“South Africa respects the sovereign rights of other countries to adopt their own legislation. In this regard, through diplomatic channels South Africa engages with Uganda on areas of mutual concern bearing in mind Uganda’s sovereignty.”
You can’t get clearer than that, can you? This was President Jacob Zuma’s reply, in Parliament, to a question about South Africa’s position on Uganda’s notorious anti-gay legislation, signed into law by President Yoweri Museveni in February of this year. In case you missed it, the bill allows repeat “offenders” to be jailed for life, outlaws the promotion of homosexuality and requires people to denounce gays and lesbians.
This from the leader of the party – liberation movement in those days – which led howls of global protest when, in the 1980s, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher suggested that engagement with South Africa would be the best way to break down apartheid, rather than sanctions and isolation. “Constructive engagement” was the phrase used at the time.
No, came the response, apartheid was a crime against humanity, in the same league as Nazism, and should be treated as such. South Africa had to be isolated until the evil edifice crumbled. Which is more or less what happened.
Apartheid’s National Party architects were also very strongly against homosexuality. If you don’t believe me, ask any gay man old enough to have served in the Defence Force back then. Beatings and abuse from NCOs and fellow soldiers were guaranteed and jail a real probability if you were caught.
In that respect, apartheid had a great deal in common with the Nazis. In Hitler’s Germany, gays were forced to wear pink triangles, and along with the Jews who wore yellow stars, were persecuted, prosecuted and despatched to prisons and concentrations camps. The aim was the racial and cultural purification of Germany; thousands lost their lives and gays in the camps were treated with unusual cruelty, even by Nazi standards.
So there was great rejoicing in the gay community when South Africa made its transition to democracy in the early 90s, and gay rights were enshrined in the new Constitution. The country also became one of the first to allow gay marriage. the Constitution’s architects had made it clear that the persecution of a person on grounds of sexual orientation was no different from persecution on grounds of race.
Fast forward 20 or so years to Zuma’s parliamentary response.
“South Africa respects the sovereign rights of other countries to adopt their own legislation.”
So it was perfectly OK, then, for the South African government to say no to Basil d’Oliveira when he was selected to play cricket for England and to tour South Africa? Wasn’t this just one country exercising a sovereign right, having adopted some legislation that others perhaps disliked?
Nor could we have expected any protest from a Zuma-led government to Berlin during the 1930s, as millions were slaughtered because of their religion, sexual orientation or even mental handicaps. Far from it, it would seem – after all, had not the Nazis, through Germany’s Parliament, the Reichstag, adopted legislation permitting this kind of persecution? Was Germany, therefore, not also just exercising its sovereign rights?
In fact, I can’t imagine where the ANC itself would be today if governments and right-thinking people around the world had looked at apartheid in South Africa and used the same words: “we respect the sovereign rights of other countries to adopt their own legislation.”
The implication of that statement is chilling: it now seems to be the ANC’s view that provided a properly elected government passes the necessary legislation, it can do as it pleases and the rest of us will have to look the other way.
So now we know: the Zuma-led ANC truly is a party that has lost its moral compass.