John Lancaster in “The London Review of Books” (a publication that is decent, except for publishing the rants of the South African neoconservative, R W Johnson) on the prejudices exposed by reactions to Caster Semenya.
“THERE ARE MORE [PEOPLE] WHO ARE INTERSEX THAN THERE ARE BOTSWANANS”
October 2, 2009 By Leave a Comment
SCHOLARSHIPS FOR VIRGINS ONLY
September 20, 2009 By Leave a Comment
“… Literacy rates in Sierra Leone are devastatingly low, just 29 per cent among women. One of the chief culprits, as the report indicates, is teenage pregnancy. About 12 per cent of girls have their first child by the time they’re 15, and, most never return to school. To encourage girls to stay in school local groups in the provinces had been offering scholarships to those that chose to remain virgins. In the Biriwa District in northern Sierra Leone, the Biriwa Youth Association for Development (BYAD) claimed it had a hundred university scholarships for teenage girls who agreed to be examined by a community nurse. At the same time village chiefs are trying to stigmatise stigmatize teenage pregnancy through immediate suspension for both the girl and the boy. They insisted that such moves were bringing pregnancy rates down. Incentives and deterrents are time tested but the findings in the report are counter intuitive. There seems to be a backlash against young women who benefit from these grants. ‘ “Girls are (forcibly) impregnated by their peers as a “punishment” for receiving opportunities to further their schooling, whilst boys are left with no option,’ the report says. In the eastern part of the country this ‘punishment’ amounts to rape… “
Sulakshana Gupta on the New Internationalist blog.
HT: Dan Moshenberg.
CASTER SEMENYA AND THE IDEA OF “NORMAL” BOYS AND GIRLS
September 20, 2009 By Leave a Comment
With the media spectacle around world beating athlete Caster Semenya gaining fever pitch, South African newspaper “The Cape Times” sacrificed one of its reporters working tirelessly on inequality in South Africa, to find out how common “intersexuality” is:
“True hermaphroditism is more common in South Africa than anywhere else in the world. And specialists who deal with intersexed people in Gauteng say they’re seeing a new patient every four to six weeks – less than 10 percent of the condition’s estimated incidence in the province….This week Dr David Segal, a paediatric endocrinologist at Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital, said there was a greater incidence of true hermaphroditism, medically referred to as ovatesticular disorder of sex development, here than anywhere else in the world. Segal, who also works at Wits University’s Donald Gordon Medi-Clinic, explained this hermaphroditism meant a person was born with both testicular and ovarian tissue. This results in there not being enough testosterone to form a normal boy and too much for a girl. But what many people do not realise, Segal said, is that other conditions can lead to intersexuality.”
As my friend Dan Moshenberg (who forwarded it to me) remarked: Maybe, we could start, again, by having the medical profession not term every alternative `disorder’ or `deviance’. “A normal boy … a girl.”
VIDEO: “TO BE AFRICAN AND QUEER TODAY”
September 18, 2009 By Leave a Comment
What it means to be a Black lesbian, to be a gay man or lesbian of any sort, in South Africa and on the continent more generally.
South African TV clip focusing on the work of photographer Zanele Muholi.
Via Dan Moshenberg
“THE GAY HAIRDRESSER”
September 14, 2009 By Leave a Comment
A journalist at the Dutch newspaper, Die Volkskrant, has a story about his barber who turns out to be a leading gay rights campaigner who had earlier fled Zimbabwe because of hysterical homophobia there and ended up in Amsterdam. (Narration in Dutch, but interview in English with Dutch subtitles.)
LOVE IN AFRICA
September 1, 2009 By 1 Comment
New academic text, edited by Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas, about that stuff most Western journalists don’t write about when they write about Africa.
“IF CASTER [SEMENYA] IS A BOY, I’M A BOY”
August 28, 2009 By 5 Comments
My friend Herman Wasserman and I wrote an op-ed for The Observers, the website of the French TV station, France24, on the manufactured controversy around Caster Semenya, the new 800 m woman’s track and field world champion:
SEX AND RAPE: TOAST COETZER RESPONDS
August 21, 2009 By 1 Comment
Earlier this week I posted a comment by my friend, Christi van der Westhuizen, going after novelist-singer Toast Coetzer for this statement in an interview:
“One probably writes about the things that you think about a lot. Sometimes the line between having sex with someone and raping someone is very thin, even within a relationship. If the girlfriend does not want to, but you do and you have sex with her — is that rape?”
The remark has pissed off lots of people (not just on this blog). Coetzer has now responded in a comment to this blog about the context and his own attempts to set the record straight:
SEX AND RAPE
August 18, 2009 By 6 Comments
The South African journalist and commentator, Christi van der Westhuizen, passed this on:
An “upcoming” singer, writer and journalist with the name Toast Coetzer who gets a lot of airtime in the Afrikaans media made the following outrageous statement in an interview this past weekend (Sat 15 Aug) in the very popular supplement “By” that is carried in the three Afrikaans dailies Beeld, Burger and Volksblad (with combined readership of about 800,000 people).
THE CHURCH ELDERS AND THE GAYS
August 6, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Malawi’s Constitution Amendment Bill banning homosexual marriages was passed on Thursday July this year, during a parliamentary sitting to pass the 2009/2010 budget. During this sitting Member of parliament, Edwin Banda proposed that the constitution should include a clause stipulating that Malawi is a “God fearing nation”, a phrase that would cast homosexuality out as it is said to be ungodly.
Banda said Malawi is a God fearing nation, “the whole front benches (Cabinet Ministers) are God fearing people, the speaker is a church elder. We should say no to same sex marriages”
Amidst applause by members of parliament Banda added “the clear position against homosexuality will help protect the sanctity of marriage and Malawi’s belief in God.”
However Minister of Local government, Goodal Gondwe, rejected Banda’s proposal stating that the phrase would be legislate people’s faith.
He said “people have different beliefs that will not be included in the constitution.” Supporting the fight against homosexuality even the speaker of parliament said “as a church elder myself I do not support same sex marriages.”
In Malawi and most countries of Africa, policy makers continue to use religion to criminalise homosexuality. Malawi’s Penal Code like in most African countries outlaws homosexual relationships and homosexuality by 14 years imprisonment or a death sentence.
[Source]
Such laws have also been passed in Burundi, while activists in Uganda are fighting back.
