questions for me about the impact of PEPFAR and the meaning of the expanding influence and involvement of Christian communities in AIDS prevention work in Africa. When I returned to conduct fieldwork in October 2005, I based my research in Ugandan church communities that were involved in promoting youth abstinence in Kampala. One church, University Hill Church (UHC), became the focus of my fieldwork and is featured prominently in this ethnography. Two other churches where I spent time are not described at length in this book, though my experiences there and the interviews I conducted with youth in those churches have contributed to the analyses I include here. One church identified as Pentecostal and the other two as nondenominational, though all belonged to the family of born-again churches that Ugandans consider distinct from the mainline mission churches—Anglican and Catholic—that have been dominant religious institutions in the country since the colonial era.
UHC was located near the Wandegeya neighborhood in Kampala and served a mostly English-speaking population. This is significant because English-language-dominant churches catered to a more educated, and thus elite, population than churches that primarily used one of Uganda’s indigenous languages. This was a church that had been positioned to serve a growing population of educated urban youth in Kampala, and many members of UHC were drawn from the city’s university campuses, especially nearby Makerere University. While the church comprised a multiethnic Ugandan community, the culture of the Ganda ethnic group dominated,53 in part because the church was led by a Ganda pastor and in part because the church itself, like the city of Kampala, is located in Buganda. For this reason, in this book I draw on literature from throughout the region to describe Ugandan cultural attitudes and orientations, but I sustain a focus, especially in the historical analysis I provide in chapter 2, on the literature of southern Uganda and especially Buganda.
UHC, as well as other churches I visited and spent time in, was actively involved in AIDS prevention activities. Over the course of my fieldwork, UHC sponsored and organized abstinence education projects, including public marches, concerts, workshops, and outreach and counseling programs. UHC was also the recipient of a modest amount of PEPFAR funding, which was received via a church-founded NGO that had been named the recipient of a grant for abstinence education. Because of the relatively sensitive nature of my research topic—which touches on spirituality, sexual relationships, and disease—both interviewee names and the names of churches remain pseudonymous for reasons of confidentiality.54 I will describe UHC more fully in chapter 3.
For nineteen months between October 2005 and May 2007, I spent time in these communities, interviewing pastors and youth and attending services, workshops community events, prayer meetings, and women’s meetings. I also lived for nine months in the home of a Ugandan family who were members of a born-again church I visited regularly, and I attended home Bible study groups and family meetings with them. (I later rented for a year a small house adjacent to the home of another member of the same church.) I returned in July 2010 and June 2011 to conduct follow-up interviews with pastors and youth. I also spent time during those visits attending parenthood workshops at UHC, where I learned more about the church’s expectations for family life. I conducted group interviews with both church members and Ugandans outside the born-again community that focused on the issue of homosexuality and Uganda’s 2009 Anti-Homosexuality Bill, a topic I take up in chapter 6.
I interviewed four dozen young adults and reinterviewed ten of them at least twice over the six years of primary field research, tracking how their attitudes about marriage, sexuality, and their desire for and struggles with parenthood and family life changed over time. I also interviewed eight pastors and church leaders about their hopes for their church, their involvement with AIDS prevention and activism, and their problems with church financing. I knew many more young adults, older adults, and clergy less formally, and spoke with them at church meetings and social events about their concerns in life. In addition to ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, I also interviewed individuals involved in AIDS prevention outside these churches, including people involved in advocacy and research from various other sectors including academia, the secular NGO world, and the mainline Catholic and Anglican churches.
I was positioned as a researcher within the church community I studied, though—especially by those I lived with and knew well—I was also considered a friend. The intimacy of the ethnographic encounter can be both tremendously rewarding and challenging, as frustrating as it is illuminating: it is a mode of research that generates close personal ties between researchers and research participants. Ethnographers depend on the intimacy of the fieldwork experience to help reveal deeper cultural understandings: How do people in this community think? What matters to them? As Clifford Geertz has famously described, ethnography is akin to “thick description”; it is the way we come to understand the difference between the proverbial wink and a twitch of the eye.55
In recent years, especially as the work of religious activists in Uganda has generated more controversy (see especially chapter 6), many people have asked me what it was like to conduct fieldwork within this community. Studying Ugandans who have embraced a version of the religiosity—born-again Christianity—that many (Ugandans and Americans alike) view as native to my own country certainly presented its own unique challenges. The church where I conducted fieldwork had relationships with Christians in the West, and so the presence of an American in church was not all that unusual. As a researcher rather than a missionary-volunteer I was, of course, positioned differently from most of these other visitors. (I am not a born-again Christian, for one thing.) Yet as many other anthropologists who have studied Christianity around the world have also noted, my position outside the “frame of belief” was not a point of particular concern or contention for the Ugandans I knew.56 As a participant-observer I was taken seriously as someone who sought to better hear and understand the Ugandan Christian way of life. Church members took time to explain their mode of worship, their attitudes and beliefs, in part because this was the work of being a Christian—of both proselytizing and experiencing their own faith.
I was not only viewed as a potential convert (as all nonbelievers are), however; I was taken seriously as an anthropologist. This was somewhat surprising to me, as anthropology is not a discipline that is widely studied in Uganda (though, like foreign missionaries, the peripatetic academic researcher is a known commodity in Kampala). Thomas Walusimbi, the head pastor at UHC, once told a room full of church members that he wanted to start a college radio station and feature on it a show about “anthropology and our culture.” Though surprising, his idea was not all that far-fetched. The study of culture—especially as it was understood in Uganda to mean “traditional culture”—was a project of some significance to a community that sought to both embrace and reform aspects of so-called traditional life. Pastor Walusimbi even once spoke to me, unprompted, about the “anthropology of the Baganda,” forwarding his own analysis of the ways precolonial Ganda political relationships influence contemporary mind-sets. As a discipline concerned with understanding both the similarities and the differences between Ugandan and American Christians, anthropology presented a certain utility to the pastor. As I discuss in chapter 1, he was concerned with highlighting the agency of Africans in a world that seemed defined by the politicoeconomic relationships of development aid that positioned Africans as passive recipients; thus, a project focused on a deeper understanding of African actors was one he could get behind.
That being said, it was not always easy to observe and seek to understand views that were not only different from my own but at times objectionable and unsettling to me. The most challenging portions of my fieldwork were those toward the end of my study, when an antihomosexuality agenda came to dominate church activities. Both within and outside the church, discussion of homosexuality in Uganda revolved around often disturbing and violent imagery. Attacks on people accused of being gay or lesbian were becoming more common in Kampala in the wake of 2009’s antihomosexuality legislation. But it
