It is much more difficult to be steadfast in focus and determination to speak out about what one knows to be happening in distant parts of the world.
Here is a rare video of an interview with Kato. His words live. His legacy endures. You cannot kill his courage, nor erase his humanity.
Recently, I was contacted on Facebook by women in South Africa and Australia who wanted me to write something, anything on the rapes of South African lesbians as a method of "curing" them of their homosexuality. I have been putting it off for a month now with a million excuses. I am ashamed to say that one of my pitiful excuses was that I did not know enough to make the story "compelling." As I read with sorrow about David Kato, I realize that speaking out about evil is required and not a matter of a writer's sense of convenience.
Writers are wordsmiths. It is our job to tell the story and get out of the way in the telling. It is not about us or how clever or shocking or "compelling" we are.
So, here is something you need to know about what is happening now in South Africa.
This is another story that has been making the rounds in Europe since at least 2009.
The heinous practice is called "corrective rape," in which sexual assaults on lesbians are viewed as a means of curing homosexuality. The most high profile case occurred 2008 when Eudy Simelane, a prominent gay rights activist was stabbed to death after being gang-raped. Her body was dumped into a stream.
Here is another account, "Hate Crimes: the rise of Corrective Rape in South Africa by the UK group, ActionAid.
On Sunday 7 July 2007, the bodies of Sizakele Sigasa and Salome Massooa were found in a field in Meadowlands, close to the Johannesburg township where they both lived. The murders were particularly shocking because of the brutality of the attacks the women had been subjected to before their deaths. Both had been gang-raped and tortured before being tied with their underwear and shot, execution-style, through the head. Sizakele was one of the first women in Meadowlands to live openly as a lesbian, and was a well-known gay and women's rights activist and HIV campaigner. On the night of the murders, both women had been drinking in a local bar and, according to eyewitnesses, suffered homophobic abuse by a crowd of people when they left to go home.
My Facebook contacts offered similar stories, and why I felt they were not "compelling" enough is beyond me. These and other accounts are not isolated instances. South Africa specifically prohibits discrimination against homosexuals in its constitution, but corrective rape is on the rise.
In 86 United Nations members states, homosexuality is illegal. In eight countries it is punishable by death. See this website for the International Gay and Lesbian Alliance.
And still we remain silent.
Would worldwide media outrage against homophobia in Uganda have saved David Kato? We will never know. But, despair and fatigue and news cycles are not sufficient reasons to look the other way.
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