“We Shall Not Be Eaten by Any Lions”: Healing Ugandan Queer Trauma through Creative Contextual Bible Study

Building on feminist, queer and postcolonial concepts of trauma as everyday and ongoing, this chapter explores the trauma experienced by Ugandan LGBT+ refugees currently living in Nairobi, Kenya. Expanding on traditions of African women’s biblical hermeneutics, storytelling methods, and creative arts, the chapter specifically offers an account of how a process of contextual and creative bible study and dramatisation about the story of Daniel in the lions’ den provided an interface for participating refugees to work through trauma and engage in a restorative and healing praxis. In the light of the status of the Bible in postcolonial African Christian societies, as a widely known book holding sacred status, and of the problematic role of the Bible in the contemporary politics of queer sexualities in Africa, this chapter contends that it is vital to engage and appropriate the Bible as a resource for affirming, empowering and healing African queer communities traumatised by socio-political homophobia and its multiple effects.