David Kato

David Kato Kisule was a schoolteacher who spent several years in South Africa in the 1990s and saw there, in the years after apartheid, a country that had written the rights of gay people into its constitution. He came home to Uganda in 1998 and declared himself openly gay, something almost no one in the country had done. He said later that he was jailed for it within days.

He worked for years in obscurity, teaching, losing jobs and steadily building the organisation that became Sexual Minorities Uganda, where he served as litigation and advocacy officer. The work was unglamorous: documenting arrests and evictions, finding lawyers, arguing with landlords and police. In 2009 an MP introduced a bill proposing the death penalty for some homosexual acts, and Kato became one of the few people willing to speak against it on camera and in Parliament, in a country where a minister called gay people a threat to the nation.

In October 2010 a tabloid called Rolling Stone printed the names and photographs of a hundred people it said were gay, including Kato, under a banner that read Hang Them. He and two others sued. On 3 January 2011 the High Court ruled that the paper had violated their rights to dignity and privacy and ordered it to stop.

On 26 January he was beaten to death with a hammer at his home in Mukono. Police blamed a robbery. A man was later convicted and sentenced to 30 years. At his funeral the pastor used the sermon to condemn homosexuality, and mourners had to carry the coffin to the grave themselves.