“I was never taught to hate myself”

Africa is a bad place legally for gay people. Not everywhere. South Africa has one of the fairest regimes in the world regarding LGBT rights. Sadly, the competition for second gay friendliest on the continent is barely engaged. Most the fight seems to be over who can be worst. 

I would like to visit Africa. But I avoid countries where gay people are persecuted. There are some, it seems, where bad laws are mostly ignored, but I prioritize places that are friendly. 

So it was a rare piece of good news that Botswana’s sodomy laws were invalidated last summer by the Botswana’s highest court. The decision was unanimous. 

The plaintiff was a young man named Letsweletse Motshidiemang, who had filed the case as a twenty-one-year-old university student, with the help of a law professor. Interviewed at the time of the judgment, Motshidiemang [said,] ‘people knew I was different, but I was surrounded by people who loved me. I was never taught to hate myself.’ That job was done by something else: ‘It was the laws.’

This story appears in the last chapter of Mark Gevisser’s exploration of the LGBT movement around the world, The Pink Line. The pink line is Gevisser’s metaphor for the divisions between and within us, the struggle to define ourselves and find a safe place to live in an often hostile world. The last chapter offers some hope, where so much that preceded described backlash and scapegoating from the self-declared enemies of LGBT people. 

Good news like this from Botswana is often fragile. As we know in the United States, court rulings can be reversed by unjust legislatures rewriting laws or constitutions. That the ruling seems to have held up for a year (it came down in summer of 2019) suggests this basic fairness may persist. 

source: The Pink Line: journeys across the world’s queer frontiers

by Mark Gevisser

2020. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York