The church may not be full, but the mainly male congregation is enthusiastic as a gay pastor leads a service in the heart of Johannesburg for the city’s gays, lesbians and transsexuals.
South Africa, with a post-apartheid constitution that bans discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, stands out on a homophobic continent.
In neighbouring Namibia, President Sam Nujoma called on police in March to arrest, deport and imprison gays and lesbians, and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe once called gays and lesbians ”worse than pigs or dogs”.
”We all come from other churches: Baptist, Anglican, Roman Catholic,” says pastor Paul Mokgethi, 35, who recounts that he has been campaigning for homosexual rights since he was 16.
”We try to combine everything together so that everybody should feel welcome.”
Said Busi Kheswa, 32, who describes herself as ”a lesbian born, bred and buttered” in the Johannesburg township of Soweto: ”(the church) provides a spiritual home for me. It’s a place where I can be myself and talk about my relationship freely. I feel I am very much lucky.”
The Hope and Unity Community, founded in 1997, is a member of the Metropolitan Community of Churches (MCC) established 35 years ago in Los Angeles.
The MCC, which clails a worldwide membership of 40 000, defines itself as ”a worldwide fellowship of Christian churches with a special outreach to the world’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender communities”.
Of six affiliates in Africa, five are in South Africa.
At the beginning of November, when most African churches condemned the consecration as bishop of an openly gay Episcopalian in the United States, some with virulence, South Africa’s Anglicans bucked the tide.
The Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, Njongonkulu Ndungane, said nothing should prevent Gene Robinson’s becoming a bishop, and that the issue of gay clergy was ”on the agenda of the worldwide church and was not going to go away”.
Joe Mdhlela, a Roman Catholic priest who is spokesman for the South African Council of Churches, said: ”The South African constitution has been very helpful, it is a model that should be followed by others.” But he stressed that attitudes had evolved only among a minority of South Africans.
”One would hope that we should reverse the whole picture,” he said.
Anthony Manion, of GALA, the Gay and Lesbian Archives of South Africa, told AFP: ”The constitution did not come out of nowhere… gay and lesbian people started organising themselves in the late 1960s. The constitution has made a huge difference. What it means is that we can start adressing other problems like violence that lesbians face in the black community.”
Homosexuals in South Africa were persecuted in the 1970s and 1980s under the apartheid regime, succeeding in making their voices heard only as it neared its end.
During the 1990s, they instituted numerous lawsuits, resulting in a significant evolution of the law, and in March this year a South African court recognised two lesbian partners as parents of twins.
The first Gay Pride parade in Africa was held in Johannesburg in 1990, and GALA has established a gay tour of Johannesburg, but Cape Town nevertheless counts as South Africa’s premier gay city, with gay tourists encouraged.
It has become one of the world’s great ”queer” cities, it’s gay inhabitants say.
”Cape Town has all the things that bring gay people together, like music, nightclub life and beautiful scenery, and the people are tolerant and accepting,” said Andre Vorster, the organiser of the Mother City Queer Project, a popular gay costume party held annually in Cape Town.
”If Amsterdam is like the grandmother of gay cities, then San Francisco and Sydney are the elder daughters and Cape Town is the little sister,” he said. — Source : Sapa-AFP