True colours of the Rainbow Nation?

By Clifford Bestall
Producer, World Weddings: Gay on the Cape

Gay couple Mark and Cengey must have a "commitment ceremony" in place of a legal wedding

They call each other "bent", "faggot", "queer", "dyke", "moffie", terms tantamount to hate speech.

South Africa's gays are in a defiant, robust and challenging mood.

They are fighting for rights they claim should be theirs - marriage rights included - and already, they smell victory.

Homosexual couples here have won the right to adopt children, cross-dress if they feel like it and have sex with one another.

Gay on the Cape BBC Two, 2200 BST on Wednesday, 9 June, 2004

In apartheid South Africa, none of these were allowed.

Sodomy, for example, was a crime in which a private citizen had the right to use lethal and deadly force to make an arrest. The law derived from English common law dating from the reign of Henry VIII.

A 1957 statute in South Africa even made it a crime for men to engage in any erotic contact.

Now, with all of that gone, it is small wonder that the "pink set" at the tip of Africa are in celebratory mood.

Deeply veined taboo

Under South Africa's new constitution, discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation is illegal, so gays can do what other couples do like hold hands and kiss in public... well, almost.

Gay rights campaigner Zackie Achmat welcomed the ruling in 1998 to de-criminalise homosexuality

Decades of cold Calvinist chill - when the country was run by white Christian conservatives - have left their mark, not on whites so much, but on blacks.

Even with South Africa's status of having the highest number of HIV/Aids sufferers in the world, talking about sex is a deeply veined taboo amongst older traditionalists, and homosexuality is discussed even less.

It is still dangerous to expose gay preferences in black townships where homosexuals have been attacked.

In a country numbed by violence against women, lesbians are a common target, due to the twisted and cruel logic that all they need is an initiation into heterosexual sex.

Many have been raped, others have been stabbed, some even murdered.

To be a black homosexual in South Africa can mean having to step in and out of the closet depending on social circumstances.

Power of the church

Homosexuals are worse than pigs and dogs Zimbabwe's President Mugabe

The African conservative position has been openly expressed just beyond South Africa's borders.

President Sam Nujoma of Namibia, who outlawed homosexuality in 2001, has made his unambiguous prejudice well known: "When you [whites] talk about human rights, you include also homosexualism and lesbianism.

"It is not our culture. And if you try to impose your culture on us Africans, we condemn it, we reject it".

He, like President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe - who calls gays "worse than pigs and dogs" - sees homosexuality as a foreign white threat.

Homophobia runs through all aspects of life in Africa and mainstream churches do not help curb this tendency.

In April 2004, Africa's Anglican archbishops vowed not to accept donations from Western churches that support the ordination of gay priests. This, despite the fact that the church in Africa depends almost entirely on funding from the West.

South Africa is different and leads the way in the struggle for full human rights for gays, despite a small vocal objection from some churches.

Legal wrangling

But there is one last issue that stands in the way: the right to marry as heterosexuals do, with full state recognition, thus allowing partners hereditary rights and access to housing and medical grants.

The document gay couples sign at a ceremony has no legal status

Gay matrimony has become a universal battleground on which liberal tolerance confronts conservative and often religious fundamentalism.

Unlike US President George W Bush, who wants to change the American constitution to make gay marriage unlawful, the South African government is proud of its progressive constitution and has not stood in the way of gay aspirations.

The law does though. Particularly the Marriages Act which, as a relic of the past, has to be unpicked and challenged clause by clause in the High Court to bring about change.

Until that happens, gay couples will have to make do with their same sex commitment ceremonies which resemble heterosexual weddings in every sense bar the signing of a state register and of course, the gender of the couple.

World Weddings: Gay on the Cape was broadcast in the UK on BBC Two at 2200 BST on Wednesday, 9 June, 2004