Sun and solidarity: From left: Deputy Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development Andries Nel, human-rights advocate and LGBTQIA+ activist Dr Thulani Mhlongo, Deputy Minister of Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities Steve Letsike; LGBTQIA+ and human-rights activist, and Dr Bev Ditsie. Photo: Angelo Louw
This past weekend, we “celebrated” Africa’s oldest Pride, Joburg Pride, first organised in 1990 with pioneering activists like Dr Beverley Ditsie.
In recent years, the official Pride event has faced harsh criticism for favouring sponsorship and spectacle over its activist roots. Ahead of the 36th edition this month, several organisations, including South African Jews for a Free Palestine, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Narrative Repair, Queers for Palestine and Save Our Sacred Lands, issued an open letter under the banner NoGoBurg Pride, urging a boycott.
The letter backed up its claims by recalling 2012 when One in Nine activists were blocked from holding a moment of silence for murdered black lesbians and trans people.
It accused Joburg Pride of “rainbow-washing” and colluding with corporations that profit from oppression. Amazon, previously cited as a sponsor, was criticised for alleged ties to Israel and African land exploitation, though Joburg Pride later clarified it was not a 2025 sponsor.
The NoGoBurg Pride open letter loudly declared: “No pride in genocide” and instructed participants to “wear all black to Joburg Pride”, where they would be “singing; talking about Palestine, Sudan, Congo, supporting fellow queers”. It even encouraged readers to attend alternative, activist-led spaces on the day.
What strikes me is the hypocrisy and deflection in some of the spaces most vocal about justice, once one has experienced them from the inside.
Park it: Wits anthropologist Dr Nosipho Mngomezulu, Dr Bev Ditsie, singer Leon John, and wellness facilitator and co-founder of House of Ditsie, Nicole Ditsie, whose organisation House of Ditsie hosted an alternative community gathering to mark Pride in Johannesburg. Photo: Angelo Louw
Within many (activist) communities exists exploitation, inequality and nepotism. They tend to generate offshoots — informal subgroups that, despite their rhetoric of care and solidarity, can be emotionally charged and, at times, profoundly unsafe, particularly for poor, black and queer folk.
One such offshoot, known as Queer Fight Club, is the ideal example of the stark inequities embedded in these supposedly safe spaces. Its hosts, insulated in Killarney by generational wealth and access to resources, ostensibly operate a (queer) fighting ring without any real safety measures or accountability.
Lured by the fallacy of a safe space, I faced severe damage that was not only physical but emotional and psychic and the responses to the harm in the group showed me how black bodies were easily treated as disposable.
The irony is bitter — the same people shouting the loudest about injustices that exist “out there” often perpetuate the same violences they condemn in their own relationships. Privilege, whether rooted in race, gender, inheritance or historical advantage, frequently dictates whose voices matter and whose bodies are protected.
Black individuals are sometimes expected to overlook their own danger, harm, trauma and exclusion, while global issues are used as moral cover. In these spaces, solidarity is conditional and care is transactional.
After the hectic harm, I withdrew to lick my wounds until the hubbub around the “No Pride in Genocide” protest reached me.
Even in preparatory meetings, I heard, tension flared. The usual suspects attempted to dictate, with familiar patterns of centring personal preferences over collective agency.
People of colour had to assert that activism and Pride are profoundly personal and no one has the authority to demand risk or define how others protest or celebrate.
“[We] reminded our community to exercise their own choice in how they wish to celebrate and be visible,” Ditsie told Mamba Online.
While the entire community stood 10 toes, deep in solidarity with oppressed communities globally, including Palestine, Congo and Sudan, over a hundred members of the LGBTQIA+ community chose to picnic as a form of protest and pride, many out of preference and others alienated by the woes and unfair demands of some of our queer comrades.
What emerged was a thing of total beauty. Rather than directing our energies towards aggro antagonisms and the corporate spectacle of Sandton Pride, we veered towards something far rarer. Something that reminded us more of ourselves and what we truly desire.
House of Ditsie, led by Bev and Nicole Ditsie, orchestrated the Pride Picnic at Zoo Lake on 25 October with familial finesse. It was a sunlit, unruly oasis where queer people, black and brown folk, could breathe, be visible, be sexy and take part in activism on their own terms.
Present at the event were Steve Letsike, Deputy Minister for Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities; Andries Nel, Deputy Minister of Justice; MP Palomino Jama and Dr Thulani Mhongo, a veteran human rights advocate who participated in Johannesburg’s first Pride. Not to mention some of the fiercest young faces of queer Joburg.
We played games, broke bread and commiserated about how we’re often pushed away from Pride by those who insist on our quiet allegiance.
Here, love and joy were not optional extras but the organising principle. Presence was not a performative checkbox, virtue signal or a site for quiet violence, but a meaningful act, radical in its harmonious simplicity. For once, Pride felt like it was really ours. It was a win, but what it was not, was an anomaly.
There are many small wins. I once recommended Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (2018) to a beloved white queer comrade who took it badly and blocked me. They chose violence. But there are plenty of palatable pieces of literature that aim at forms of repair.
Dean Spade’s Love in a F*cked-Up World (2025) is technically a self-help book, a genre which I typically despise, but it reads more like a manifesto for living ethically and politically in intimate spaces.
Spade frames relationships as laboratories for practice, where we can confront conflict and imperfection not as failures but as terrain in which ethical relationality can flourish.
“We live in a society that responds to people being hurt in two ways: either with denial, telling the person who was hurt to shut up, or by casting the person who did the harm as a bad guy who needs to be punished …
“What is missing when we live on these two extreme ends of the spectrum is the reality that all people do things that hurt others and all people experience hurt …
“The more we can practice listening and not minimizing when someone gives us feedback and sharing feedback with others in a compassionate and measured way rather than being out for blood, the better our skills will be when larger conflicts arise.”
Starved for nooks where we might live, laugh and love without apology, we often navigate the treacheries of this world, hearts wide open, only to find the same oppressive machinery thrumming behind the banners.
The 2025 Pride controversy lays bare the persistent tension between corporatisation, ethics and solidarity, as well as the subtle violences that linger within activist spaces.
Yet amid these ceaseless pressures, spaces like House of Ditsie remind us that we can still choose love and that we always have a right to Pride!