Bongani*, resplendent in a tailored suit in brilliant white, alighted from a white Mercedes Benz adorned with golden ribbons. By his side appeared Sipho* in a black suit and elegant yellow silk necktie. It was their wedding day.
On Saturday December 2 they became the first gay couple to be legally married in a religious ceremony in South Africa, and on the continent of Africa.
This came after South Africa’s second House of Parliament passed the long awaited Civil Union Act on November 28, enabling lesbian and gay people to enter either into a civil partnership or a civil marriage — and giving them all the rights and legal protections enjoyed by married heterosexual South Africans.
Minister of Home Affairs Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula issued a letter making Pastor Janine Preesman of the Glorious Light Metropolitan Community Churches the first religious marriage officer with the right to marry lesbian and gay couples under the Act.
Preesman led the ceremony with Reverend Nokuthula Dhladhla at a church in Johannesburg. Bongani’s best men were decked out in shimmering silk waist coats with flower bouquets in hand, while Sipho’s best men cut imposing figures in their black suits and sunglasses.
The ceremony was a stylish affair, attended by about a hundred guests dressed in Johannesburg’s finest fashions. The grooms’ two frail grandmothers, sporting wide white hats, were first led into the church before other family members with children and babies filed in.
Praise singers in traditional garb reminded those in attendance of their hosts’ many virtues. Guests were seen wiping tears as the grooms made their vows of commitment and love to each other.
Ululating and clapping guests saw the grooms off as they were swept away in an open-top silver Peugeot cabriolet, with an ecstatic Bongani waving the marriage certificate in the air. A reception was held afterwards.
While they were the first same-sex couple to marry in a religious ceremony, they were not the first gay couple to marry under the Act. Two game rangers, Tony Halls and Vernon Gibbs, were married by a Department of Home Affairs official in George on Friday December 1.
‘I am an African’
In an interview, Dhladhla dismissed the insistence of traditionalists that homosexuality is un-African. ”I am who God created me to be. I am an African, no matter who says what. We are not all the same. God created us to be different.”
While Bongani and Sipho have the right to marry, their request to remain anonymous exposes the gap between legal rights and continuing social prejudice, said Melanie Judge, who led the marriage campaign as programme manager at the lesbian and gay organisation OUT.
Dhladhla explained that Bongani and Sipho were ”concerned about their own safety because some people are upset about the Civil Union Act being passed”.
Lesbian and gay groups participating in the recent African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) process in South Africa pointed out the continued victimisation of lesbians and gays. The issue was highlighted in the APRM report on the country, and the government was admonished to take further steps to address the problem.
The APRM involves a review of governance across several sectors in member states of the African Union, which voluntarily accede to the mechanism. The review process is overseen by a seven-member panel of eminent persons drawn from across the continent.
In South Africa, resistance to the legalisation of same-sex marriage went right up to Parliament, where certain members of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) threatened to break ranks over the issue.
An informal alliance emerged between African traditionalists and conservative Christians, with calls for the country’s much-vaunted liberal democratic Constitution to be amended, to strike down the clause that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
Later this demand was changed to an emphasis on protection for marriage as a ”heterosexual institution” in the Constitution.
Human rights
The ANC’s top leadership intervened, making the links between the organisation’s own human rights tradition and the human rights of lesbians and gays. When the Bill was adopted, Minister of Defence Mosiuoa Lekota told Parliament that ”the question before us is not whether same-sex marriages or civil unions are right or not”.
”The question is whether we suppress those in our society who prefer same-sex partners,” he said. ”We have no right to preserve for ourselves, purely because of the majority of our numbers, the exclusive right to marriage while we deny others that same right.”
Lekota pointed out that ”in the very long and arduous struggle for democracy very many men and women of homosexual orientation joined the ranks of the liberation and democratic forces. How, then, can we live with the reality that we should enjoy rights that together we fought for side by side, and deny them that?
”We do them no favour but reward their efforts in the same way that our own efforts are being rewarded.
”This country cannot afford to continue being a prisoner of backward, timeworn prejudices that have no basis. The time has come that we as this society, we as this Parliament, on behalf of our nation, must lead,” he said.
Judge said the passing of the Civil Union Act provides the opportunity for South Africa’s political leaders to be agents of change to secure human rights for all citizens in African countries, regardless of their sexual orientation. ”The passing of the Act is a momentous occasion for the African continent as a whole where homosexuality is still shrouded in silence, taboo and in most cases remains criminalised.”
South Africa’s legislative reform for same-sex couples ”shows a stark contrast to the ongoing systematic oppression of lesbian and gay people across Africa”, she said. In countries such as Nigeria, Uganda and Ghana a backlash against gays and lesbians has been witnessed in an apparent response to the developments in South Africa.
* Names have been changed