The ceramic and wood figures by Leilah Babirye in her ongoing series Ebika bya ba Kuchu Mu Buganda (Kuchu Clans of Buganda) are arresting. Babirye examines the political hostility toward gay people in Uganda through materials possessing different yet potent histories. Bakalipo (Family of Sisters), 2020, constructed from wood and waste metals, suggests families rising from rubble, while the two-part sculpture, Nansamba O’we Ngabi from the Kuchu Antelope Clan, 2020, hand-built in clay, recalls additive pottery techniques employed across Uganda. These remarkable works, at the intersection of sculpture and language, are assembled with found objects and depict adorned human figures. Their ornamentation includes hair styled in updos and earrings made from metal scraps that Uganda-born Babirye finds in the streets of New York City, where she lives and works. In these circumstances, the ongoing Kuchu Clans series can be understood as a critical reflection on the complexities of belonging.

Babirye, who is self-exiled in the USA, explains that she produces this work partly in celebration of the resilience of gay people like herself who are persecuted by legal authorities and ostracized in some social contexts because of their sexual orientation. The stringent anti- homosexuality laws passed by the Uganda Parliament and signed into law by the president in 2014 and in 2023 make it impossible for Babirye to live freely in Uganda. Yet, however welcoming New York City might seem, Babirye remains an immigrant building community in a place she has made home. She titled the ongoing series Kuchu Clans of Buganda according to the clanship lineages of the Buganda Kingdom located in central Uganda, inflecting her titles written in a combination of the Luganda and English languages with the word kuchu. By choosing this respectful term for gay people, Babirye does away with the pejorative term ebisiyaga, which means sugarcane husk or rubbish, and bridges the brutal present with the past to complicate understandings of family and justice.

As anti-gay laws in Uganda and other countries on the African continent have kept a spotlight on LGBTQ+ people, Babirye has argued for complicating the term ebisiyaga by incorporating found and discarded objects in her work. Using the coil method, Babirye hand- built the prominent frontal-facing head in Nansamba O’we Ngabi from the Kuchu Antelope Clan. A large head adorned with a hair braid and pierced ears rests atop a cylindrical form suggestive of an elongated neck. The figure’s prominent eyes in the shape of cowrie shells recall the cowrie used as currency in pre-colonial Africa and its continued use among other objects in divination practices connecting the physical with the spiritual realm.1 Dripping layers of blue and green glazes accentuate the open mouth that appears to address the viewer. An old and fraying lemon- yellow nylon rope hitched through four round perforations and knotted together joins the two parts. The found rope attests to Babirye’s commitment to giving new life to discarded objects, like creating familial bonds among those society shuns. The waste materials in her work also relate to place and the value attached to objects that might seem useless. In a conversation with the writer Rianna Jade Parker, Babirye explains that her use of found objects is rooted in “coming from an African context, where people don’t throw out certain materials because everything is put to use.”2 I infer two connected ideas from Babirye’s words: first, politicians in Uganda, like all leaders obsessed with power, are also obsessed with controlling sexuality; and, second, Babirye’s work draws on a rich history of inclusivity found in diverse societies in Africa.

The starting point for the Kuchu Clans of Buganda was in 2017 when the artist undertook oral and textual research into attitudes toward sexuality in the Buganda Kingdom to trace the origins of present-day homophobic tendencies in Uganda. Some sources Babirye consulted indicate that Kabaka (King) Mwanga II (1869–1903) was bisexual. She draws upon this history of acceptance to pose questions about human brutality anchored in fear and neglect of historical events. Babirye says of her process when making the 2018 series Amatwaale Ga Ssekabaka Mwanga II (The Empire of King Mwanga II) following her research, “I gave all the queens beards and I gave them princess names, giving them earrings, jewelry, they all had ornaments on them. So, this raises the question why, and then I always say because there is homosexuality in there, in our kingdom, in our history.”3 In the material and textual depictions of the body, these sculptures not only address the living but also imagine a historical community of queer Ugandans relevant for bolstering confidence in this moment of increasing prejudice.

Margaret Nagawa