President Robert Mugabe says the issue of gay rights being written into the country’s pending constitution “cannot be discussed”, Zimbabwean media reported on Friday.
The country’s power-sharing government, headed by Mugabe and former opposition leader Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, is shortly to embark on nationwide public hearings about the drafting of a new constitution.
The drafting of a new people-driven constitution is part of a series of democratic reforms aimed at ending the repressive laws and policies of the nearly 30-year Mugabe era.
The government mouthpiece Herald newspaper on Friday quoted the elderly leader as saying there had been suggestions that gay rights should be included in the new constitution.
“This cannot be discussed,” he said. “Those who want to discuss this are mad. If we do, the dead will rise against us.”
On a continent where homosexuality is widely tabooed, the 86-year-old autocrat is one of Africa’s most outspoken opponents, once having described gay people as “worse than dogs and pigs”.
Friday’s report quoted him as saying he had heard that recently in Britain and the United States an archbishop had solemnised marriages between men. “What is that?” he asked. “I want to see how they will procreate. If they manage, then I will admit I do not know.”
Despite Mugabe’s rhetoric, Zimbabwe has no laws banning same-sex relationships. Sodomy is a crime, but cases between consenting adults are seldom prosecuted. The country’s gay rights body, Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe, operates relatively openly and without the harassment suffered by general civil liberties organisations.
Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change holds that homosexuality is a private issue and cannot be criminalised. — Sapa-dpa