Under African Skies, Part I sidebar: Activism bursts from townships

By Kai Wright
The Washington Blade, April 28, 2000

Gays have organized politically and socially in sub-Saharan Africa since at least the 1950s. Until the early 1980s, most of the recorded community activity involved white Europeans gathering socially to form exclusive cliques. But anecdotally, historians and Gay human rights activists say black Gay identity has existed in Africa since before colonization, and that identifiable black Gay communities have existed in Southern African townships for decades.

Visible black Gay activism and community exploded into pubic in 1983 when Gay anti-apartheid activist Simon Nkoli joined South Africa's national Gay group. As would happen in neighboring Zimbabwe over ten years later, his overtly political perspective as a black African clashed irrevocably with the largely social goals of a middle-class white organization.

Nkoli, unhappy with his cool reception in the group, quickly branched out on his own. That same year he secured an interview for himself with a black newspaper in which he offered his personal address and urged black Gay people to contact him. The response was overwhelming, and he arranged a special meeting.

"What was fascinating," the late Nkoli told South African author Mark Gevisser in his 1994 book on the country's Gay community, "was how different their language was to the white middle class members of [the Gay Association of South Africa]. They said things like 'we have to fight for our rights! We have to mobilize!' They were ordinary people, mainly in their 20s, and most joined GASA immediately."

A decade later, when South Africa abandoned minority rule and crafted one of the world's most progressive constitutions, Nkoli's activism in the anti-apartheid movement would pay off for the Gay community as well. The new constitution, which took effect in 1996, was the world's first to include protection against bias based on sexual orientation. Observers largely credit the victory to Nkoli's ties to the African National Congress.

Nkoli succumbed to AIDS in 1998, at the age of 41. But his legacy lives on. Today, South Africa's National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality is an integrated organization that not only fights local civil rights battles but also encourages and supports fledgling Gay groups throughout the continent.

The most active newcomer has been the embattled Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe. Originally founded in 1990, also as a largely white social group, today the group is almost exclusively black African and explicitly political. Their activism, in turn, has sparked groups in neighboring countries.

In Zambia, on Zimbabwe's northern border, a young Gay man marched into the newsroom of a local newspaper in July 1998, came out as Gay, and announced the formation of a Gay group. He declared himself inspired by Gay activism in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Today the government still threatens to arrest anyone who in fact forms such a group, but Zambia's fledgling Legatra has circumvented authorities by setting itself up as a chapter of a larger human rights organization. Similar attempts at activism have sprung up in Zimbabwe's western neighbors Botswana and Namibia.

The height of continental attention to Gay issues was 1995, when Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe first began to lash out with a campaign to depict homosexuality as "un-African." African press covered the debate, and black Gays began moving into the public eye throughout Southern Africa. In Botswana, a man contacted a newspaper to tell of his Gay identity. He described his first same-sex relationship.

"For me it was a step in a familiar direction - a step towards acknowledging that I had a second set of deep emotional longings," the man told the paper, according to a report by the Swiss human rights group Nordic Africa Institute. "From my earliest days I had wanted to be close to boys as well as to girls. However, because a same-sex attraction was so despised by my family and society, the thought that I might be a homosexual always terrified me."

There has certainly been backlash to these spurts of activism. While Mugabe's tirades have been the most famous, leaders in all of the countries where Gay activism has popped up have responded with vicious vows to wipe it out.

But so far, these reactions have been largely rhetorical. Leaders have frustrated political actions with legal mechanisms, but have still respected the rule of law. And while most African Gays tell horrifying stories of suffering personal assaults, they don't face the sort of wonton and gruesome murder many Latin American Gays confront.

Nkoli contributed an essay to Gevisser's 1994 book in which he discusses coming out among his fellow anti-apartheid activists. He writes at a time when the fight for Gay human rights was still contained to his own country.

"It's difficult for me to tell exactly what the relationship is between my anti-apartheid activism and my gay activism, but there are two things I know for sure. The first is that my baptism in the struggles of the township helped me understand the need for a militant gay rights movement. The second is that this country will never protect the rights of its gay and lesbian citizens unless we stand up and fight - even when it makes us unpopular with our own comrades."

Starting a year later, black Gays throughout Africa, and most intensely in Zimbabwe, would take his words to heart as they stood in the face of threats from their national leaders.