I was appalled to read The Herald front page article this morning: President, PM speak on gays

It was particularly worrying to read Tsvangirai’s flippant remarks about homosexuality, given the MDC’s supposed founding principles of tolerance and human rights.

I resonated deeply with Delta’s blog on exactly this issue:

I live in a country where there are too many loud prejudiced voices, standing piously on the moral high ground, their sanctimonious gospel of intolerance surpassed only by the blinding glare of their fake halos.

Find Kubatana’s open letter to the MDC below. We look forward to being able to publish the MDC’s response soon.

RE: Prime Minister Tsvangirai’s comments in The Herald, March 26, 2010

The Kubatana Trust of Zimbabwe is very concerned with what we have read in the article entitled “President, PM speak on gays” in The Herald of March 26, 2010.

The article quotes Tsvangirai in these two paragraphs:

PM Tsvangirai concurred saying: “President mataura nyaya yemagay rights, yevamwe varume vanofemera munzeve dzevamwe varume. [“President you talked about gay rights, of men who breathe in the ears of other men.”]

“Bodo, apowo handibvumirane nazvo. Unogodirei kutsvaga mumwe murume yet vakadzi make up 52 percent (of the population)? Varume titori vashoma,” [“No, I do not agree with that. Why would you look for a man when women make up 52% of the population? We men are actually fewer,”] he said.

It is even more worrying that these remarks were made as part of International Women’s Day celebrations in Chitungwiza, where the theme was “Equal Rights, Equal Opportunities: Progress for All.”  The comments made by the Prime Minister speak more to “Equal Rights for Some” – not All.

Is The Herald article an accurate quotation of the remarks made by the Prime Minister’s in Chitungwiza?

If it is an accurate reflection of the Prime Minister’s response, and his personal views, what is the position of the MDC about homosexuality, gay rights and the protection of gay rights in the Constitution?

The Parliament of Uganda is currently debating the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, an extremely worrying and homophobic piece of legislation. This Bill draws strength from its assertion that homosexuality is “unafrican”. However, this assertion goes against the truth of history and culture, which finds instances of same-sex sexual relations between men and women across Africa, throughout time.

You can read the opinion of respected Ugandan human rights lawyer Sylvia Tamale, denouncing this bill, here:

• A Human Rights Impact Assessment of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill
• Why anti-gay Bill should worry us

Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe has been at the foreground of campaigning for gay rights, and have a wealth of literature available explaining the history of homosexuality in Africa. This history makes it clear that homosexuality is not a “Western import,” nor is it a response to demographic pressures in which one gender outnumbers the other.

The remarks attributed to the Prime Minister in The Herald suggest a simplistic, populist view of homosexuality. Is the Prime Minister seriously making an argument that because women out number men in Zimbabwe, men should not be in relationships with other men? If so, he is making an insulting, demeaning argument, which belittles the thousands of Zimbabwean men for whom homosexuality is their personal identity.

One’s sexuality is as integral a part of someone’s humanity as their race, gender, and religion. A Constitution that protects Zimbabweans against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is thus as essential as one that prevents discrimination on grounds such as race, gender, ethnicity, or religion.

When political leaders discriminate against one segment of the population in order to gain popularity with another, it encourages prejudice. This prejudice can easily fuel violence, hatred, and intolerance, which can divide the country. It is imperative that politicians use their public profile and status to promote tolerance, encourage diversity, and embrace all sectors of the population. To do otherwise is an egregious, offensive violation of the spirit of democracy, peace, human rights and ubuntu on which the Movement for Democratic Change is founded.

The Kubatana Trust of Zimbabwe

I live in a country that legislates morality; a country where the oppression of certain quarters of the society is institutionalized and where the law is used to police the personal choices of its citizenry, used as justification to intrusively enforce morality in the private lives of people.

I live in a country that daily wakes up to read of the most horrendous acts of inhumanity, shaking their heads as they sip their morning coffee and quickly moving away from the unpalatable story of the man who has raped his 3 month old baby to the cartoon section – thinking ‘what has this world come to?’

I live in a country that condones corruption, daily turning a blind eye to the cash exchanging hands between the commuter omnibus and the strategically placed traffic cop who will shrug off the guilt (if any) by reminding him or herself that survival supersedes any other moral code – he has kids to feed.

I live in a country where men and women make personal choices that impact on the lives of defenseless children, pursuing the thrill of illicit affairs, peeling skins off one another with scalding water, shedding blood with knife stabs and as domestic violence escalates, society looks the other way or offers ineffectual sermons on the need to ‘seek counseling from elders, church, relatives or professionals’.

I live in a country where the bulk of the citizenry have the biblical log stubbornly lodged in their eyes and still claim a right to criticize the ‘speck’ in the eyes of the few who are seen as making ‘unnatural’ choices because (to their way of thinking) they have a right to dictate what grown up adult men choose to do behind closed doors.

Gay people in Zimbabwe (and yes they are there) have been victims of the worst social injustice in recent times – likened to animals, their human dignity has been torn to shreds by the vicious machinery of bigoted public opinion.

I am a sucker for social justice and to me, social justice rests firmly on the belief that every human being has a right to life, a right to hold autonomy over their body and a right to dignity (if you can’t respect their choices at least acknowledge that they have a right to their dignity).

So I ask myself, where is this social outrage, anger and vicious dissention when we need it most? Where are these chiefs (would-be enforcers of morality) when rapists prey on the frail grannies who are under their chieftaincy – where is this vehement and boisterous condemnation of such acts?

Why are these enraged defenders of morality silent where it matters most? Do they challenge the man caught in bed with a married woman, do they vilify the married man who’s having an affair with a school child?

Yet it is almost comical (if one can ignore the superciliousness) to hear how our intolerant society is up in arms against the gay community.

Those who still have breath (after denouncing homosexuality by screaming themselves hoarse) often pose the question, ‘what are we going to do about these gays?’

Well, I was thinking – how about we leave them alone?

I’m certain being homosexual is not a contagion so we can all rest assured that there won’t be an ‘outbreak’ of homosexually oriented people. Among the arguments I have heard made against recognizing the rights of gay people is that what they are doing is ‘immoral, unnatural and contrary to God’s plans’.

It is the latter that leaves me in stitches, because this tendency to brandish the bible like some tool of exorcism meant to subdue gay people into sexual conformity is what defeats the whole purpose of the exercise – the bible above all else teaches love, values tolerance and expressly appoints God alone as the judge.

How selective (not to mention hypocritical) of people to use an article of faith like the bible to impose their own beliefs on others and worse still to go on and enact it into legislation.

I think too many people in our society suffer from the fallacious thinking that gay people actually need our permission, consent or approval to exist, to be what they are and to have the sexual preferences that they have.

They don’t.

Gay people have nothing to apologize for; they don’t owe us heterosexuals any explanation and our refusal to recognize their right to privacy and dignity doesn’t change the fact that they have those rights by virtue of having been born human.

So while we can curtail the expression of the rights and liberties of the gay community by criminalizing their sexual orientation, using legislation to bludgeon them into submission and using other social institutions to victimize, terrorize and degrade them – gay people remain human, not animals.

They are gay, so what?

While the idea may repulse many; I think at the end of the day we have no right (moral or otherwise) to dictate the sexual lives of gay people in as much as they have no right to dictate to us heterosexuals.

I live in a country where there are too many loud prejudiced voices, standing piously on the moral high ground, their sanctimonious gospel of intolerance surpassed only by the blinding glare of their fake halos.

What I resent and challenge is the idea that one person or set of people has a right to impose definitions of reality on others.

To paraphrase, Arthur Schopenhauer’s views, they tell us that (homosexuality) is the greatest state of insanity… that (homosexuality) is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.

I don’t believe in homosexuality. But I also don’t believe that anyone has a right to take what is an article of faith to their selves and legislate it (or impose it on) to other people.

This last year was one of magic and challenge. Watching the Tree of Life healing workshops begin to unfold at grass roots where people with scant resources began to take up the role of healing their communities. Seeing the integrity and self respect that allows people to carry the responsibility of this healing without reward or recognition. And it has been hard, and many have had to give up – but there has been this strange sense of knowing that ‘we can be better than this – wider than this’.

I have found it both inspiring and hard to watch.

But harder to watch, has been the edge where funder and grassroots activist meet. (The first world and the third world?/ old thinking and new thinking?). The world of checks and balances, of project proposals and programmes, and promises, and signed agreements and collecting receipts for the bus fare to town for the woman who was recently raped. The world of black and white, right and wrong, operating at the slow pace of the last person who has been on holiday, and has had a week to recover.

And seeing what happens to the people working in the  risky places living on a few hundred US$ a month or less – and who are made to wait two and a half months on a three month contract before any payment is made. Who have to leave their accommodation, and take their children out of school, but who carry on going.

This relationship is made all the more unbalanced because it is delivered as a gift from the knowing to the unknowing, from the benevolent to the victims. It is not support for the work of the warriors for peace.

There is no dignity in this!

Walking the grey clouds, wondering where  these two worlds meet.

And then towards the end of this year we began to be touched by magic – when amazing individuals acted with love and trust – and we were held in place by their contributions – and we made it through – to another place where we may get funding.  We are blessed.

Magic doesn’t fit in boxes
it streams in clouds

flowing with our dreams
not  our control

it is not held in place by our rules and regulations
but in  the trust of our common intentions

a place without boundaries
in a web of shared resources

living in a moment
- never re-gathered
soaring  the edges
on outspread wings

magic doesn’t fit in boxes
it comes from circles of love

Below is a comment from The Guardian Weekly (12/3/10). It reminded me of Delta Ndou’s blog about Zuma being called a buffoon by the British media.

“How do Zulus explain polygamy?” the BBC website asked in a piece at the end of last week’s coverage of the South African president’s state visit to Britain. There are many more serious concerns about Jacob Zuma’s rule beside his domestic arrangements, and many more important issues for the British and South African governments to discuss. He has said deeply unpleasant things about women and Aids. It is right to criticize him for this. But that does not wholly explain last week’s media fascination with polygamy. There is an undertone of imperial snobbishness about it as well, the mockery of a visiting president exposing a British national weakness for thinking of foreign leaders in the most simplistic, comic-book terms.

African leaders seem particularly prone to this stereotyping. Nelson Mandela can do no wrong in British eyes, just as President Zuma can now do no good – South Africa’s saint giving way to its sinner. Idi Amin, who got his own state visit in the 1970s, was thought a buffoon by the press before he was declared a butcher. Robert Mugabe experienced a similar slide. Britain’s closer neighbours suffer too. President Sarkozy’s state visit in 2008 was dominated by excitement over the tight outfits worn by his wife Carla Bruni. Silvio Berlusconi is routinely laughed at in the press as an ageing Italian lothario, which takes away from the much more serious harm his rule does to his country. Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is seen as a tough guy. Most other world leaders, even Germany’s Angela Merkel, lacking any easy definition, are largely ignored.

What Zuma makes of the reporting of his several marriages is unknown. A tough politician, he has doled out as many insults as he has taken. Before leaving for Britain he told a South African paper that “when the British came to our country they said everything we did was barbaric, was wrong, inferior in what-ever way”. That is a reasonable point about an empire whose relics linger on in the imperial coaches and plumed hats dusted off before state visits. The absurdity runs both ways in this affair.

Allow me to share with you a statement from one of my favourite authors, Anne Bronte, one of the first feminist writers. It reads “Sick of mankind and their disgusting ways”. Ironically the statement was scribbled in her prayer book and one would wonder how such a statement got into a prayer book.  This shows that even in those early times there were strong women who saw that there were many mistakes being made by society that needed to be changed.

Anne wrote her works in the 1840s, a period known as the Victorian era when women were so disempowered. In her novel “The Tenant Wildfell Hall”, Anne questions the societal values and beliefs that gave men so much power over women. The novel portrays Helen’s eloquent struggle for independence at a time when the law and society defined a married woman as her husband’s property. Women were married off at very tender ages to “rich” men. During this period, wealth was highly regarded and women would scramble to get married to rich men. Parents also played a major role in arranging suitors for their children. This probably is what made Anne “Sick of mankind and their disgusting ways”. Anne never married. She died at 29, already labelled a spinster. She also wrote her works under a pseudonym “Action Bell” because women were not allowed to work and her books were published after her death.

As I read through the novel. I could not help reflecting on the life we are leading these days. Is history repeating itself? Will we ever get to the stage where we can totally empower the girl child? These are some of the questions that ran through my mind.  At least we’ve passed the stage where women were not allowed to work, where women were confined to the home; a stage where women were numbered amongst men’s property. I salute women’s rights activist organizations that are working tirelessly in empowering women.

My fear though is that history might be repeating itself in another form. I get very worried with the age at which girl children are getting married. I read an article in The Herald where parents gave away a fourteen year old virgin as compensation for her older sister who gave birth just before her marriage. The suitor intended to marry the elder sister but upon discovering that she was already pregnant by another man, parents offered the younger sister as compensation. Parents have also adopted a carefree attitude towards marriage. They are accepting lobola as a “bribe”if their daughter is impregnated while she is below 16 so that they will not report the matter to the police even though the law says that having sex with a girl under the age of 16 is a crime.

Also, the topical issue these days are about some religious sects that are forcing young girls into marriage under the guise of the Holy Spirit. Are we going back to Anne’s era where girls and women are numbered among men’s property? Have we become so obsessed with marriage to the extent that we accept any suitor as long as that person is able to pay whatever bride price we ask for? Or has religion become a marriage ground where elders can just decide to offer girls to any man of their choice.

The death threats? Too numerous to count. The serious attempts on his life ranged from make-believe doctors offering potentially fatal “medicine” to a traffic accident that was no accident at all. In his native Zimbabwe, Chenjerai Hove has been ranked as high as No. 17 on the government’s Enemies of the State list. Read more