Africans from the continent at large find many inventive reasons to attempt to obtain asylum in post-apartheid South Africa — economic deprivation and political persecution in their own countries being foremost.
One of the less-advertised reasons is sexual persecution. The recent outburst by African bishops against the ordination of a gay bishop in the United States gives some indication of how tough it is to be openly gay in most African countries. And yet the gay phenomenon exists everywhere — much to the chagrin of those who would piously claim that being gay is a European-imported disease, like smallpox and measles and a lot of other things.
The Johannesburg suburb of Hillbrow, once a faintly Bohemian but basically decent urban flatland populated by middle-class white people, has become a refuge for all sorts of naughty Africans over the past 20 years. Some of the naughtiest are the gay boys and girls from Nigeria, Cameroon, Senegal, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and many other places, whose emergence as something of a community living on the edges of Johannesburg society gives the lie to the homophobic rantings of those they have left behind.
Unlike many countries that have revelled in the joys of independence and democracy for several decades, South Africa, the new kid on the block, is tolerant of diverse sexualities. Tough as life might be in other respects, homosexuals can find sanctuary in a whole network of acquaintances in bars and clubs around the country’s major metropolises. They can even lean on a number of support groups who work to publicise their cause, and provide support and information on how to survive the illogical vagaries of the hetero world.
Of course, it was not always so. Homosexual men and women have had to struggle as hard as any other part of society to win the right to live and breathe freely under the wide skies of the motherland.
In the old days one apartheid government after another steadfastly refused to even believe in the existence of such a state as homosexuality — just like Richard Nixon, former president of the US. (When Nixon was tactfully told by one of his advisers that there really was such a category of humanity, and that they really did indulge in certain sexual practises among themselves, he almost fainted, and had to be revived with several glasses of Wild Turkey bourbon before he could safely take over the reins of the most powerful country in the world once more. It could be argued that the Watergate debacle that later brought him to his knees was a logical extension of the bitter mania that took hold of his brain after that unhappy discovery.)
In South Africa much of the time and energy of the police force was taken up in trying to catch queers in flagrante delicto, as they say, and punish them by sending them to jail. Now, jail, of course, with its segregated single sex environment, is the worst place to send someone who already has homosexual tendencies. And if you ain’t got them already, conditions in the nick will help you find them willy nilly, and in pretty short order, at that.
The gay thing came to prominence and notoriety when police raided a party in Forest Town, northern Johannesburg, in 1966, and busted a few hundred white men who had gathered together to celebrate their like-mindedness. A high-profile trial ensued, as a result of which the infamous ”three-men-at-a-party” law was passed. Under the terms of this law, anything more than two men gathered together under the pretext of holding an innocent party could be arrested and charged with depravity, riotous assembly and gross indecency.
As in other examples of their bumbling ineptitude, the cops would often come a cropper in the course of trying to police this section of society. In one famous incident, a police major spent days patiently lying in wait in the Turkish baths downtown before bursting into a private cubicle and catching two theatrical white gentlemen having a go at what Shakespeare used to call ”the beast with two backs”.
Unfortunately for the galloping major, the judge took a dim view of his intervention and threw the case out of court, observing that the ”three-men-at-a-party” law could not be applied in this case because there had only been two men ”partying”, as it were, in the cubicle. The major could not count himself as a third member of the ”gathering”, since he was ”an uninvited guest”.
It is darkly clownish incidents like these that make you believe that the clumsy apparatus of apartheid partly imploded in on itself through sheer ineptitude. It was not, after all, so difficult to render the country ungovernable, since the system was already trying to govern over an impossibly wide terrain. If everything was illegal, how could you avoid breaking the law? What did anyone have to lose?
But back to this common misconception that homosexuality is merely foreign devilry let loose, like all sorts of other mayhem, on the innocent face of Africa. Wits University’s Gay and Lesbian Archive has recently unleashed a ”Gay Johannesburg” tour, which takes in not only the ‘mo subculture of the predominantly white northern suburbs, but also landmarks in the history and present reality of black homosexuality.
I hope the tour will not remain a self-indulgent flight of fantasy for the converted. Being confronted with the day-to-day reality of coming to terms with and living with a queer profile is an eye-opener for smug, generally knee-jerk homophobic heterosexuals — especially when your tour guide is a black lesbian who grew up in Soweto, and had to negotiate the tricky road to self-fulfillment by ”coming out” in a tough and seemingly intolerant township environment.
To be queer, Zulu, and still wish to remain in contact with your ancestors through the medium of the sangoma can sometimes be a combination that the average citizen of Zondi or Orlando East might find impossible to tolerate.
And yet, even in Soweto, there is tolerance.
Different strokes for different folks. It has finally been acknowledged that you can’t stop a queer being queer by administering electric shock treatment. You is what you is.
So it is, and so it has always been. The ”Gay Johannesburg” tour goes some way to showing you exactly why, when, and how.