Uganda’s Bakiga minority.

  He was a man of many influences. Thirty-six years old, he’d been educated in Uganda, the University of Cardiff in Wales, and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, with financial support from a foundation in Norway. He was an orphan. His mother had died in childbirth. His father, he says, was poisoned by a business associate when Bahati was three years old. He was sent to his grandmother; she died when he was in elementary school. He lived off the streets of Kabale, a market town of forty thousand in southwestern Uganda. “I sold things you cannot understand,” he told me. That sounded dramatic, but what he meant was bananas.

  He won one scholarship after another and he became an accountant. But he felt God wanted more from him. In 2004, on the advice of two friends who’d studied in the United States at the fundamentalist Family Research Council, he went to America to learn the art of political campaigning at the Leadership Institute, a well-funded school of “political technology” for conservative activists. Lesson number one: a black African conservative will always have friends in a Republican Party eager to prove itself past racism. The institute, in Arlington, Virginia, made Bahati a star of its fund-raisers, and soon, he said, he was on a first-name basis with men like “Mitch” (McConnell, Senate Republican leader) and “John” (Ensign). Young man, one of the politicians told him—he won’t say whom—you need to visit the Cedars. There he met John Ashcroft and a philanthropist-lawyer heavily involved in Uganda. When he won his seat in 2006, the first thing he did was look for the Ugandan Fellowship he’d learned about in America.

  “God uses instruments to make his purpose be fulfilled,” Bahati said after we’d filled our plates. “He uses voters.” He chewed as he spoke. “He uses voters to lift somebody up to bring them where you are. Eh?” Eh—that was his all-purpose word, good for acknowledgment, dismissal, or coercion. I nodded despite myself, confirming his self-anointing. “God puts people in place,” he continued, satisfied. “The Bible says in Romans 13 that all authority comes from God.” He pointed his fork at me. “All authority comes from God. Eh?” Nod. “Yes,” he said, smiling, as though I were an apt pupil.

  There was a sense in which his conflict with Hunter was a result of his belief that he himself was no longer a student of the Family’s, but rather, as the acting head of the Ugandan branch (after Museveni), an elder in his own right. He remembered his excitement at his first discovery of the Family. “To know that you have leaders who trust in God. And you are a part of a global movement like that, that family, that global family. You can travel from here to Ukraine and know you have a brother or a sister.” We are alike, the Family tells its foreign relations. We are all the same, Christian and Muslim, the weak and the strong. It’s a way of dealing with differences—the haves and the have-nots, on a global scale—by denying difference. We are the same, he said to the Americans, to Hunter, to Coe: you are like me. “They want to distance themselves from a Bahati,” he’d said in one of our first conversations. He spoke of himself like that, in the third person, when he wanted to make a point about his own universalism. “But they cannot. Because we are a family! Doug Coe has gone into a very high level of thinking on these issues. It is about a sense of belonging.”

  Not in a personal sense, but in terms of what evangelicals refer to as discernment, one of the gifts of the spirit interpreted from the Acts of the Apostles, like speaking in tongues. Discernment means more, or maybe less, than being perceptive. It means opening yourself up to the gift of discernment, God’s revelation direct from Him to you. “For example, I didn’t champion this issue, homosexuality, for the whole world. I did it for Uganda. That was me. But God!” Bahati pointed up. “God made it bigger. We are going to get the bill through, now or later. And when we do, we will close the door to homosex, and open society to something larger.”

  That was the crux of the matter for Bahati. To him, homosexuality is only a symbol for what he learned from the Family is a greater plague: government by people, not by God. “The original sin,” according to “Jesus Transcends All,” a sermon distributed to international guests at the National Prayer Breakfast (Bahati had been twice, in 2007 and 2009), “was not murder, adultery, or any other action we call sin. The original sin was, and still is, the human choice to be one’s own god, to control one’s own life, to be in charge.”

  “Homosexuals have won the battle in America,” Bahati said. He believes they have seduced straight Americans, tricked them into believing they could make their own choices. The empire was rotting from within. The burden is on you, David, his American friends told him. Inhofe’s people had sent word, Bahati said. “I have spoken to his assistant, Mark Powers,” he explained. (Powers is an Assemblies of God missionary on Inhofe’s Senate staff. He’s also well represented in the Family’s Africa documents.) In total, Bahati said, about half a dozen leaders had sent their support. He couldn’t name them, though, because the gays would destroy them. That’s what they told Bahati. You must fight the battle. “We have talked to a number of conservatives in America who believe what we are doing is right, and that if we do not close the door to homosexuality at this time, it would be too late for us to breathe,” he told me. “They wish that homosexuality was confronted and fought severely in America.”

  There was still hope for Africa. God would use the weak to teach the strong, a Bahati to send a message to America. God had given him a Word, divine insight. Six years before, on the eve of his first journey to America. Five words, actually, Isaiah 6:8, illuminated for Bahati by Jesus: “Here am I; send me.”
The words of the prophet Isaiah to the Lord, the words of the Lord for Bahati, his ticket to America and his calling in Uganda; in 2006, his “prayer team” had used it as a campaign slogan. Smartly divorced, that is, from what follows, just two verses below:

  Then I said, Lord, how long? And he answered,

  Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant,

  And the houses without man,

  And the land be utterly desolate,

  And the Lord have removed men far away,

  And there be a great forsaking in the midst of the land.

  Prophecy isn’t kind, but Bahati was brave. He knew his bill, if passed—and in Uganda, voters wanted it passed—would lead to a great forsaking, indeed: of foreign aid, the lifeblood of what passes for an economy in a country where job seekers outnumber jobs fifty to one. People would starve. There would be no medicine for AIDS. And it might be worse than that. The dictator was old, his grip was weakening, and war might be coming. It was hard to conceive, after at least three hundred thousand dead under Amin and as many as half a million lost in the fight that brought Museveni to power, that Uganda would ever return to slaughter. But they would do what God asked of them, Bahati believed. They would be a God-led nation, a light unto the world.

  Even as the American brothers of the Family shied away from controversy, Bahati’s African brothers in reconciliation gravitated toward him. He was in demand; Bahati and a pastor ally whom he’d put on the government payroll said Fellowship groups in the governments of countries across the continent—Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Zambia, Congo—had requested copies of his bill or, better yet, a personal appearance. The message was spreading, with Bahati as its apostle, suddenly the most famous Ugandan since Idi Amin.

  Bahati wanted to bring the message back to the source. “If I came to America, what do you think would happen?”

  “I think there would be protests,” I said. In 2010, there’d been protests at the Prayer Breakfast for the first time in five decades based just on the possibility that Bahati might show.

  “I want to come one of these days and see. What do you think is the best way to come in? Eh?”

  “I wouldn’t make it public.”

  “Ah! So the best way would be to sneak in?”

  “Just go as a regular traveler.”

  “But they wouldn’t hurt me?” He claimed to have survived several gay poisoning attempts already. “I will be coming to America very soon. To do something very private. I will not announce it to the world. I will just come. To our friends in Washington. I will tell private people, whom I’ll visit. There are people willing to host me.”

  Not Hunter, he added. He no longer trusted Hunter, though he didn’t blame him for what he saw as cowardice. The Family, he’d been told, was also under gay attack. In Uganda the gays used poison; in America, “blackmail.” How did that work? He couldn’t explain. The gays, he said, have secret ways.

  “Spiritual warfare?” I asked.

  “Mm-mmm.” Bahati smiled, pleased that I had invoked the dark side of reconciliation, the invisible work of the spirit that selects between right and wrong, men of God and those outside His circle. Spiritual warfare is a concept as old as the Bible, but, through the literalist filter of twentieth-century American fundamentalism, it has taken on magical meaning, imbuing the actions of its believers with supernatural power. “Imagine a small bill in a small country like Uganda,” he said. “Sponsored by a Bahati. An ordinary member of Parliament. And—”

  He gestured toward me, my presence in Uganda, and the dining room of the Serena, Kampala’s international stage. I saw where he was going.

  “You think something must be going on here.”

  “Yes. Something… He paused. “Invisible.” Spiritual warfare, that is, the amplification of angels and their worldly counterparts, American allies. With that power came enemies.

  “You believe in the reality of demons?” I asked.

  “Demons, yes.”

  “Do you think homosexuality is a form of demonic possession?”

  He giggled, like Pastor Kyazze rejecting my simpleminded suggestion that, according to his logic, gays might have hooked noses to go along with their financial wizardry and control of the media. “It is modern witchcraft,” Bahati clarified. Modern witchcraft isn’t a matter of chicken heads or curses, he explained; it’s about information, the suppression or selective release of truths. “It is manipulation for control and dominance.”

  And what about the lies he claimed that his American friends had told about him, about his role in the organization and his visits to Washington? Was that “modern witchcraft”?

  No.

  But he thought Hunter had lied?

  Yes.

  What was the distinction?

  Perspective, thought Bahati. Take a lie and turn it upside down. What do you see?

  The truth?

  Bahati giggled. No. “Unnecessary truth.” Truths, that is, that are too subtle for the public to understand.

  The following afternoon, Bahati called me. “Jeff,” he said, “I think we must meet again.” He didn’t explain why, but my guess was that it had something to do with Tim Kreutter, the author of the Family’s Eight Core Aspects.

  Robert and I were driving back from a three-hour conversation with Kreutter when Bahati called. Kreutter, an American, runs a Family-funded project of youth homes and schools centered around a “Leadership Academy,” created to train a new political and professional elite instilled with the principles of Jesus from childhood forward.

  Kreutter is, in Uganda, what Hunter calls “the nail on the wall,” one of the men behind the face of power. When Hunter had explained to me his theory of advocacy—reaching out to “the little group around the president” instead of the big man himself—I’d thought he’d meant Bahati’s Parliament Fellowship group, which meets on Thursdays. No, Hunter had said; “the Friday group is really the power group.” Kreutter’s group, that is. “They are the ones we’d go to if we really needed something done,” he’d explained. It was Kreutter, a senior finance ministry official named Paulo Kyama, and a former MP who’d cofounded the Parliament group. “They’re the ones who decide who to recommend to Congress for the Ugandan delegation. They have great connections, if you need to get something done. Plus, they have the added advantage of being almost—well, Tim is an American. Paulo, for all intents and purposes, is. In terms of, you tell him to do something, he’ll do it. They know how to get through to the First Lady, the president. I mean, Doug Coe could pick up the phone and call. I suppose I probably could.” But they hadn’t, he said, not in a long time. They hadn’t asked Museveni to fight the anti-gay crusade. They’d left that matter to the “nail,” Kreutter.

  Kreutter had been raised in Africa, the child of missionaries. He’d lived under a succession of dictators, and now counted the dictator Museveni, and especially his wife, Janet, as personal friends. While I was with him, two missionaries came by requesting help from the First Lady, through Kreutter. The missionaries were worried, though; they’d heard rumors that Janet Museveni could be a dangerous woman in her own right. Kreutter had seen power from every side, a 360-degree perspective that had taught him to be forgiving. Americans are arrogant, he warned; Africa and her leaders need a greater understanding. That’s what he gave his students.

  That, plus connections: the Musevenis are patrons, Kreutter guides the annual Prayer Breakfast delegation to Washington and helps organize its Kampala counterpart, Sen. Inhofe parachutes in, and then there’s Hunter, himself one of the most influential Americans in Uganda. A senior aide to Bahati works with one of Kreutter’s programs, African Youth Leadership, and Kreutter, a tall, thin man so mild-mannered as to be nearly invisible, had been a mentor to Bahati. Bahati said that from Kreutter he had learned that, in the end, he had no enemies, only opportunities.

  But Kreutter was displeased with his protégé’s new initiative. Bahati had brought his idea for the Anti-Homosexuality Bill to a Fellowship dinner attend
ed by Kreutter and several other international members a week before he’d introduced it the previous October. When the bill had become a political issue in the United States, Hunter had declared that the Family’s men in Kampala had cautioned their junior brother Bahati against proceeding. Bahati was emphatic in denying this: “No one opposed. Not one.” He’d taken the meeting as a green light to proceed with the biblical agenda he thought they shared. Kreutter sighed when I told him Bahati’s interpretation. “I know David’s heart is good,” he said. “But.” He shook his head. Bahati wasn’t revealing “unnecessary truths” in speaking of his intimacy with the Family so much as unnecessary complications. Kreutter didn’t like strong language: truth, lies, right, wrong. “Complex”: that’s what he called Bahati’s legislation, which he neither fully condemned nor supported. “Essentially I am against it,” he later told me, but he did not want to use language that would hurt Bahati’s feelings.

  Bahati and I agreed to meet for dinner again the next night. “Why?” Robert asked, puzzled. “I guess he likes me,” I said. This time, we had the Serena’s white room to ourselves. It was early evening; I wanted to leave time for Ssempa’s Saturday night abstinence party at Makerere. The clientele were in one of two theme bars, sophistication or safari, or at a fabulous wedding being held on the grounds. Bahati was upset that he hadn’t been invited. We took the same power table on the platform, but this time there was nobody to admire him. Just the waitstaff, with whom he was no longer so kind. “Okay,” he said, once we had our food, “let us pray.”

  He had two items on his agenda. The first was a book: he wanted to write one. He had learned so much in his war with the homosexuals, he wanted to “give back.” To America, that is; he wanted my help finding an American publisher.