t first it might seem as though the prospects for GLBTs living in African nations are grim. A Malawi same-sex couple has been sentenced to a 14-year prison term for simply throwing a party to celebrate what they viewed as their engagement – not that Malawi’s laws would have allowed them to marry in any case. In Zambia, a nation just West of Malawi, civil and religious leaders have ramped up anti-gay rhetoric, with the result that American-based international watchdog Human Rights Watch has sent a letter to that nation’s leadership deploring the likely result that gays and other MSMs (men who have sex with men) will go underground and HIV rates will skyrocket as MSMs avoid testing and medical care out of fear of persecution. Earlier this year, religious leaders’ anti-gay rhetoric drove a violent mob attack on the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KMRI), a medical facility in Kenya. The Feb. 12 attack on KMRI, located in the coastal town Mtwapa, sent shockwaves across the country and sparked riots and anti-gay violence by vigilantes in other towns, according to a Feb. 17 posting at the website for the Human Rights Watch (HRW). Meantime, according to the HRW’s Dipika Nath, “The government is sitting silent while mobs try to kill human rights defenders and assault people they suspect are gay.”
Similar religiously driven anti-gay persecution has wracked Nigeria, a large nation in which both Christian and Muslim anti-gay influences set the stage for violence targeting GLBTs. Changing Attitude Nigeria Director Davis Mac-Iyalla told EDGE in 2008 that, “The real threat of death or serious injury is not from legal actions by the state, but from mob violence and unofficial actions by the police who are a law unto themselves.”
In Uganda, following a visit from several anti-gay American evangelists, a little-known politician named David Bahati rocketed to global fame when he proposed a bill that would inflict the death penalty on gays. Bahati later refused to take the bill off the table even when asked to do so by his government in the face of international criticism. Workers at a GLBT advocacy group in Zimbabwe were held in jail for six days, during which time they were allegedly tortured, following a police raid on their office. They were accused of possessing gay pornography, as well as a document that criticized the nation’s notoriously anti-gay president, Robert Mugabe, who has sworn that the nation’s new constitution will not provide legal protections to gays.
by Kilian Melloy
