The retrogressive Anti-Homosexuality Bill is still being debated by Uganda’s parliament.  Uganda’s Civil Society Coalition on Human Rights and Constitutional Law is coordinating opposition to the  Bill within Uganda. Regionally, The AIDS Law Project and the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project in South Africa are circulating the following statement against the Bill:

Statement by African Civil Society

We, the individuals and organisations from African countries listed hereunder, recognise the universality of the human rights of all persons.

We affirm that the right of men and women to have same sex relationships is a fundamental human right.

We are further guided in the knowledge that all forms of discrimination, in particular against vulnerable groups, undermine the human dignity of all in Africa.

We are therefore profoundly disturbed by the nature, content and potential impact of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill (“the Bill”) that was recently tabled in and is currently being considered by the Parliament of Uganda.

We believe that the Bill, if enacted, will cut deeply into the fabric of Ugandan society by–

• Violating the rights of an already vulnerable and severely stigmatised group of persons by attacking their dignity, privacy and other constitutionally protected rights;
• Disrupting family and community life by compelling everyone, by the threat of criminal sanction, to report those suspected of engaging in same-sex sexual activity;
• Seeking to withdraw Uganda from the family of nations by reneging on the country’s international law obligations;
• Undermining public health interventions such as HIV prevention, treatment, care and support;
• Promoting prejudice and hate and encouraging harmful and violent action to be taken against those engaging in same sex relations.

We respectfully call on the Parliament of Uganda to reject the Bill in its entirety.

We also call on African governments and the African Union to call on the President and Government of Uganda to withdraw the Bill and to respect the human rights of all in Uganda, without exception.

They are seeking civil society endorsements of the statement.  Submit your endorsement before 12 noon on Monday 29 March (SA Time – GMT +2). Please supply the full name of your organisation together with your full name, office address, telephone contact details and organizational website. Please also indicate in your email that you have been authorised by your organisation to endorse the statement. Encourage others to also endorse the statement.

Please send your endorsement to Ms Adila Hassim of the AIDS Law Project at hassima@alp.org.za. Please copy your email to Ms Phumi Mtetwa of the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project  at phumi@equality.org.za

Savemore is a vendor in Harare. He says that selling roasted mealie cobs helps him pay for school fees for his siblings as well as the rent and food. His dream is to buy a car so that when the maize season is over he can buy fresh vegetables and sell them around the city. Because he has to put in long hours to make money to support his family, Savemore doesn’t think that he’ll get to see many soccer matches during the World Cup. Being proudly African, he hopes South Africa will win.

Rejoice Ngwenja rocks.

Kubatana.net recently interviewed him and you can read and listen to his views on a variety of critical issues in Zimbabwe on www.kubatana.net

In the meantime, below we carry an article by him entitled Scorpion in my Shoe, published by www.africanliberty.org

Thanks to Robert Mugabe’s reign of record-breaking incremental destruction, my country is struggling to redeem itself from the abyss of infrastructure collapse, so much that even hardcore urbanites like me have to make do with irritating wood smoke just to have a warm plate of sadza [Zimbabwe’s staple maize meal paste].    And that was without additional injury to the back breaking exercise.   A week ago, I was stung by a small black scorpion on my big toe as I chopped firewood to beat Zimbabwe’s notorious power outages.

The sting, while irritating, passed off just like any other experience of living in modern-day Zimbabwe under the Jurassic governance of the primeval ZANU-PF.  Thinking back, I imagined that Morgan Tsvangirayi was persuaded to take Robert Mugabe into his political boot, wherefore the old trickster settled at some dark corner until MDC fell into a stupor of artificial comfort.  But now, Tsvangirayi has been inevitably stung while he least expected.

Instead of focusing on the business of building high yielding relations, Mugabe continues to conspire evil against our nation hiding behind questionable legalism.  According to a recent Zimbabwe Situation news online report, “…. Mugabe is entitled under the law to assign functions to ministers, [but] he still has to consult his partners in government on the allocation of the ministries, according to the GPA”.  In complete defiance of this noble proposition, Mugabe unilaterally takes it upon himself to strip MDC-held ministries of essential powers.

Apparently, the biggest challenge confronting Tsvangirayi is not the quality of Zimbabwe’s coalition government, given that most such arrangements are products of large-scale compromise.  Agreements are made on the basis of partner credibility, honesty, consistency and transparency – traits which ZANU-PF is not exactly endowed with.  Most progressive analysts will agree that Tsvangirayi knew exactly the nature of the partner he was committing himself to, that is why he needed to have a comfortable stock of antidotes to deal with Mugabe’s chicanery.   More importantly, ZANU-PF is a completely discredited partner, headed by one Robert Mugabe who comprehensively lost the March 2008 Parliamentary Election, only to be ‘salvaged’ by an equally discredited one-man masquerade in June of the same year.

According to Professor Arthur Mutambara, the Global Political Agreement [GPA] is the only source of Mugabe’s ‘presidential legitimacy’.  In fact he would have proceeded to add that had SADC taken the right decision to call for a more organised, African Unity-supervised presidential re-run, Mugabe would now be confined to overdue retirement at his Zvimba rural home.  It therefore is astonishing by what authority Mugabe cherry-picks ministerial responsibility, if it were not that he is of a tyrannical genre obsessed with power.  I have argued time and again that our Zimbabwe government is too big and expensive, hence the shifting of ministerial powers would, on any other day, have little impact on service delivery.  And yet if you really put Mugabe’s juggling under the spotlight, he is only interested in ministerial adjustments that entrench his hegemonic hold on political power.

What is left now is for both Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirayi and his deputy, Arthur Mutambara to place an inexpensive political device that should shatter once and for all, Mugabe’s life-presidency ambitions. Both MDC cadres must come out of their friendly accommodative shells and tell Mugabe to fulfill all the provisions of the GPA. This is the opportune time for both men to stop making excuses for the aging dictator and embark on three-dimensional activism. The more sensible side of government – MDC – must promulgate statutory instruments to licence all applicants for radio stations and newspapers.  The democratic parties must dispatch all ambassadors, governors and appoint deputy minister for agriculture Roy Bennet.  Morgan Tsvangirayi and Arthur Mutambara must repeal all anti-democratic laws while all pubic appointments not sanctioned by the GPA must be nullified, including that of attorney general Johannes Tomana and central bank governor Gideon Gono.

The gist of my argument is that Robert Mugabe lost the election, thus has no moral high ground to play god.  Five million Zimbabweans have given both MDCs the mandate to govern, so the one-man political dance of the discredited Robert Mugabe has no authority or legitimacy to give five million voters a single sleepless night.  If both Tsvangirayi and Mutambara are weak, they should immediately hand over their power – Nigeria style – to more capable members of their parties.  This weakling image of subservience they are portraying does not augur well with our expectations.  It could also endanger their 2012 electoral standing in their constituencies.  Mugabe’s unpopular mandate expired in 2000, so any compromise on the part of Tsvangirayi and Mutambara is blight on the noble fight against ZANU-PF fascist dictatorship.  Luckily, we now know there is a scorpion in our boot.

And then again, the wonderful Nyemudzai trumps the ugly t-shirt. We spotted her walking up the steps of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe to celebrate the International Women’s Day events. Way to go girl . . . walking the streets of Harare with funk and fabulousness.

Ok, so I’m not hot on censorship, but it was disturbing to see a guy helping with the logistics at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe on International Women’s Day wearing this t-shirt. We’ve got a long way to go.

Didymus Zengenene’s blog post titled is Lobola still valid in the era of equality? made me think. I consider myself a feminist, yet I want my future husband to pay roora to my family. Yes, that’s right, my family as a whole. The understanding of what roora or lobola is, and what it means has, through time and loose translation been lost to a generation that now considers English meaning of a shona or ndebele tradition to be Gospel. But what happens when that tradition’s real meaning is lost in translation? We get feminists, neo liberals and the like clamouring for the banishment of that tradition, using big words like equality and gender imbalance. Don’t get it twisted, I’m all for gender equality. But I also believe that culture is an important factor in personal identity.

Translated into English roora, means bride price. Of course then, on the surface, this tradition would appear to be a man buying a woman. I don’t deny that there are those who pervert that perception of this tradition to enrich themselves by selling off their underage daughters. Neither do I deny that there are men and women who believe that by having roora paid for her a woman must be completely submissive to her husband or suffer the consequences, violent or not. But these are the ill-advised actions of people, not the intent of the tradition. They reflect more on the characters of the individuals involved than on the culture they profess to practice.

The act of paying roora shouldn’t be looked at in isolation. It is part of a complex and formal process of negotiation that results in a mutual agreement of the bride price. Roora is not meant to extract ridiculous sums of money from the would be groom. In fact for true traditionalists, the exchange of money, which is foreign to our culture, is taboo. Roora is a tradition that is rooted in building a sense of community, both within the families that are marrying, and between them. A man cannot marry alone, the cattle he pays to his bride’s father are those cattle given to his family by his brothers in law. The ceremony itself cannot happen with out a number of members of the extended family being present, tete’s (the bride’s father’s sisters), Sekuru’s (the bride’s mother’s brothers), varoora (sisters in law to the bride) and hanzvadzi (brothers and sisters) included. Far from being transactional, this tradition is meant to establish and reinforce a relationship between the two marrying families to strengthen the new union. It is impossible for a good parent to place a monetary value on a child, so why should it be looked at in monetary terms alone?

In answer to Didymus’ question, as a card-carrying feminist who wouldn’t suffer the indignity of being dictated to by a man simply because he is one, yes I think it still is. I think the tradition of roora, as it was intended, is very important. In a time when divorce rates climb every day and our sense of culture and community is being lost through cultural alienation, migration and other factors I think it is more important now than ever.