Zimbabwe: one lesbian's story

Zimbabwe: one lesbian's story

Sikhanyisiwe Ngwenya and girlfriend Anita

• South Africa legalises gay marriages

• Zim arrests 'gay man' who claimed UK asylum

• Zimbabwe: how long before gays accepted?

• Zim gays honoured with Int award

• Mugabe fuels 'reformation' against gays

• Gays leader held outside State House

• Msipa quits Book Fair over gay row

• Gays flee mob at book fair

• Gays move closer to recognition in Zimbabwe

By Lebo Nkatazo

THE picture is a familiar one -- two girls snuggle together on a night out for a quick photograph.

Except these are not just normal girls -- meet Sikhanyisile Ngwenya and her Dutch girlfriend, Anita.

Ngwenya, who now lives in Holland, caused hue and cry across Zimbabwe in 1999 during a consultative process on a new constitution when she declared she was a lesbian. Homosexuality is illegal in Zimbabwe and attracts a jail sentence.

"I would like the new constitution to include the rights of lesbians in Zimbabwe," Ngwenya, a student then, said to stunned members of a government-appointed constitutional commission.

She added: "Zimbabwe, as a nation, must accept the fact that there are lesbians in Zimbabwe from all races and creeds, and I am one of them."

Ngwenya's public declaration of being lesbian is thought to be the first by a woman in Zimbabwe, and her stand catapulted her to heroine status among Zimbabwean gays and lesbians too scared to come out of the closet.

Described by one journalist as "strong, more compact than short, with solid legs that hint at having spent years sprinting up and down a soccer field, and a head that sports a mop of dreadlocks", Ngwenya was the youngest player of Zimbabwe's national women's soccer team at the age of 15.

From the moment she admitted being gay, Ngwenya was cast away by her own family. For years, she was homeless. If she was not staying with friends, she would be holed up at the Gay Community Center run by the Gays and Lesbians Association of Zimbabwe (GALZ).

There is nothing, bar sporting activities, that unites Zimbabweans as much as a shared revulsion of gays and lesbians. It is also probably one of the last remaining issues on which Zimbabweans agree with President Robert Mugabe who has described gays as "worse than pigs and dogs".

His former Information Minister, Jonathan Moyo, in a stinging attack on British liberalism, once said "it is only British politicians who see being gay as a way of getting votes."

Although South Africa's Constitutional Court has instructed that country's parliament to amend the law to allow for same sex marriages, a similar development in Zimbabwe, and indeed wider Africa, is hard to fathom anytime soon.

In an online poll of 2 500 New Zimbabwe.com readers, a staggering 81 percent said Zimbabwe should never allow same sex marriages, with only 10 percent coming out in support.

Call it old school, ignorant, medieval thinking or any other name, but it is such openly expressed public rejection of homosexuals in Africa that has complicated the struggle for sexual freedom for people like Ngwenya.

Ngwenya now lives with her girlfriend in Holland and is continuing her football career. She is currently on a US tour with her local women's football team
JOIN THE DEBATE ON THIS ARTICLE ON THE NEWZIMBABWE.COM FORUMS
newsdesk@newzimbabwe.com