Originally Posted by :
Homosexuality and the battle for
Africa ’s soul
By Mark Gevisser
Complex anxieties are at play in
the wave of homophobia that's
currently sweeping over the
continent, writes Mark Gevisser
'These boys committed a crime
against our culture, our religion and
our laws," said the Malawian
president Bingu wa Mutharika at
the weekend as he pardoned
Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge
Chimbalanga from their sentence of
14 years hard labour. He claimed
he was exercising the pardon "on
humanitarian grounds". If he were
more truthful, he would have said it
was on diplomatic, or expedient
grounds; his country is almost
entirely dependent on foreign aid,
and the pressure on him was
intense.
Meanwhile, Monjeza and
Chimbalanga will no longer see
each other now that they are free,
according to reports. How could any
young couple bear the pressure
and run the risk of recidivism and
rearrest? Both have been
"returned" to their home
communities and their families, it
seems, will take up the role of
punishing them where the state left
off. Two lives, at least, have been
ruined, and as the terrible episode
draws to a close, it is worth
reflecting on why there appears to
be a wave of state-sanctioned
homophobia across the continent at
the moment, and what those of us
-- African or not -- committed to
human rights might do about it.
The recent pressure on Malawi is
reminiscent of that on Uganda last
year. As a consequence, the
country's president, Yoweri
Museveni, intervened to prevent
the inclusion in anti-homosexuality
laws of a clause mandating the
death penalty in certain instances.
On a smaller scale, something
similar happened in Rwanda: gay
activists caught wind of a proposal
to criminalise homosexuality and
mounted a rapid-fire global
campaign, largely via the internet,
forcing Paul Kagame's government
to announce that it had no
intention of intervening in the
private lives of its citizens.
Such actions are in the best
tradition of international solidarity;
the kind of global action that
played its part in bringing down
apartheid. But given the politics of
aid in Africa, it has consequences.
Both Museveni and Kagame find
themselves accused of being
stooges to their donors; in Rwanda
the country's evangelical churches
are seeking constitutional relief and
one influential pastor is reported as
saying, recently, "leta yafashwe
kungufu" -- Kinyarewanda for "the
state was raped by the donor
community".
Recently the Palestinian academic
Joseph Massad wrote a
controversial book accusing gay
funders and activists of becoming a
proseletysing neocolonial "Gay
International", and of provoking
unneccesary cultural conflict in the
Arab world by imposing their
Western "orientalist" definitions of
gay identity on societies they
deeply misunderstood. Such
provocations, he wrote, land up
making things worse, rather than
better, for the people they are
trying to assist, because of the
backlash they provoke. Do
Massad's arguments hold any
water in sub-Saharan Africa? Would
homosexuals in Malawi or Uganda
be any better off if the "Gay
International" (perhaps best
personified in the person of Peter
Tatchell) had not been activated?
Homosexuality is -- as has often
been noted -- illegal in 38 of Africa's
53 sovereign states. In most
instances, however, this is merely a
hangover from the colonial British
penal code, which criminalised
sodomy for the first time in Africa,
and is usually ignored.
Homosexuality is certainly not a
Western import, but both
legislated homophobia and gay
identity are. Particularly for
younger urban people, sexuality
has become a matter of identity
("I am gay" rather than mere
practice ("I sleep with men"; an
overt insistence on equality
rather than a covert satisfying
of desire, accommodated by
social norms and traditions.
The result has been social crisis.
Before the Malawi case, there was
organised mob violence against
gay men and Aids workers in
Kenya, and a protracted crackdown
against homosexuals in Senegal;
when gay men fled to Gambia last
year, the president told them to
leave or face decapitation.
Recently, in Zimbabwe -- where the
state has been viciously
homophobic for more than a
decade -- two gay activists were
arrested and detained for criticising
the anti-gay policies of Robert
Mugabe, and in several other
countries new anti-gay legislation is
in the offing.
Africa, of course, is neither homo
genous nor unique. Much of what is
being faced by gay Africans today
has been experienced in other
parts of the world, including the
West. Nonetheless, there is
something undeniably specific
about the loathing that has been
activated on the continent at
present, as couples such as Monjeza
and Chimbalanga challenge age-old
gender roles in societies struggling
to maintain their integrity and to
define their places in a globalised
world.
There is a very particular dynamic
to the current wave of
homophobia; one which has its
roots in American-sponsored
Christian fundamentalism, the
current politics of aid, and the Aids
epidemic. The digital revolution
plays its part too; thanks to satellite
TV, middle-class Africans can
channel-switch effortlessly between
Will and Grace and Wahaabi tirades
against the decadent homosexual
West. Local tabloid newspapers
sniff out marriage ceremonies to be
performed by young men who
have learned of such possibilities
through their own exposure to the
global media -- even though there
is no evidence that the Malawian
couple, poor and marginalised,
were in any way acting beyond
their own impulses. Indeed, it is not
even correct to call them a "gay"
couple: Chimbalanga self-identifies
as female.
Nonetheless, because Malawian
society does not accept
Chimbalanga as female, their
engagement ceremony was read
as the equivalent of a "gay
marriage" -- something which
many Africans now know of due to
global exposure -- and the arrests
of the two were provoked by
sensationalist reporting. The Nation,
the Malawian newspaper that
caught wind of the story and broke
it, put it bluntly: this was "the first
recorded public activity for
homosexuals in the country". The
anti-gay legislation had never been
used in Malawi, but readers were
now reminded that the practice of
homosexuality carried a sentence
of up to 14 years, and the police
felt compelled to act.
The Kenyan violence began
similarly: a gay Kenyan couple was
legally married in London; a
Kenyan newspaper reported on it,
which triggered a spate of
homophobic coverage in the
country's mass media, which made
local radio stations in Mombasa
eager to report on the rumour of a
gay wedding. That, in turn, led to
anti-gay vigilantism, brutal violence
and the arrest of six allegedly gay
men earlier this year.
Meanwhile, as Islam blooms in both
East and West Africa, Christian
clerics use homophobia as a
weapon in the battle for souls,
while American conservative
Christians in the West have found in
Africa the numbers needed to
counter the liberalisation of their
churches back home. This has been
most evident, for example, in the
way the Nigerian Anglican church
has become a bulwark against the
ordination of gay priests and the
sanctification of same-sex
marriages.
And so, while Western human rights
organisations fund the
development of gay organisations
in countries such as Uganda,
conservative American Christian
organisations in these countries
have been mobilising politicians in
the same country to adopt
extreme anti-gay legislation.
There is much irony, for example,
in the way the pastor quoted
above blames the donors for
raping Rwanda, when his very
theology has its roots in evangelical
America, and when he and his co-
religionists have been exposed to
homophobia through the
missionary activity of right-wing
American churches. These churches
and high-profile individuals have
provided both the mobilisation and
the theological underpinnings for
state-sponsored homophobia.
The context to these "culture wars"
is the Aids epidemic. Conservative
American evangelicals gained a
foothold in some African countries
thanks to the policies of George W
Bush's President's Emergency Plan
for Aids Relief, which prioritised
"faith-based" HIV-programming,
including the preaching of
abstinence over the distribution of
condoms. This gave American
evangelicals an entrée into
countries such as Uganda and
empowered an entire generation of
conservative Christian organisations
in East Africa.
In contrast, the largely-liberal
establishment aid agencies --
particularly those from Northern
Europe -- strongly pushed an
agenda of gay equality. This was
not just for reasons of equality, but
because of the growing evidence
that one of the major vectors of
HIV-transmission in African societies
is "men who sleep with
men" (MSMs): precisely those men
who do not call themselves "gay"
but who practise homosexual sex.
To reach these men, state-funded
programmes such as the Kenyan
Medical Research Institute (Kemri)
began focusing on MSMs. It is not
coincidental that the victims of the
anti-gay violence in Kenya were
Aids workers, who provided
services to homosexual clients at
Kemri in Mombasa.
The Aids epidemic has only
heightened many African countries'
dependence on the West and in this
context there has been a new
impetus to fight the
"neocolonialism" of development
aid: the Zambian economist
Dambisa Moyo argues in her
bestselling Dead Aid, for example,
that dependency on Western aid is
killing African society, and that the
plug must be pulled in five years.
While many of the precepts of this
approach might be correct, the
reality is that the withdrawal of
development aid from Africa at this
point -- particularly given the Aids
epidemic -- would be catastrophic.
And so, as many Africans become
increasingly uncomfortable with
their countries' dependence on the
West, they look to find a place to
put their pride; they might be poor,
but at least they have values! In all
the world's global indicators of well
being, they can at least lead one:
morality. What better way to
maintain popular support than
through the scapegoating of an
unpopular minority in the name of
a battle against Western
decadence?
In the face of this -- and of the
brutality experienced by the
Malawian couple, or the victims of
violent homophobia elsewhere on
the continent -- what choice does
the international community have
but to exert the kind of pressure it
has in countries like Rwanda and
Uganda? Such pressure, however,
perpetuates the very sense of
powerlessness that provokes
homophobia in the first place, and
confirms the canard that support
for gays is a "Western agenda". It
alone is clearly not a viable long-
term solution.
Perhaps the experience of South
Africa provides a way out of to this
vicious cycle. Here, despite the
horrific phenomenon of "corrective
rape" against black lesbians in
townships, the ruling ANC has
championed sexual equality and
legalised same-sex marriage; even
the country's president, Jacob
Zuma, a man with a history of
homophobic statements, felt
compelled to condemn the
Malawian sentence last week.
This is, in part, a consequence of
South Africa's uniquely
heterogenous and industrialised
society -- and a non-homophobic
church, thanks to Archbishop
Desmond Tutu and his generation
of liberation theologians. But it is
also the result of a highly effective
campaign by human rights activists
-- like Tutu himself -- who worked
to disarm political African
homophobia by folding gay rights
into a broader understanding of
human rights and post-colonial
development.
The winning argument went thus:
to discriminate against
homosexuals for an inherent
immutable genetic fact is
tantamount to discriminating
against black people for the same
reason. Such logic may hold greater
purchase in South Africa, where the
memory of racial discrimination is
still fresh, than in countries like
Sudan, Kenya and Uganda where
other sectoral battles have become
predominant. Still, even in these
countries -- where one might be
stigmatised because of one's tribe,
or religion rather than race --
invocations to "equality" and
"human rights" have a particular
resonance. Until a significant
number of African leaders join Tutu
in the fight against homophobia by
invoking the continent's experience
of discrimination, there will be no
imminent end in sight to the
hardship of people such as Steven
Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga.
Meanwhile, as subjects become
citizens in African societies thanks
to the deepening of civil society
and the spread of digital
technology, they claim their space,
and they also discover the world
beyond the narrow confines of
their communities. They do this
with intent -- as in the case of
brave activists in Uganda or Malawi
-- or simply out of the natural
inclination towards freedom and
self-definition, as in the case of
Monjeza and Chimbalanga. Tough
as it might be for them, future
generations will thank them.
Mark Gevisser is writer-in-residence
at the University of Pretoria

Bullcrap!
My best bet is that this writer is a white southAfrican. . . I would rather pitch my Tenth with the right-winged American Evangelicals than listen to the preachings of the so-called left-wing Northern Europe. I dont have problem with homosexuas as long as like the writer said, they keep it to be a covert satisfying of unorthodox desires rather than a overt desire to practise such bizarre abomination in open. . . They ve succeeded in turning SA into a cultureless society and want to do so to the rest of Africa through subtle appeal for its acceptance and legislation. Call it homophobia I don't care, it should not be right becoz some ppl have found a way to rationalize it through their neocolonial aids, and manipulative comparisons like likening it to discrimination against black ppl by white ppl. Rubbish! They should also make cases for incestuous cohabitation, paedophilia, bestiality and such. All we need is one weird explanation and acceptance from those bizarre whiteys and the world order changes. Manipulative Freaks.

how can you say you have 'no problem' with homosexuality and then call it a bizarre abomination?
i can say i have no problem with your mother, but if in the next 2 sentences i call her a bizarre abomination you'd be safe to assume there's a problem.

Ikengawo:

how can you say you have 'no problem' with homosexuality and then call it a bizarre abomination?
i can say i have no problem with your mother, but if in the next 2 sentences i call her a bizarre abomination you'd be safe to assume there's a problem.

. . . You of all people should understand the paradox of my statement, especially after I said I dont ve problem with them, I went further to say only if they keep it a closet affair and not make it the darling of every impressionable youth by practising it in the open and trying to get legislations that further their cause and make it look normal. Hope you dig now. Fact is, I can't stop them from have such weird feelings or sexual leanings but of course I can stop them from trying to force others to be like them through their shameless open display of such despicable act. I may not hate homosexuals but I sure damn hate homosexualism in all entirety.