Isaac Mugisha, co-ordinator of Pride Uganda, is determined and optimistic that Ugandan LGBTs will hold a Pride event in Kampala later this year, without it being shut down by the authorities.

If the event does go ahead, it will be the first Pride held successfully in the East African country since 2015.

In 2016, as reported by The Daily Beast, Uganda Pride events were the subject of a brutal crackdown by police. Frank Mugisha, executive director of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), his colleagues, and others were arrested and detained. In the chaos, one gay man fell four stories and suffered horrendous injuries.

The 2017 event was also “crushed,” as Mugisha wrote in The Guardian, with Simon Lokodo, the minister of state for Ethics and Integrity, threatening Pride-goers with “arrest, even violence.”

Lokodo has made the repression and persecution of the country’s LGBT population a personal crusade.

Late last week, Lokodo was reported to have been in a coma after suffering a stroke. Other reports said the stroke was minor and doctors had worked “around the clock” to prevent it from becoming a major stroke. Lokodo, later reports indicated, had been discharged from the Uganda Heart Institute.

Speaking to The Daily Beast in New York, where he was attending the first of two fundraising events for All Out, the internationally focused LGBT equality organization, Isaac Mugisha said that in recent months in Uganda “cases of people being arrested, put in police cells, and tortured have been greatly reduced.” Read more via Daily Beast