How to write about the deaths of people who don’t matter

Sisonke Msimang

Sisonke Msimang, The Daily Maverick

I was asked this week what it takes to tell the stories of black lesbians killed in the townships in South Africa. The answer, in some ways, lies in Ferguson, Missouri, far away from South Africa, in an American community that has been burning all week.

There is much that South African journalists and editors can learn from the coverage of the protests that have arisen in the wake of Michael Brown’s death. Under normal circumstances the shooting death of a black teenager from a segregated community in the Southern state of Missouri would not have garnered much attention nationally, let alone globally. After all, two black men are killed every week by law enforcement officials in the US – most of them unarmed. Indeed, until he died, it is unlikely that Michael Brown mattered much to anyone except those who loved him. In his death he has come to matter a great deal to a great many people in America and beyond.

Chimamanda Adichie: Why can’t he just be like everyone else?

Chimamanda Adichie

By Chimamanda Adichie, The Scoop

I will call him Sochukwuma. A thin, smiling boy who liked to play with us girls at the university primary school in Nsukka. We were young. We knew he was different, we said, ‘he’s not like the other boys.’ But his was a benign and unquestioned difference; it was simply what it was. We did not have a name for him. We did not know the word ‘gay.’ He was Sochukwuma and he was friendly and he played oga so well that his side always won.

In secondary school, some boys in his class tried to throw Sochukwuma off a second floor balcony. They were strapping teenagers who had learned to notice, and fear, difference. They had a name for him. Homo. They mocked him because his hips swayed when he walked and his hands fluttered when he spoke. He brushed away their taunts, silently, sometimes grinning an uncomfortable grin. He must have wished that he could be what they wanted him to be. I imagine now how helplessly lonely he must have felt. The boys often asked, “Why can’t he just be like everyone else?”

More than just a thorny ride: (un) accounting for my silence in the company of homophobes

Lerato Makate, Bokamoso

After I attended my first annual Soweto Pride — LGBTI Parade in Johannesburg, South Africa — it was time to head on home. I ran across a bumper traffic congested main road, which runs between Mofolo, White City, Jabulani and Jabavu township locations in a typical  Soweto Saturday night.  As my cousin gestures  a random sign to the taxis, a minibus taxi stops and I in a snail’s pace climb into the front seat, minding my hip injury. Inside the taxi it’s a buzz with two toddlers singing their rendition of the South African national anthem remixed with a nursery rhyme, women sharing their day’s events especially from the stokvels — social gatherings that bring women from across any township location together, over music food and drink.

LGBT Activists Disrupt Jo'burg Gay Pride 2012

LZ Granderson: The myth of the gay agenda

The pain we all share – in memory of Thapelo Makhutle

Pinkwashing South Africa

by T.J. Tallie and Maria Hengeveld, Africa is a Country

This week BBC News reported on the rise in Cape Town’s status as a premiere international gay tourist destination. The article itself went on to report at length from gay South African hoteliers and organizers, many of whom lavished praise on the progressivism enshrined in the country’s constitution, and the comparative sense of freedom that South Africa in general (and Cape Town in particular) provided for LGBT-identified people. While it is undeniable that South Africa can boast one of the most inclusive constitutions in the world, particularly in regard to protecting the rights of those with different sexual orientations, the BBC article and much of the rhetoric surrounding ‘Cape Town as gay paradise’ obscures far more complex realities.

Interrogating the notion of “corrective rape” in contemporary public and media discourse

by Sekoetlane Jacob Phamodi, Consultancy Africa Intelligence

Recent media reports have shown a rise in attacks against lesbian women in townships across South Africa. The nature of the violence includes assault, often with grievous bodily harm, rape, murder or any combination of these. The sexual violence perpetrated against these women has become a particular focal point in media coverage, crudely termed “corrective” or “curative rape.”

African Leaders Hide Political Woes Behind Homophobia

In late March, Sam Nujoma, President of Namibia, ordered apurge of homosexuals, stating that “The Republic of Namibia does not allow homosexuality or lesbianism here. Police are ordered to arrest you, deport you and imprison you.” The Namibian Society for Human Rights countered that the “attempt to turn a personal dislike into ad hoc national policy is entirely unconstitutional and misguided.”

The Black Radical Congress joins those who have strongly condemned the Namibian president’s assault on same gender loving people in his Southern African nation. Namibia, a former German colony that was administered as a mandate and later annexed by South Africa, gained its independence in 1990 after a more than 20-year long anti-apartheid war. Given that he is a former freedom fighter and a head of state, Nujoma’s homophobic, discriminatory actions are particularly repugnant. His actions and rhetoric come on the heels of similar rhetoric and repression in Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe has campaigned to imprison and expel same gender loving people.

Only Protected on Paper

Richard Pithouse

by Richard Pithouse, Behind the Mask

It’s now almost three months since David Kato, a former teacher and a leading Ugandan gay rights activist, was beaten to death in Mukono Town in Uganda.  Kato was living in Johannesburg in the salad days of our new democracy and, inspired by the progress made here in recognising the legal right of gay people to an equal humanity, he became a key figure in the Ugandan movement when he returned home in 1998.

Homosexuality was first criminalised in Uganda in the 19th century under the British colonial occupation. That criminalisation of a mode of expressing love and desire that is part of all human communities across space and time was sustained and updated after independence in 1962. As the new century unfolded there were active attempts, often driven by senior politicians and clerics with the support of an increasingly rabid tabloid press, to create a popular moral panic about homosexuality.  Public vilification escalated and there were threats, calls for further state repression, censorship of gay people and organisations and a further tightening of a legal regime already so repressive that it carried a sentence of life imprisonment for certain forms of gay sex.