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Maxine Clarke discovers what it’s like to be out in South Africa.
There’s no denying that South Africa is a country renowned for its past human rights atrocities. Under the Apartheid era, which began in 1948 and officially concluded in 1994, the South African government segregated the country’s inhabitants into racial groups, with excellent education opportunities, services, human rights protection and a good quality of life reserved for whites only.
Individuals in opposition to apartheid faced detention without trial, torture and censorship. Political opposition from liberation movements such as the African National Congress and the Black Consciousness Movement was banned.
During the time of Apartheid rule, white supremacy dominated national policy, and inequality, legalised discrimination, police brutality and prejudice pervaded, with South African blacks effectively stripped of their citizenship. Apartheid was dubbed a crime against humanity by the United Nations General Assembly in 1973.
Not surprisingly, GLBT people were also treated appallingly by the Apartheid-era government, regardless of their ethnic origins. For example, white gay and lesbian soldiers in the Apartheid army were forced to undergo sex-change operations when electric shock therapy and chemical castration proved ineffective ‘deterrents’.
Former army surgeons have indicated that over 850 such gender reassignment operations occurred between 1971 and 1989 at military hospitals in an attempt to ‘combat’ homosexuality. The majority of military victims subjected to this treatment were young white men who had been involuntarily drafted.
Under Apartheid, sex between two men was punishable with up to seven years in prison. Even incidental contact between men in a social context was frowned upon, and had the potential to be misconstrued as homosexuality. Sex between women, while equally frowned upon, was not mentioned in South African law, but prohibited by implication.
At the conclusion of the Apartheid era, President Nelson Mandela’s government pushed for an end to all forms of discrimination and, in 1994, South Africa’s post-Apartheid constitution became the first in the world to explicitly prohibit unfair discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation.
Far from being a symbolic gesture, the inclusion of sexual orientation as a prohibited ground of discrimination renders it not only unlawful, but unconstitutional, to discriminate unfairly against GLBT people, and has been unequivocally upheld by further judgements.
In 1998, the South African Constitutional Court formally repealed the law that criminalised homosexuality in South Africa in a judgement which stated that the ‘sodomy laws’ ‘criminalised the intimate relationships of a vulnerable minority group’ and were a degrading violation of the rights to dignity and privacy.
The South African Constitutional Court has since repealed immigration laws that prevented the spouses of gay and lesbian people from immigrating to South Africa, paved the way for gays and lesbians to adopt children, extended IVF to lesbians, and repealed laws which prevented same-sex parents from sharing equal legal guardianship and parenting status with their children.
In 2005, the highest court in South Africa ruled that the South African constitution guaranteed the rights of gay and lesbian couples to marry.
Heartbreakingly, while the human rights of gay ad lesbian people in South Africa continue to be upheld, the homophobia, prejudice and paranoia of the Apartheid era has proved difficult to penetrate at a social level.
For example, while anthropologists have found that homosexuality was widely accepted in pre-colonial Africa, the traditional African stereotypes of the way black African women and men should behave have been instrumental in the stigmatisation of homosexuality and the instigation of ‘black on black’ violent hate crimes.
A glance at South Africa’s (openly) gay nightlife, and the infamous Cape Town Pride march, confirms that being an out gay black man in South Africa is a rarity. As recently as 2007, human rights groups have reported that gay black men were a prime target for violent hate crimes in South Africa.
Similarly, many black lesbians have been subject to ‘corrective’ gang-rape by men in their communities. In June 2007, Simangele Nhlapho, a member of a support group for women living with HIV, and her two year old daughter were raped and murdered in a homophobic hate crime.
The next month, Salome Masooa and Sizakele Sigasa, a black lesbian outreach worker and a black lesbian activist were raped, tortured and murdered execution-style in Soweto.
This alarming disparity between legal protection and social acceptance is perhaps not surprising, given that South Africa is a part of the most homophobic continent on earth, where sexual preference is still, in 2008, a major cause of harassment, imprisonment, intimidation, violence and death.
The South African legal system, however, is now one of the strongest upholders of gay rights in the world. This, in itself, is no small victory by any means, and a beacon of hope in the fight for equality.
“I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society, in which all people live together in harmony, and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for, and to achieve, but if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
- Nelson Mandela
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