Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - April 13, 2003

He was an ANC struggle hero and a treason trialist. He was also the founder of South Africa's multiracial gay movement, and an Aids activist.

Now the life of the late Simon Tseko Nkoli will be brought to the stage this week at Johannesburg's Market Theatre.

Your Loving Simon tells the story of the freedom fighter and activist - who once said it was easier to be black than gay because you didn't have to tell your mother you were black - who made it clear through his life and work that the struggle for equal rights for gays and lesbians was inseparable from the struggle for democracy.

"In South Africa all issues are linked together. Homophobia is part of discrimination. We cannot deal with it in isolation. We are trying to link our struggle with the struggle of the majority of the people against apartheid and racism," Nkoli told the Green Left Weekly in 1991.

The play, which is devised and directed by Robert Colman, focuses on 1984 when Nkoli was arrested for alleged terrorist activities against the state as one of the "Delmas 22" that included Mosiuoa Lekota and Popo Molefe.

While in prison - he was awaiting trial for four years - there was a scandal over a report that one of the treason trialists had sex with a prisoner . When a meeting was called to discuss the situation, Nkoli used the occasion to "come out"' to his fellow detainees. They demanded he be tried separately from them, but his unique combination of charm and perseverance won out, and he would later recall, "when we were all about to go to the witness box, there was no one against me".

Lekota, who at the time thought that Nkoli's sexuality posed a threat to the ANC, later came to praise him and once asked, during debates around the formation of the new constitution, "How could we say that men and women like Simon, who had put their shoulders to the wheel to end apartheid, how could we say that they should now be discriminated against?"

Colman researched the play with the help of the Gay and Lesbian Archives (GALA) and collated the piece from more than 500 letters that Nkoli had written to his lover and friends at the time.

"Reading those letters was incredibly emotional, apart from their content," says Colman. "The fact that they weren't in depersonalised e-mail format and that there were doodles, like turning the 'o' in 'love' into a face."

Colman started work on the piece in 1998 and workshopped it last year as a resident project at the Market Theatre laboratory with actors Fourie Nyamande and Bheki Vilakazi.

Colman didn't want to do a one-man show and he couldn't do it as a 22-hander, so he created a fictional character, Madoda Mvelazi - a "composite" who represents everyone who was in prison with Nkoli.

Bheki Vilakazi, who plays the fictional prisoner, says that as a practicing Christian he has problems with homosexuality. "It was only during the workshops of the play that I started challenging my thoughts." He quotes St. Matthew Chapter 6 to me, ". . .if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you." Vilakazi was worried about how his community would react to the character finally accepting Nkoli's homosexuality and used that fear to define his character's growth from rejection to acceptance.

Nyamande also confesses to having had a tough time researching a gay character, even though he remembers Nkoli as a fellow resident of Sebokeng. He used to be perplexed about homosexuality, "My aunt used to say, 'this is nature'. And I wondered what kind of nature is this?" Nevertheless at the run-through I saw, Nyamande delivers a forthright performance that, like the production, never wears its sexual orientation on its sleeve.

Nkoli died on November 30 1998, the eve of World Aids Day. In the play he's asked, "Did they tell you, you are going to die?" and he replies, "No, they only told me I was HIV positive."

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