Zimbabwe’s Gays Go ‘Out’ at Great Risk

Being openly homosexual in this southern African country is considered such a disgrace that Tina Machida’s parents had her raped to prove that she was capable of being with a man.

Machida, then 18, got pregnant, but she refused to go along with the rest of the plan. Not only would she not marry the man, she ran off with a female lover and got an abortion.

Today, Machida is among a small number of gay and lesbian activists in Zimbabwe who have dared to go public despite a stepped-up campaign by Africa’s most anti-gay head of state to cast homosexuals as Western-influenced deviants dangerously out of sync with traditional African values. President Robert Mugabe’s crusade has generated a climate of fear in which gays, both open and closeted, are feeling threatened like never before.

“There is freedom of religion, freedom of political association--all the freedoms that you get elsewhere, except that of gays,” Mugabe said of his country during a recent gathering of U.S. and European investors in nearby Namibia.

Even independent Zimbabwe’s first president, the Rev. Canaan Banana, has not been spared in the homophobic crackdown. Long believed in church and government circles to have had relationships with men, Banana is now on trial on charges of sodomy and indecent assault stemming from alleged trysts with male aides when he was president in the 1980s.

The 62-year-old Methodist minister, who is the father of four, has denied the charges, but a string of state witnesses testified that he used everything from drugged orange soda to the pretense of career advancement “to have his way” with male subordinates.

“I was terrified,” former aide-de-camp Jefta Dube, Banana’s chief accuser, testified last month. A convicted murderer who was rewarded with a lighter sentence after turning on Banana, Dube has emerged as a sympathetic--albeit blundering--victim in the government-controlled media.

“I did not exhibit my displeasure, although inside I felt it,” he testified. “If you want to know what was in my mind, I was thinking, ‘He must know that I don’t want this.’ ”

A Delicate Balancing

As Machida’s unending torment illustrates, “coming out” for most ordinary Zimbabweans entails a delicate balancing of modern freedoms and age-old traditions of the majority Shona-speaking people that leaves many of them feeling unwanted in both worlds. Even with the satisfaction that comes with standing up to Mugabe, who has been vilified by Western gay and lesbian groups, being openly ngochani in conservative Zimbabwe means being increasingly lonely, ashamed and ridden with self-doubt.

“Mugabe has successfully created the impression that gays are enemies of society,” said the Rev. Levee Kadenge, a school chaplain who preaches tolerance toward homosexuals. “I am not saying that homosexuality is acceptable in Shona culture, but there have been ways of accommodating it. In our culture, when people do something that isn’t the norm, we say the spirits are making them do that and we accept there must be a purpose.”

In some communities, Kadenge said, there is even a belief that having sex with another man, particularly a young one, can bring good fortune to the senior partner. It is not unheard-of, for example, for a tribal elder to engage in a homosexual act before an important vote or decision, he said.

“By doing such an extraordinary thing, you get power from it,” Kadenge said. “But the power remains only if you keep it under seal. If you talk about it or show other people, the strength goes. That is our tradition.”

Mugabe agrees that homosexuality is best dealt with quietly, but he rejects any suggestion that it is home-grown, insisting that gays and lesbians are remnants of colonialism.

He once publicly declared that homosexuals are “worse than pigs and dogs,” and recently he instructed Zimbabwean journalists--most of whom work for state-owned institutions--to report negatively about same-sex relationships. In an ongoing cause celebre, Mugabe is trying to block a local gay organization from joining a human rights session at the World Council of Churches gathering here in December.

“I know [Mugabe] to be a student of history committed to the African identity,” said the Rev. Noah Masimba Pashapa, a Baptist minister who believes homosexuals are “eating away” at the country’s fundamental values. “He is simply seeing this practice as not belonging with the Zimbabwean African heritage. If homosexuality existed at all, it existed on the fringe and was not encouraged. That is the kind of heritage we still want today.”

The country’s small number of outspoken gays and lesbians--there are fewer than 200 dues-paying members of gay organizations in a country of 12 million people--say the president’s pronouncements have hardened public attitudes and made homosexuals’ lives hellish.

A recent fund-raiser for Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe, or GALZ, the country’s only politically oriented gay rights organization, was canceled after an organizer was beaten up at a nightclub where the event was to be held. Juan May-Lopes-Pinto, who was at the fund-raiser when his colleague was attacked, said police refused even to take a statement once they realized the victim was gay.

“Something that would have happened 25 or 30 years ago in America is happening now in Africa,” said May-Lopes-Pinto, 27, who aspires to be Zimbabwe’s first openly gay member of parliament but, because of the current climate, was reluctant to even reveal his name. “We are very much in the Dark Ages here.”

Extortion Attempts

Members of GALZ also report a spate of extortion attempts, with both strangers and casual acquaintances threatening to report sodomy charges to the police if they are not paid to keep silent. Sodomy is illegal and can carry a penalty of two years in prison.

In one such case, the group’s program manager, music teacher Keith Goddard, has been arrested and charged with sodomy after refusing to pay his 20-year-old accuser $400 in cash plus a television, stereo, stove, electric kettle and iron. Goddard says he never shared an intimate relationship with his accuser, Siphephile Vuma, who has been charged with extortion. Vuma alleges that Goddard sodomized him three times at gunpoint.

“The temperature has risen in this country, and it is now extremely dangerous for homosexuals,” said Goddard, 38, whose trial is scheduled to begin today. “People are desperately frightened. They are now worried even about their sexuality becoming known.”

The growing public intolerance has led to disagreements within GALZ, with many members unhappy about its high political profile. Except in neighboring South Africa, where mostly white homosexuals are visible and well-organized, there is little precedent in Africa for the gay activism in Zimbabwe.

Machida, now 28, who heads the organization in Harare, the capital, says she supports its activism but understands the reticence. She has been repeatedly locked out of the building where she rents a room after a government-controlled newspaper reported in May that her GALZ office was being used as a “playing ground for sexual activities” by rich foreign tourists.

GALZ denied the report, but her landlord has told Machida to find new quarters.

A few years ago, when her name first surfaced during a dispute over a GALZ stand at a book fair, her family moved 350 miles away.

“My parents are ignorant, and, like a lot of people, they think that homosexuality is unnatural and needs to be wiped out,” she said. “At one point a few years ago, I couldn’t take it anymore, and I went to my mother and said I was going to kill myself. She said, ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.’ ”

Machida said she tossed a bottle of poison on the floor and tearfully ran away, promising never to return home. But like many times before, she did come back. And despite her stature and no-nonsense reputation in the Harare gay rights movement, she continues to accommodate her parents’ traditional beliefs.

“I live with a lot of guilty feelings,” Machida said as she sipped a cup of tea with her lover and several other gay activists in the backyard of the GALZ headquarters, the country’s only openly gay meeting place. “I still believe in the traditions of my parents.

“Sometimes I wish I could just go back into the closet,” she said. “But it is the satisfaction of walking through the gate here and seeing people laughing and talking--and knowing that we are giving them something--that keeps me going.”

Every month or so, Machida travels the 350 miles from here to her family’s home in the company of a married male friend, who her unknowing relatives have been led to believe is her husband-to-be. When they ask why he hasn’t paid the customary marriage lobola of a dozen or so cows, he smiles and pleads urban poverty.

At the request of her grandparents, she is now seeking a friend to father a baby so that she can fulfill a revered custom of the Shona people: The firstborn must always produce a child.

“My grandparents said, ‘OK, you can live your life the way you want, but at least give us a child,’ ” said Machida, whose round face and broad smile give her a deceptively cheerful appearance. “I think I will do it. But this time, it will be my way.”