FACT Mixes

From left, Authentically Plastic, Nsasi and Turkana, co-founders of queer music collective Anti-Mass, August 8, 2021 (Photograph by Guilherme Gomez)

If you think your life is difficult, imagine being gay in Uganda.  

In 2007, the Ugandan newspaper Red Pepper published a list of allegedly gay men, many of whom suffered harassment as a result. Not to be outdone, the Ugandan newspaper Rolling Stone published a front-page article in 2010 titled 100 Pictures of Uganda's Top Homos Leak that listed the names, addresses, and photographs of 100 alleged homosexuals alongside a yellow banner that read "Hang Them." The paper also alleged that homosexuals aimed to recruit Ugandan children. Many Ugandans were attacked since the article was published, and on January 27, 2011, gay rights activist David Kato was murdered.

In 2009, the Ugandan parliament proposed an Anti-Homosexuality Bill that would have allowed the death penalty for people who were previously convicted or were HIV-positive and engaged in same-sex practices. The bill also included provisions for Ugandans who engaged in same-sex practices outside of Uganda to be extradited back to Uganda for punishment. The bill was signed into law by President Yoweri Museveni on February 24, 2014, although the death penalty was dropped in the final legislation. 

More recently, Kampala police and military personnel raided the gay-friendly Ram Bar on November 10, 2019, and arrested over 120 people. Joan Amek, one of those arrested, later told Human Rights Watch, “They kept on calling us prostitutes and genderless people. They kept on making common mistakes on ‘he’ and ‘she’ and dramatically laughing about it, saying that they thought we didn’t care so why are we complaining.”  The Ugandan police said the Ram Bar served hookah and opium and that those arrested would be charged under the Tobacco Control Act of 2015, which bans smoking in public places. Activists argued that this was a smoke screen for the persecution of the LGBTQ community and when 67 of those arrested were eventually charged, it was with “public nuisance”, not a contravention of the Tobacco Control Act.

Ram Bar, Kampala, Uganda

Despite this oppression, Anti-Mass has emerged in Kampala as both a musical collective and a queer night club. Anti-Mass parties have become vital spaces for safe expression for the city’s gay community, bringing together a diverse gathering of people of wildly different genders, sexual orientations, and backgrounds to move and sweat together, all within a city infamous for its conservatism and increasingly draconian legislation. Anti-Mass co-founders Nsasi, Turkana, and Authentically Plastic are the house dj's, pushing a fluid, hyper-modern style of club music that seeks to disrupt traditional forms.  Their style draws a line from Kiganda percussion to Chicago house and beyond.

I know all this because London's on-line FACT magazine posted a mix by Nsasi last month.  The set opens with a slowed-down version of Oh by Ciara (featuring Ludacris) and from there covers a variety of African dance-music artists, including fellow Anti-Mass member Authentically Plastic toward the end. Overall, it's sort of a trance-inducing set and you can choose to dance to it or zone out to it. Either option is acceptable.

Fact Magazine · Fact Mix 861: Nsasi (May '22)

FACT has admirably been posting more-or-less weekly mixtapes curated by various artists, musicians, producers, and dj's (I'll let you decide where to draw the line between those categories) since 2008. They were nearly 100 sets into their series by the time I first became aware of them in late 2009 and they've kept at it since. The Nsasi mix is number 861 in the series, and they just dropped number 862 by the 19-year-old Tanzanian DJ Travella.  

The young Londoners who maintain the FACT site are hipper, worldlier, and sexier than this ROM, but I can tag along behind and take notes to maintain an open mind.  The vast majority of the FACT mixes are in various styles of electronic dance music, which is not necessarily my thing.  But FACT also invites various other electronic, ambient, post-rock, and psych artists to contribute mixes, often to fascinating results.  My collection ranges from 60 minutes of 1960s French pop auteur Serge Gainsbourg, to field recordings of L.A. by Julia Holter, to a seamless blend of Brazilian field recordings, Kenyan club music, Indonesian gabber, and new music from NYC by Brooklyn composer Britton Powell.

All of the mixes can be streamed and downloaded for free, except for some of the older mixes, which were originally uploaded to file-sharing sites no longer in operation. Today, the mixes are all uploaded to Soundcloud, which allows sharing, reposting, and free downloading.  I've got about 40 of the mixes, ranging from June 2010's number 162 (Oneohtrix Point Never) to Nsasi's recent 861, saved to a backup drive, a total of over 42 hours of music.  The programming is so eclectic and diverse that I can play though the sets multiple times and everything still sounds fresh and new on each listen.

So go along for the ride.  If you listen to Nsasi's mix you're hearing the authentic sounds you'd hear today if you managed to find your way into an underground queer dance party in Kampala, Uganda, one eye on the dance floor and the other on the door for the police.