The international campaign for equal rights for homosexuals and other sexual minorities took a step forward on November 14 last year when South Africa became the first country in Africa, and the fifth in the world, to legalise same-sex marriage.
“This country cannot continue to be a prisoner of the backward, time-worn prejudices which have no basis,” declared ruling African National Congress parliamentarian and Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota in urging passage. “Culture is not static.”
The new law, adopted by a 230-to-41 vote, was welcomed by gay and lesbian activists in South Africa and around the world as a significant advance for equal rights. But it is not a trend. Conservative religious and political leaders in many countries still strongly oppose equal rights for homosexuals, including same-sex marriage.
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour noted in August last year that more than 80 countries criminalise consensual sexual relations between persons of the same sex — including seven in which the punishment can be death.
“There is no doubt that these laws violate international human rights standards,” she said. “Neither the existence of national laws nor the prevalence of custom can ever justify the abuse, attacks, torture and indeed killings that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons are subjected to because of who they are or are perceived to be.”
The “shameful silence” with which homophobic violence is greeted by governments and society, she told delegates to a Montreal human rights conference, is the “ultimate rejection of the fundamental principle of the universality of rights”.
Discrimination, isolation, repression
Bias and stigmatisation against homosexuals and other sexual minorities in Africa is rooted in deeply held cultural and religious values. They can be accompanied by abuses, are too often enforced by vigilante violence and are sometimes enshrined in law.
In one widely reported instance, the UN Human Rights Commission found Cameroon in violation of its treaty obligations after police arrested 17 men at a Yaoundé nightclub believed to be frequented by members of the gay and lesbian community and held nine for more than a year. One of the detainees, a 30-year-old man living with HIV/Aids, died 10 days after his release.
Prosecutors initially charged the men with “homosexuality”, although that is not itself a crime in Cameroon. Seven of the men were later convicted under the country’s anti-sodomy law, although no evidence of any sexual activity was presented.
In a letter to the New York-based International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, a senior government official said that homosexuality was not acceptable in society and defended the arrests as necessary to preserve “positive African cultural values”.
Nor is family or community necessarily a haven. In testimony at the UN Council on Human Rights, Juliet Victor Mukasa, a Ugandan transgendered person, described her life as a member of this “highly vulnerable” community.
“In Africa, transgendered people are seriously punished for being who they are,” she said. “I was always being beaten by my father for ‘behaving’ like a boy. In school the same story … I became the laughing stock of the village and expelled myself because of the humiliation.
“In church I was once stripped naked before a multitude of people. The pastor ‘saw’ the spirit of a young man inside me and they burnt my clothes and shoes in order to kill the male spirit … As a transgendered person, it is constantly demanded of me to explain and justify why I do not fit into other people’s idea of what a man or a woman should be.”
‘Un-African’ claims challenged
Much of the stigma attached to homosexuality in Africa has been justified by opponents on broad religious or cultural grounds, with assertions that same-sex relationships are condemned in the Bible or Qur’an or that they never occurred in pre-colonial African society. Religious scholars on both sides of the issue are still debating, sometimes bitterly, the proper interpretation of scriptural references to homosexuality.
Recent research by African and northern academics, however, is challenging the assertion that homosexuality was imported to Africa by colonialism and is not compatible with tradition and culture.
For instance, research among the Gikuyu people of Murang’a district in central Kenya by Wairimu Ngaruiya Njambi and William O’Brien found traditional acceptance of “woman-woman marriage” when such relationships brought children into households or eased disputes over inheritance of land and other property.
In one case, they reported in 2000 in a scholarly article in the United States National Women Studies Association Journal, a childless woman married a younger woman with the expectation that the new wife would bear children by a male partner and create heirs. In the relationships examined in the study, the complexities of gender roles were more a source of amusement than tension in the community, and, at least within Gikuyu tradition, acceptable.
Other researchers have found traditional homosexual and bisexual practices among men in some African cultures as well, and words for homosexuality, gay men and lesbians in a large number of indigenous languages.
Despite the risks, a slowly growing number of African gays and lesbians, encouraged by the spread of democracy and galvanised by the need to combat the spread of HIV/Aids, have emerged from the shadows to confront stigma.
In February 2004, 22 homosexual, bisexual and transgender organisations from 16 African countries called on their leaders to “safeguard our real situations and our basic rights. We, African lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered people, do exist — despite your attempts to deny our existence.”
They continued: “Political leaders promote hatred against us to solidify their own political situations,” but “we have and have always had a place in Africa … We demand that our voices be heard.”
Reprinted from UN Africa Renewal