Women and South Africa’s LGBTI movement: A personal reflection

While the issue of gay rights in Africa is gaining centre-stage both on the continent and internationally, the longtime role and visibility of women in the fight for gay rights in South Africa has been wiped from official narratives, including the histories that are told within the country’s gay rights movement. Gone are the facts of working class mobilisation, popular struggle and women’s participation and leadership, and in its place is the mythography of heroic, singular men challenging apartheid and legislative homophobia.

In South Africa, it is important to commemorate and document the struggle for equal rights that resulted in the country’s groundbreaking constitutional clause giving legal protection from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. It is even more important, given the backlash that this has engendered in the form of hate crimes and rape against township lesbians and in the political expediency of the ruling leadership and public figures who use the cover of the constitution to hint at hate speech against sexual minorities and dissenters. South Africa’s guarantee of gay rights will likely also be challenged by the need to give asylum to African gays fleeing pogroms and persecution in their home countries.

In South Africa, it is marked how much the country’s ruling African National Congress (and particularly President Jacob Zuma) uses political speech to advance hatred and rightwing politics: often using political office and media reach to put the validity of oppression in the public domain, and then pretending to apologise when there is an outcry, only to reiterate similar remarks once the dust has settled. This past year, a number of African governments and religious figures have used the guise of homophobia to promote hate speech and pogroms against sexual minorities. Governments are also steadfastly advancing anti-gay legislation that draws on the legislative precedents of past fascist governments across the world and also on legislative apartheid in South Africa.

Now, more than ever, the earth-shattering implications of South Africa’s constitutional equality provision ensuring gay rights cannot be underestimated, even years after coming into being. Up to then, no country in the world had imagined that it was possible to give full human rights to gay people without the structure of society collapsing. South Africa’s decision is directly responsible for the marriage equality movement happening globally now.

It’s important to remember this achievement, because it is likely only a matter of time before President Jacob Zuma and the ruling African National Congress (ANC) attempt to dismantle gay rights in the country.

But the constitution’s Equality Clause ensuring non-discrimination because of sexual orientation was not South African exceptionalism or simply the benevolence of the ANC: it was the result of consistent work by anti-apartheid gay activists, including black women. It was also the result of decades of political engagement with gay rights, starting with Nelson Mandela himself.

Political struggle, risk and visible gay identities most famously came together in 1962, when Mandela was on the run from police and the legend of the Black Pimpernel was cultivated. ANC history acknowledges that Mandela evaded capture for so long largely because he posed as the chauffeur of Cecil Williams, a gay white communist theatre director, thus enabling him to move around the country and mobilise the masses. The ANC always felt a debt to Williams, and could not divorce his political action from his personal identity.

Williams sheltering Mandela was one of the threads that started the conversation for the ANC on gay rights within the liberation movement. The conversation continued – often boisterously – in prison cells, picket lines and detention centres as the final push against apartheid started in the 1980s. And it was during these repressive years of the 1980s States of Emergencies and the height of the internal anti-apartheid struggle, that a clear political culture based on equality was formed.

Furthermore, Mandela’s insistence on equality for all during his speech from the dock at the Rivonia Trial (where he was sentenced to life imprisonment) gave democratic gay rights activists a political language as they toyi-toyied, picketed, worked and struggled in the dark days, adamant that lived equality also meant that gay rights were human rights.

But throughout South Africa’s modern history, there has always been the marked presence of gay people, particularly in black urban working class communities. In everyday life, black sexual minorities have always lived within their communities in South Africa because under apartheid it was impossible for black people (meaning all people who aren’t white) to legally be able to move away. Documentation by Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) stalwart Barney Desai has also given us photographic evidence of a visible gay presence within township communities.

In my own family, my grandmother raised her pastor’s daughter (whose mother died), and the daughter eventually set up home with another woman from the church, with their three children. This was more than thirty years ago, and our families have always considered the women to be married.

Yet it was the final push against apartheid that provided the political conditions to enable for the growth of the democratic gay rights movement in the country. During the 1980s, under the United Democratic Front (UDF), gay rights activists became consciously political in a public and national sphere. Progressive lesbians and bisexual women (including black women) stood up where they were: in the UDF as well as in the smaller socialist and Africanist organisations. There were black lesbians in Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK- the ANC’s armed wing) and in other armed resistance movements. National gay visibility had up to then been confined to white people who had a big problem with black people and who largely had no problem with apartheid. The democratic non-racial movement overturned that, bringing together black and white gay rights activists, and within that struggle, black gay people worked to ensure that racial and sexual equality didn’t have to be an either/or trade-off.

The povo (the poor, the proletariat) in the townships formed the rank-and-file of that struggle. What the narratives on South African gay rights often misses is the role that township communities – and particularly women – played in supporting the movement, particularly as gay rights activists were also prominent anti-apartheid fighters. It was our grandmothers, mothers, aunts and sisters who shielded activists, rooted for them and kept bodies and spirits together under the threats of torture, detention and murder.

At the early gay pride marches in Johannesburg, it was our township mothers and aunts who cooked the food, helped in the organisation and provided houses for us to sleep over when we came in from other cities.

But the visibility of women – and black women – was not only in supporting roles. Lesbians and bisexual women were visible in the leadership and the structures of the gay rights movement. Their work had global resonance, culminating in Bev Palesa Ditsie being the first “openly” gay person to address a UN conference in 1995. Ditsie had been instrumental in organising gay rights in Johannesburg and including it as part of a national liberation agenda.

None of this denies the role of activists like Delmas Treason Trialist, Simon Nkoli, nor of Ivan Toms and his work in the townships and in the anti-conscription movement.

At the same time, it wasn’t all roses for gay rights activists: gay white liberals were not welcoming of black gay people and the homophobia and threats to safety in our townships was an entrenched as they are now.

Furthermore, in my life, it was clear that a number of prominent activists would have the courage to stand up to torture, detention and long-term imprisonment (and even the risk of death), but they would never have the courage to come out and identify as gay. I remember being fourteen at school and shielding and protecting a married teacher who obviously was gay. In my first job at seventeen at an anti-apartheid newspaper, brazen black activists in their thirties who had risked their lives to stand up to the security police and had been imprisoned and tortured, would hide behind me as an out gay person and leave teenage-me unprotected to fight on their behalf, and they’d still expect me to be their support system and agony aunt. (Needless to say, post-liberation, these are all people who now live comfortable middle-class gay lives.)

But for me there was also the joy and the fun of a teenage love affair and the calls to my communist girlfriend as she regularly got arrested in campus protests, trying to have a conversation while she was swearing at the police or her calling me from the police station, toyi-toying, singing and causing mayhem, while waiting for a lawyer to bail her and her comrades out.

This is not political nostalgia: the question of how we got to full equality is an attempt to quantify the political culture and practice in South Africa.

The ANC’s recent threatened shift to the right is a fundamental misreading of what has always constituted political culture in the country. This is not unsurprising in a movement that was exiled from this country for decades: the gist of resistance was shaped by the ANC, but the daily practice of democracy, anti-authoritarianism, anti-patriarchy and the value of putting equality into practice is something that perhaps is not fully understood by a movement which for decades didn’t first-hand experience the lively reality of nation-wide mass democracy. It’s not just the occasional comments by South Africa’s leadership figures where this is apparent. In recent moves around polygamy, repressing the media, using religion and morality to support oppression, and re-consigning rural African women to apartheid-era provisions there is the sense that they have missed out on more than thirty years of these conversations taking place within the country. For example, polygamy was legalised because we all remembered what happened to Muslim and African women under apartheid who were in polygamous marriages and how they were legally unprotected. You cannot re-tribalise African women in rural areas without acknowledging the thorough decimation of their lives of this practice under apartheid. Did these political conversations not reach the ANC in London and Lusaka? And when the tide turns on gay rights, will it be presented as a way to ‘rid the country of unAfrican influences’, when in fact this discussion has already been had for three decades in South Africa?

The erasure of women from South Africa’s gay history is also because gay spaces are not free from oppression, whether this is patriarchy, domestic violence or racism. Politically active lesbians and bisexual women are often suspicious of working with gay men on struggles, knowing that they are always short-changed in the men’s patriarchal practices, with women expected to support men but that support seldom being reciprocated.

Acknowledging the role of women and black women in South Africa’s gay equality movement is more than a gendered correction of history. Black women’s agency has often been presented as folksy and personally self-sacrificing. But if you look at female support from working class households, it points to a fundamental truth about who we are: not crusading heroes, but black women showing political independence by taking in their gay children and forging their own political and cultural practices in the face of colonial and political onslaught. It is not blind self-sacrifice; it is moral and political action.

But it’s important to remember that before we were South Africa’s black diamonds, we were the povo. And, as a new generation of young gay people in South Africa’s townships start their own struggle, the older generation need to remember the urban povo who made our lives possible: the mineworkers, black streetwalkers, hustlers and crooks who made space for us in their bars and clubs because we had nowhere else to go; the transvestite sisters turning tricks who put their arms around our shoulders; and our aunties, our mothers and our grandmothers who said that we were human. And not to forget the women who were righteous: Sheila and Julia, fierce, Jewish and running the gay rights stalls at early UDF rallies; Bev; Meganthrie; Tanya who told the socialists they needed to walk the talk; sister-soldier Funeka; Medi and Theresa who opened their home; Tracy who loved nothing more than causing a riot in a police van; and also that righteous 14-year old self who said I’m woman, I’m black, and I’m here.

* Karen Williams is a journalist who works across Africa and Asia. A shorter version of this piece first appeared in Genderlinks Commentary Service

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