Thinking time.

What drove the man in the house of horrors nightmare?

Humanity is such a contrast. We can be very kind, and very cruel. Irrespective of race, and of gender, and up bringing.

It is so easy to characterize and stereotype people. The stereotypes help us to think, and hide a lot of the individuality which we all show. Goodness is a perception, and so is evil. To some people I am evil because I am gay. Or I am evil because I affirm that I am gay. Or I am evil because I embrace other gay people from the ‘west’. To others, I am good because I am kuchu.

Once upon a time, soon after I had discovered the gay community in Uganda, I was very trusting. See, I had lived with my secret for years. Then I found that there were people who shared it, and I could trust my deepest, darkest secret with them. I thought that because I could trust them that way, I could trust them in all ways.

Well, kuchu life is a merciless jungle, wilderness. I was soon disabused of that.

Nowadays, when someone comes to me complaining of the ‘badness’ of the kuchu community, I commiserate, and tell them even kuchus are human beings. Bad, good, indifferent, some are supremely evil and uncaring of others. Some are worth of being friends.

That man who deceived his wife, abused his daughter from 11 years of age, then imprisoned her and made her a sex slave in a free country, fathering 7 children of her. Father, grandfather, and prison warder to his family, and benovelent grandparent to others. The only person with the key to the prison where his underground family was. What if something had happened to him? His children/grandchildren, who did not see light, literally for all of their life. To them freedom is a concept that is almost unimaginable. At least the mother had some memories of freedom. They could only see something on a television of the world outside.

Yet, they were victims, not truly able to change their circumstances.

But what drove the man? The man beast?

There are so many examples of such things round us.

Kony the Beast in Northern Uganda. Hitler and his henchmen. North Korea, Mugabe of Zimbabwe, etc, etc. I can understand ideology. Bush the 43^rd and Bin Laden sincerely believe so completely in what they have bequeathed the world that they will go to their deaths believing in their opposing crusades. When one is that married to an idea, one tends to fail to think outside that box. Nothing exists beyond that box of thought.

So, if one is a Christian fundamentalist, all non Christians are a (slightly), despicable part of humanity which does not really know the truth. Same for one who is a fundamentalist Moslem, or Jew, or any other kind of marriage to an idea. Those who embrace your idea are the people. Those who do not are not, and anything is justified in the struggle to convert them, whether it is Communism or Capitalism.

But pure, simple, unadultered selfishness, like the man in the house of horrors shows is kind of hard to imagine. Selfish, self-centered, seeing the world totally in the self and not in family, or any other ideology. Willing, for his own or her own satisfaction and enjoyment, to enslave and imprison his own family. A total lack of care for others, or what may happen to them. I think we call them psychopaths. Another convenient ‘label’.

I admit that I do not understand them. Not at all. Doesn’t stop me from wondering how they think, what drives them.

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