Now that almost every populist movement, political party and entrepreneurial fake news merchant is pushing the xenophobia sales pitch in SA, someone is bound to start looking elsewhere for a brand differentiator.
There’s the race one, of course, the anti-West one, and radical economic transformation, among others. But as sure as God didn’t make little green apples, the diminishing returns on the tried-and-tested shibboleths that drive the economy of hatred are going to force someone to come up with something fresh.
While pondering this, with some trepidation, I noticed a Reuters news alert: “Uganda suspends operations of charity championing LGBT rights”. The unfortunately named Smug, or Sexual Minorities Uganda, “has for years championed the rights of LGBT people in Uganda, where homosexuality remains illegal and gay people face arrest, ostracism and violence”, the news agency reports.
Now, the government has suspended its operations, accusing it of working in Uganda illegally.
According to The Guardian, “a 2012 attempt to register Smug with the authorities was rejected because the organisation’s name was deemed ‘undesirable’, the NGO bureau and the nonprofit said”.
I’m assuming the authorities found the name undesirable for reasons different to mine. But we shouldn’t really be making fun of the name, when the reality is so dangerous.
“The executive director of Smug, Frank Mugisha, said the suspension was ‘a clear witch-hunt rooted in systematic homophobia that is fuelled by anti-gay and anti-gender movements’.”
Given the alacrity with which political parties have jumped on the xenophobia band wagon, one can’t help but wonder who will be the next target of opportunistic hate
— What it means:
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and his MPs, you might remember, tried to get a bill passed in 2014 that would make life imprisonment the punishment for homosexual relations.
Here’s a sample quote from a CNN interview: “They’re disgusting. What sort of people are they? I never knew what they were doing. I’ve been told recently that what they do is terrible. Disgusting. But I was ready to ignore that if there was proof that that’s how he is born, abnormal. But now the proof is not there.”
The bill was eventually thrown out by Uganda’s Constitutional Court on a technicality.
A Ugandan journalist, writing for the Mail & Guardian at the time, pointed out that “the anti-gay law is popular with most Ugandans. By agreeing to assent to it after years of opposing it, Museveni will have charmed the largest political constituency ahead of the 2016 general elections.”
The country is still virulently anti-gay. The LGBTQ+ site Them references surveys from 2013 and 2016 that found only 4% of Ugandans believed “society should move towards greater acceptance of homosexuality”, and that only 3% of Ugandans “would accept having a gay neighbour”.
Them also notes that “the country’s authorities have used the pandemic to further intensify the persecution of LGBTQ+ Ugandans. In May 2020, nearly 20 LGBTQ+ people were whipped and caned for allegedly violating social distancing rules. And in June, 44 people were arrested following a raid of what police claimed was a ‘gay wedding’.”
The law would also make it a crime for any person to identify as LGBTQ+ and would be punishable by five years in prison
— Ghana Business News
In Ghana, a draft version of the ominously titled “Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights & Ghanaian Family Values Bill 2021”, proposed by opposition MPs and backed by the ruling party, has gone through its first reading in parliament.
Ghana Business News tells us that “the bill is expected to ensure that people who engage in homosexual activity could be fined or go to jail for three to five years. The law would also make it a crime for any person to identify as a lesbian, gay, transgender, transsexual, queer, pansexual or nonbinary (LGBTQ+) and would be punishable by five years in prison.”
Also immensely disturbing is that the bill makes any form of advocacy for LGBTQ+ people a criminal offence, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
“Anyone who hosts advocate groups or meetings on their premises or website would also be criminally liable. Anyone witness to or aware of acts made criminal in the bill would also be forced to report them,” according to a Guardian article.
“Campaigners have described the bill as seeking to extinguish and erase gay and queer identity in Ghana, and create the conditions for heightened vigilance and targeting of sexual minorities. ‘Cross-dressing’ would also be prosecuted.”
And if you thought this couldn’t get any more violent, the bill also dictates that “intersex people would be guided by the state to undergo corrective surgery”.
In the same way that xenophobia has been legitimised by SA political parties, which are making it part of their recruitment drives, the Ghanaian bill “has itself sent a signal in Ghana. Public hysteria over LGBTQ+ people and those advocating for their rights has become intense over the past 18 months. In February last year, a community centre offering support for gay and queer people and a place for them to meet was forced to close amid attacks from politicians, civil and religious groups and the media.”
And if political parties do decide to push anti-LGBTQ+ messages to appeal to constituencies, or to deflect attention from subjects they’d rather bury, they can hang it onto other kinds of propaganda, such as the appeal to culture or religion.
“The presence of foreign and European diplomats at the opening of the centre was also seen as provocative as it is often claimed that gay and queer identity is against African culture and is being promoted by the West.”
In Ghana, the bill will just put a sick gloss on an already officially sanctioned evil. The Guardian describes how Ghanaian police in the city of Ho “arrested an intersex woman, stripped her in public at the police station and questioned her gender. Officers accused her of denying being a man, and then detained her in male cells and encouraged the men in the cell to ‘rape her since she says she is a woman, and that perhaps that would clear the doubts from her sick mind’.”
To remind you, the term “corrective rape” (described as the use of rape against people who do not conform to social norms regarding sexuality or gender roles, with the aim being to “punish perceived abnormal behaviour and reinforce societal norms”) is an SA neologism. Wikipedia tells us that “one of the earliest known mentions of the term is by SA feminist activist Bernedette Muthien during an August 2001 interview by Human Rights Watch in Cape Town”.
SA, notwithstanding strong legal protections, continues to battle violence directed against LGBT people. In 2021, at least 24 people were reportedly murdered in bias-motivated attacks
— Graeme Reid
Human Rights Watch’s LGBT rights director, Graeme Reid, reminds us in a Daily Maverick article that there are 69 countries that criminalise same-sex relations, of which 33 are in Africa. He points out that “though the examples are few, there has been some progress over the last year on the protection of LGBT rights in Africa”.
Many of the anti-gay laws are relics of the colonial age, and most are not actively enforced. But there are of course exceptions. An example cited is Cameroon, which actively enforces the law that “punishes ‘sexual relations between persons of the same sex’, with up to five years in prison”, Reid says.
“At least 27 people were arrested in Cameroon in the first quarter of 2021, and in a similar period this year, at least 11 victims of mob violence were themselves detained for alleged consensual same-sex conduct and gender nonconformity. In May 2021, two transgender women received prison sentences of five years each under the law that forbids same-sex relations.”
How does SA fare? According to Reid, “SA, notwithstanding strong legal protections, continues to battle violence directed against LGBT people. In 2021, at least 24 people were reportedly murdered in bias-motivated attacks.”
We can be proud of the fact that, in 1996, we became the first country in the world to give constitutional protection to LGBT people. We’re a leader not only on the continent, but also globally. But as we’ve seen with other opportunistic attacks on the constitution, this rectitude is something that can provide fodder for politicians and rabble-rousers to criticise the constitution as not reflective of what they will seek to define as “our traditional culture”.
I hope I’m wrong about this, but given the proliferation of populist misinformation swilling around right now, and looking at the examples from other countries, it can only be a matter of time before one of our political factions decides homophobia is the next big divisive weapon that’s going to differentiate them from the pack.
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