With Nelson Mandela's death Dec. 5, 2013, we are reminded of the radical vision of his activism, bringing together grassroots protest with international diplomacy; structures for both reconciliation and accountability for the ongoing healing of his nation. His commitment to LGBTQI rights made him a hero to the global LGBTQI rights movement.
At least on paper, South Africa has been the dramatic exception to the rule of government-led intolerance to LGBTQI activism and sexuality elsewhere on the African continent and globally. In contrast, in December of 2013, just weeks after Mandela's death, the Ugandan Parliament passed a bill imposing life imprisonment for homosexual acts. This decision echoes recent anti-gay legislative measures in India and Russia, among others.
South Africa's Constitution, in its attention to LGBTQI rights surpasses that of many other nations, including the United States. In 1996, during Mandela's presidency, after the fall of apartheid, South Africa became the first in the world to have an explicit constitutional ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation. In 2006, South Africa became the only country on the African continent and the fifth in the world to legalize same-sex marriage.
Yet the continued violence that haunts the everyday lives of lesbians, gays and transpeople reflects deep contradiction between its progressive laws and deep social change. "As LGBTQ people living in a township we are not really enjoying these rights and privileges in the constitution," said Phindi Malaza, activist from the Forum for the Empowerment of Women, the only all-Black lesbian and transgender community organization on the continent. This violence, including harassment, assault, rape and murder, often targets non-gender conforming women and trans people. In the past year in South Africa, there have been at least seven murders in what appear to be homophobic attacks.
I believe that art has the power to change the quality of everyday life in a way that laws alone can't. It can speak across continents, classes and sexualities. Taking the particular example of photography, we might consider the powerful impact of icons that that have changed the ways that we think of our humanity: the image of the boy with raised hands in front of a Nazi soldier in a Warsaw ghetto, one of the most famous images from the Holocaust; Jet Magazine's photograph of Emmett Till's destroyed body, taken during his funeral here in Chicago; the photograph of Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, walking the gauntlet of jeering white students and adults.
South African photographer, documentary filmmaker and activist Zanele Muholi has used her camera to document the lives of Black lesbians and transgender people living in this state of contradiction between laws and practice in South Africa. She was born in Durban in 1972, just four years before the Soweto student uprising in 1976. In her book Faces and Phases, she uses portraiture to document hate crime's effects on body and spirit, the sustaining power of friendship and family networks, and the funky, resistant aesthetics of South African queer style.
In one portrait, Tumi Mokgosi, from Yeoville, Johannesburg, looks at us with her playfully resistant gaze, her half-smile less Mona Lisa than Rihanna. She is wearing a fur stole and her arms are crossed around her, both protective and defiant. The shanties of her township are a blur behind her. In another, Gazi Zuma of Durban, stands in clean white polo shirt against a plain cement wall. The light hits their skin to reveal the strong planes of their face, and the study of light and shadow of closely cropped hair. We might read them as butch, or as transgender. They are wearing a badge whose letters we can't quite read and we are made aware of the multiple selves that might not be revealed by this photo: sister, brother, lover, worker, fighter?
In her book's preface, Muholi challenges the audience: "Is this lesbian more 'authentic' than that lesbian because she wears a tie and the other does not? Is this a man or a woman? Is this a trans man? Can you identify a rape survivor by the clothes she wears?" In the process, she hopes to undo the erasure of Black lesbians and transgender people from South Africa's history of revolutionary movements. ( Muholi's documentary Difficult Love ( 2010 ), a powerful intimate look at the challenges facing South African lesbians, gays, intersex and transgender people, can be viewed for free at www.imdb.com/video/wab/vi3128728089 ).
Nelson Mandela famously said, "to deny a people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity." While we might hear this as a call to laws, we might also hear it as a call to art. The power of photographs like Zanele Muholi's is to help us realize that our own humanity is deeply tied to one another.
Francesca Royster is a Professor of English at DePaul University, where she teaches courses on Shakespeare, Popular Culture, gender, race, sexuality and performance. Her books include Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era ( University of Michigan Press, 2013 ) and Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon ( Palgrave, 2003 ).