The Washington Blade - May 12, 2000
Kai Wright

The young men -- 19 years old and still boys in many people's minds -- live in Harare now, but Bulawayo is really home. Maybe that is why they insist on trudging across downtown to a club that is closed. When they moved away, each left behind some unfinished business. And after plugging into a group of Gay activists in Harare, they have returned on this November weekend to put Bulawayo on notice of things to come. It does not matter to them that the club is closed. Their two-man parade through downtown is the real point.

The pair sashays through the streets, deflecting barbs and taunts about their feminine behavior with a flick of the wrist and a snap of the tongue, "If I sleep with men, I know your father." They have come back home, they say tonight, and they bring change with them.

"I believe myself to be a Gay activist -- especially with the queens," Carlos Mpofu proudly declares. "I believe, if the Gays are to be liberated, it starts with the queens. ... We, the drag queens, are the ones who are going to liberate the Gay community!"

In Zimbabwe, at least for now, it is the simple truth. The Gay community here is growing, and the national Gay group boasts more than 300 members now. But it is Carlos and Simba and a small cadre of their friends -- almost all under 25, all men, and all self-identified drag queens -- who are truly challenging society. They have formed a group within the larger organization, dubbed Chengetanai, or, roughly, "to look after each other," which is dedicated to pushing society's envelopes one person at a time.

These assertively out young men appear in the newspapers, testify at government hearings, file legal challenges when harassed or attacked, and do whatever possible to draw attention to themselves as openly Gay men every time they leave the house. Zimbabwe's Gay human rights movement has been fueled by a thousand such acts in their everyday lives. The goal, it seems, is to continually take the mundane and make it revolutionary.

Liberated queens

Simbarashe "Simba" Zwangobani says he was a "liberated queen" before he knew what it meant.

"The first time I ever heard the word homosexual was when I went to boarding school [at age 14]. The very first day when I got to school," he remembers, "there's little me with long fingernails, painted bright red, screaming, `Somebody, please, come and get my trunk down. Somebody, please, come and get my trunk down. I can't carry it, it's so heavy.' And this one guy, he said, `Oh, this kid is a moffie.' Me, being na ve and not knowing anything, I said, `Oh, maybe being called a moffie is like he's cute or whatever.' So, I was very happy with it and content."

"Moffie" is a derogatory word for Gays, imported from South Africa. Less than a year after first hearing it, Simba learned well what it meant when he was expelled from school after a teacher caught him and another male student having sex. He was shipped off to Harare, where he entered a much larger and more cosmopolitan day school. There, Simba sat quietly through his counseling and hygiene class as his teacher instructed the students that homosexuality is abnormal, foreign to African societies, and practiced only by "rentboys" who sell their bodies to white men.

Simba's first year in the Harare school was just about the time President Robert Mugabe was launching his anti-Gay campaign, championing the idea that homosexuality is a foreign concept. Simba did not know it at the time, since he never paid much attention to Mugabe and politics, but he was already challenging society. His life thus far had already given the lie to the homophobic mantra that Gays do not exist in Africa.

"I was openly Gay and people never thought much of it," he says of his year in boarding school. "Boys thought of me as a girl -- very few people called me a boy. They used to just go, `Oh, hi, Dolly,' because of my dolls. So, I mean, this was not much of a big deal around school."

But the year he left Bulawayo had still been a hard one for Simba. Puberty had taken its toll -- not only ruining the androgyny he had enjoyed by deepening his voice, but also ending his family's patience with his feminine behavior. So, in the hostile climate he found in Harare, he tried to become more masculine and straight.

"I had to disguise myself now, be more macho," he says, partially because he had taken his teacher's admonition of homosexuality to heart. "When you're still young, it's different from being told that when you're 20."

Also around the time Simba began this transition to masculinity, 15-year-old Carlos, still in Bulawayo, was making the same decision. He became active in a local church, began dating girls, and tried to accept that puberty meant becoming a man -- which he thought to mean necessarily straight. He got a job in the church and became a prominent figure, participating in a dance group and leading Sunday school programs.

"I said, `Let me turn to God,'" he recalls with a laugh, rolling his eyes at what seems so absurd now. "In my mind, I had convinced myself that I was not Gay. ... I said, `Oh, look here, I'm straight. I'm just a graceful guy.'' But Carlos's plan did not hold for long, as he found himself still doing stereotypically feminine things. Eventually, his mannerisms, his preference for female friends, and his insistence on wearing female hairstyles sparked rumors. Then one Sunday, after a school retreat, a parent accused him of molesting her son. He was eventually cleared of the charge, but the episode shook him. Shortly thereafter, last April, he came out to his church supervisors. They angrily pushed him out of the church.

So he called the national Gay group based in Harare, Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe, and Romeo Tshuma directed him to the group's fledgling organization's chapter in Bulawayo. By October, Carlos was dating Romeo and had moved to Harare -- against the wishes of his parents, who attempted to force him into an arranged marriage in order to stop the move.

"I told them, `Look, I'm Gay and I'm proud of it and nothing you say will change it,'" Carlos boasts of his confrontation over the arranged marriage. "I stood up and said, `I'm not taking this shit anymore!'"

Simba's masculine heterosexuality did not hold much longer than Carlos's. After about a year, he had found Harare's nightclubs and figured out which were Gay-friendly. When he came out to his family, they tossed him out of the house, and, as did many before him, he landed at GALZ. He has been a leader in the movement ever since.

Jacaranda pride

Each October, springtime in this part of the world, Zimbabwe's Gays hold a drag pageant in conjunction with the blooming of the country's famous Jacaranda trees, which sprout vibrant purple buds. The pageant is their Gay Pride celebration. On the November weekend that Carlos and Simba have returned to Bulawayo, there is a victory celebration for the new Jacaranda Queen, who now hails from Bulawayo. Several other Chengetanai members have come from Harare as well. Most of them are here for the celebration party Saturday night.

"We have [the celebration] when the Jacaranda trees are in full bloom, in October," explains Pride coordinator Juan Victor May-Lopes-Pinto of the celebration. "And that's what decorates the streets for us. Since we can't go out with rainbow flags and things, we just wait until it's all purple. So that's our pride."

The weekend is also the one-year anniversary of the Bulawayo Gay group. And the morning after Carlos and Simba's parade through downtown, they attend Gays and Lesbians of Matabeleland's (GLOM) second annual general meeting, where its 31 members discuss the year's progress.

By conventional standards, there is not much of it to discuss. The group took in about $250, spent about $190, and has about $60 left. Most of the money went toward supplies for meetings and parties, and GLOM has not launched any real civil rights campaign in the city or province. But in Zimbabwe, the mere fact that more than 30 black Gay people have rented a hotel conference room to openly discuss the state of the Gay human rights movement in their province is progress.

The group considers its outreach, and decides to continue meeting in the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant downtown to provide an inconspicuous cover for anyone wanting to come and watch without being at the meetings. It reviews strategies for connecting with society -- it has had some success building bridges with local AIDS groups. And it plans for the future; the group wants to buy a house to serve as a community center such as the one in Harare.

The membership at large is quiet, almost disbelieving, while the leaders speak boldly and ambitiously about their movement. GLOM leaders have seen some of GALZ's mistakes and clearly want to avoid them. Few women participate in GALZ, for instance, and there is only one woman at the GLOM meeting. But as the members elect leaders for the coming year, a groundswell of encouragement convinces her to accept a post.

In the meeting, Carlos and Simba each take on an entirely different persona. Suddenly, they are deliberative, as they offer their advice on one problem or another to the GLOM leadership. They are emissaries, reaching out to bridge an increasing divide between the two groups. GALZ has been criticized by both Bulawayo's black Gays and Harare's white Gays for being unprofessional and too often letting the administrative details of running a movement take back seat to the social functions of building a community. Here, Carlos and Simba, joined by Romeo, seek to show attention to those details.

But it is clear their real passion is the activism of the everyday world -- forcing both straight society and closeted black Gays to recognize that African Gay people do in fact exist. While GLOM's formation marks important progress, Carlos and Simba are noticeably more excited by what they saw the night before the one-year anniversary meeting. The same nightclubs he is now welcome in, Carlos says, he fled from through bathroom windows less than a year ago. And while some heckled the pair as they drew attention to themselves in the streets, others showed solidarity. Walking down one back road, the pair encountered two men romantically embracing, saying goodnight after a date. They exchanged pleasant, if slightly stunned, greetings.

"Bulawayo," Carlos gleefully declared as they passed by, "is changing!" And so is all of Zimbabwe. As recently as the early 1990s, the only public discussion of Gays was that involving prostitution or salacious news reports about men arrested for sodomy. Today, people are increasingly interested in Gays themselves. The change is witnessed in both the independent and state-run press.

In early October, GALZ was rocked by the suicide of one of its long-time leaders. The man, 32-year-old Siphangilizwe "Panghi" Nyathi had been a pillar of stability in a group that has seen 11 suicide attempts in the last year. But what was equally stunning to GALZ members was the reaction of the media, which got wind of the suicide a month later. First, a new independent daily paper ran a page one, largely sympathetic, story on Nyathi and his family's reaction.

Then, as if as an answer, the state-run Sunday paper ran a story. In its version, Nyathi's partner -- a conservative man who is the spokesperson for the University of Zimbabwe and feels GALZ should not challenge Mugabe or the state's anti-Gay laws -- spoke about the relative ease with which GALZ is able to operate without interference from the government. The man, Herbert Mondhlani, has not participated in GALZ since it became an overtly political organization in 1995. And he has managed to maintain a government job with officials aware of his homosexuality. The article was a sort of backhanded slap at the group, but GALZ members took it as an important concession by the government -- the story's implication was that, contrary to Mugabe's assertions, black Gay people do actually exist in Zimbabwe.

This insistence on their own existence is the passion of not only the Chengetanai members but of the entire Gay human rights movement in Zimbabwe. Every year, more and more black Gays come from the cities as well as the outlying townships to join GALZ and GLOM. The virulently anti-Gay rhetoric of Mugabe and his supporters was responsible for the initial wave, in 1995 and 1996. Today, the increasingly visible Gay community pulls people out. That pull is the purpose of Carlos and Simba's parade through the streets of Bulawayo and Harare.

"What can people do? They just have to deal with you," Simba nonchalantly explains. "There are places where I have been harassed, but the next day I will go back in, because they have to deal with me. We can't keep running away. If you run away, then what? Next time, you're running out of your own neighborhood because you're being harassed. So you just keep going there."

Leaving the GLOM meeting, Carlos and Romeo don't think about it; they just clasp hands as they again begin the walk through downtown Bulawayo. Their heads are noticeably high; they don't want to appear meek about their affection for one another. They have come home.

Part 4: Nowhere in the world are there more people with HIV and AIDS in need of medication, but nowhere in the world is there less likelihood of drug manufacturers mining a profit than in Zimbabwe. The reality leaves people there with HIV and AIDS relying on vitamins to combat one of the most deadly viruses on earth.
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