ABSTRACT
Southern Africa has recently witnessed an emerging visibility of discussion around, and proclamation of, sexual identities. Regarding the question of cultural authenticity and that of gender equality, the subject of rights has been brought to the fore in local attempts to defi ne postcolonial nation states. While post-apartheid South Africa was the fi rst country in the world to explicitly incorporate lesbian and gay rights within the Bill of Rights of the post-apartheid constitution, the surrounding countries have chosen to exclude lesbians and gay men from citizenship rights. During the 1995 Book Fair in Harare the Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, for example, gave an infamous speech in which he described lesbians and gay men “as worse than pigs and dogs.” But this was just the start. In 2000 he declared homosexuality “as an abomination, a rottenness of culture” imposed upon Africans by Britain’s ‘gay government.’ Several politicians from different African countries followed Mugabe’s lead. Namibia’s minister of home affairs urged new police recruits in 2000 to “arrest on sight gays and lesbians and eliminate them from the face of Namibia,” while Sam Nujoma, Namibia’s then president, publicly stated that homosexuality was “one of the two top enemies of the national government” (Epprecht 2004, 5). In 2006 Nigerian’s president at that time, Olusegun Obasanjo, declared homosexuality as “un-Biblical, unnatural and defi nitely un-African” (Horn 2006, 7). The presidents of other countries such as Kenya, Zambia, Uganda, the king of Swaziland and leading church offi cials also “equated [homosexuals] with external threats” (Epprecht 2004, 4).
