Outrage at South African Lesbian Murders

 
16 August 2007- South Africa may be the only country in the world to have enshrined lesbian and gay equality in its Constitution, but a rash of brutal murders of lesbians last month has underscored how the country is undergoing an epidemic of hate crimes against LGBT people, triggering protests from Capetown to New York City - including from an openly gay South African Supreme Court of Appeal Justice.

The lifeless bodies of a well-known Soweto lesbian and AIDS activist, Sizakele Sigasa, and of her friend Salome Masooa were found in a field in the Meadowlands area on July 8, and are believed to have been killed the previous day.

Sigasa was discovered with her hands tied together by her underpants and her ankles tied together by her shoelaces, with three bullet holes in her head and three in her collarbone. Masooa had been shot once. Local gay and human rights organizations said the physical evidence indicated the women had both been raped.

In another case, the body of 23-year-old Thokozane Qwabe was found in a field in Ladysmith on July 22 - she had multiple head wounds, was naked, and also showed evidence of having been raped.

Also last month, Simangele Nhlapo, a member of a support group for women living with HIV, and her two-year old daughter were both murdered - and the child's legs had been broken during the vicious attack.

In April, a 16-year-old lesbian, Madoe Mafubedu, was also raped and repeatedly stabbed, causing her death.

"Police spokespersons have consistently refused to describe these murders as 'hate crimes,'" wrote South African News 24 columnist Marianne Thamm, adding, "It is almost as if authorities fear that owning up to the homoprejudice that drives these crimes might oblige or require them to work differently in solving them. Perhaps they feel that categorizing these crimes as 'ordinary' might make them all go away."

South Africa has no hate crimes legislation. Four men briefly detained in the murders of Sigasa and Masooa, following what the gay and lesbian online magazine Behind The Mask (mask.org.za) described as "whistleblowing by the Meadowlands community," have been released "for lack of evidence," the South African Broadcasting Corporation reported.

Murders of LGBT people in South Africa frequently go unpunished.

Speaking this Tuesday at a meeting called by the student LGBT group Rainbow at the University of Cape Town to protest widespread anti-gay violence, openly gay and openly HIV-positive Supreme Court of Appeal Justice Edwin Cameron said that there is "rampant inequality and prejudice against gays and lesbians" in South Africa, and added, "We need to reach a point where everyone is protected in their lifestyles."

Cameron, a former defense lawyer for Nelson Mandela's African National Congress during the apartheid era, was appointed to the South African High Court, an appellate body one level below the Supreme Court of Appeal, more than a decade ago by Mandela, when he became president, and played a key role in securing inclusion of a ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation in the South African Constitution. (He also served a one-year interim term on the Constitutional Court, South Africa's highest, one level about the Supreme Court of Appeal.) But, Cameron said in his Tuesday remarks, "We have a long way to go before the constitutional promises are translated" into reality.

Also this Tuesday, New York City's South African Consulate on East 38th Street was the scene of a demonstration called to protest the wave of lesbian murders. The 60 demonstrators were led by South Africa's Nonhlanhla Mkhize, director of the Durban Lesbian and Gay Heath and Community Centre, who met with a consular official and handed him a letter demanding equal protection for LGBT people.

The demonstration was organized by an ad hoc committee, Liberation 4 All Africans, formed in response to the murders of Sigasa and Masooa by a group of self-described "lesbian and non-conforming" women from South Africa, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and Kenya, all of whom reside in the New York area.

"The idea of an African diaspora group here in New York is really important," said Cary Alan Johnson, African specialist for the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, or IGLHRC, which sponsored Durban activist Mkhize's visit here.

"It would be great if groups like this formed in Canada and in Europe to provide support to South African activists," Johnson told Gay City News, pledging that IGLHRC will work toward that end.

Human Rights Watch, in a press release on August 9, denounced the "climate of violent homophobia" in which "lesbians in South African townships are still targeted for rape and murder." The group "urged the government to launch public education campaigns to eliminate homophobic prejudice in all walks of life."

Mkhize, who spoke to Gay City News prior to the demonstration, said, "It's our hope that this becomes a global campaign looking at the whole continent of Africa at the end of the day."

Mkhize described a South African culture in which homophobia is rampant. "In South Africa, being gay is still understood to be a Western thing," she said, adding, "To be black and a woman and gay means you're in big trouble."

Mkhize said that the latest wave of lesbian murders is only the tip of the iceberg.

"There is greater violence against LGBT people than is being reported," she said. "Many of these incidents are not reported by the families of the victims, both because the victims are not open about their sexuality and because the families would not want to acknowledge the sexual orientation of their relatives."

And, she noted, "The police have their own prejudices. Since in South Africa there is no hate crimes law, the police don't understand what a hate crime is; there is nothing in their thinking to explain that."

Mkhize blasted the South African government of President Thabo Mbeki for failing to educate its police forces about homophobic violence, and for the absence of any curriculum of science-based sexual education which includes teaching about sexual orientation in the public schools, describing what she called "a failure of leadership" by South Africa's political class.

A good example of this political vacuum is the official silence about one of South Africa's most notorious gay murders, which has yet to come to court - the 2006 Cape Town mob attack on 19-year-old lesbian Zoliswa Nonkonyana, who was clubbed and stoned to death. The teenager had been walking home with a friend when a schoolgirl had taunted them for being "tomboys" who "needed to be raped." Later, a group of 20 schoolboys, armed with golf clubs, bricks, and knives accosted the two girls and chased them through the streets. Nonkonyana fell to the ground, and was beaten to death in full view of her father just yards from her home.

No one in authority has ever spoken out to condemn this horrendous crime.

Mkhize also said that although model sex education curricula and study guides addressing LGBT concerns and homophobia have been prepared by private and non-profit groups, the Mbeki government is "throwing up roadblocks" to their adoption in the schools.

"A survey by the gay group OUT showed that one-third of South Africa's LGBT students faced rape or sexual abuse," Mkhize said in underscoring the need for education regarding sexual tolerance and respect in schools.

Mkhize complained that on only two occasions have political leaders spoken out against homophobic violence. Following a 2003 massacre in a gay massage parlor in Cape Town - in which nine gay men had their throats slit by a group of four homo-hating thugs - the president of the traditionalist Inkatha Freedom Party declared that, although his party opposed homosexuality, violence should not be used against same-sexers. And in 2005, the leader of the tiny Independent Democrats party, Patricia de Lille, made a statement in support of lesbian and gay rights and against anti-LGBT violence.

Other than that, Mkhize said, political leaders have been notably silent on these issues

President Mbeki is a notorious HIV denialist, and was widely condemned last week by South African AIDS and LGBT groups for firing his deputy minister of Health, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, because she attended a conference on AIDS in Spain without permission. Her boss, Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, follows Mbeki's refusal to recognize HIV as the cause of AIDS, and has promoted garlic and lemon as a remedy for HIV, while condemning anti-retroviral medicines.

South African LGBT groups have also condemned the Mbeki government for having abstained late last month in a vote by the U.N. Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) to accord consultative status to two organizations representing lesbian and gay interests - the Coalition Gaie et Lesbienne du Quebec and the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights. The South African delegation gave no reason for its abstention on the 21-13 vote in favor of accrediting the two organizations.

As another sign of how Mbeki is "not so keen" to embrace gay and lesbian equality, as Mkhize put it, she pointed out that when her country's parliament legalized same-sex marriage in November 2006, he refused to sign the legislation into law, leaving that task to his deputy president.

And, echoing Justice Cameron, Mkhize said that South Africa's "public services are simply not living up to the Constitution's principles" on LGBT equality.

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