God dammit, Africa. All the LGBT people there need to just run down to South Africa and stay there. At least there they'll be safe with nearly full rights.
It's too bad that's way harder than it sounds. xD It's hard enough for refugees of direct genocide and stuff to get ... refugee status in their surrounding countries.
Theres no need for same sex relationships? I didnt realise :eek: I thought that there was some shortage of gays epidemic??? FINALLY I CAN TURN STRAIGHT WITH A CLEAR CONSCIENCE! (!)
I heard about this and it really just depresses me. I live in Tanzania which is directly bordering Kenya to the south, as an East African this is really sad news but I know Kenya will get through it, they are always stronger than us Tanzanians who are more easily threatened by our government and Kenya is way more tolerant than Tanzania when it comes to homosexuality (I think it's the modern factor). This is like Moi's era all over again, the bastard who was the last president of Kenya used to perform crackdowns on gay parties and gatherings and such were everyone was rounded up and taken to prison were they performed a therapy that supposedly made you 'ungay' [read: mass rape and torture] my e-buddies in Kenya told me that they had felt much more safer after he finished his term and even started holding the gatherings again some of which I have been invited to but alas distance is a bitch, if the arrests start again then all the progress that has been made in the last decade is going to go down the drain. This is really one step backward for us the minority within a minority in Africa. ANightDude I really wish it was that easy to run to South Africa but it's not, we will just have to ride this out until someone grows enough balls to stand up for our rights.
Actually, South Africa isn't that much better. Even though gay marriage is legal, only the Afrikaners (white Europeans) actually are liberal. The poor native people which make up a large portion (I think it's majority, but not sure) are much more conservative.
Violence toward gays in South Africa is just as prevalent as it is in any other African country. And to address a small detail that bugged me - Afrikaner doesn't mean white South African, it means white Afrikaans speaker.
We talked a bit about this in my Prejudice course today. And an interesting thing we talked about is what we can do to reduce prejudice. I said while we shouldn't force equality on people, my colleagues said we should. Now I can't pretend to know exactly how it works, but I think the fact is this is getting ridiculous and I don't understand why people in the UN or w/e don't f*cking doing something about this and enforce anti-discrimination laws or something. Like I said I know this isn't possible I'm sure, but I sure wish it was, I know there's a fine line between causing equality and starting a war, but the fact is I'm sick and tired of people of power saying they can't do shit all. You've got the power use it! All it takes is one voice, and that voice becomes a hundred, a thousand, a million to knock down the walls of prejudice and raise the flag of equality!
The people here believe that homosexuality is a western thing ( a "white" thing), they say that the Americans and Europeans are forcing us to accept their ways (apparently homosexuality is non-existent in African culture) so when some international organization or powerful western country forces us to stop being dumb shits, we cry out that we are not free, they are taking our sovereignty blah blah blah simply because we depend on them for aid and money and shit blah blah blah. Yeah in the end they are just ignorant idiots, plain and simple. Nuff' said.
Good point, but like you said, when people start being dickbrains about things like Equality, it's not "we're not free" it's more like "we don't want to be free"
Unfortunately that's the situation in all of Africa, SA is a step forwards than the rest of the African countries but nowhere near the situation of Europe or America -the Caribean doesn't count for the sake of this argument, homosexuality is Prohibited in most of Africa, and you can be killed -legally- in Mauritania, a poor country even by African standards and extremely disorganized, Sudan, a country not very concerned in defending human rights at all (at leat we are not the only victims, they're doing right now an ethnic cleansing and are suspected for promoting slavery and of training child soldiers, torture and abuse of prisoners is included in the combo as well, there's also the great country of Somalia, I wonder how they've manage to progress that much, and in northern Nigeria, in the south you just get 14 yr in jail for being a homosexual male, a country were 97% of the residents reject homosexuality -and I guess that 3% is made up of lgbt's
That is correct. Overall, the white population in South Africa is more liberal w.r.t homosexuality, but that doesn't mean they are comfortable with it. Even though we have a great constitution that protects minority rights and prohibits discrimination based on race, if the mindset of the population doesn't change it doesn't help much. Gays and lesbians in South Africa, especially those who live in the black townships, face hardship every day, with the threat of being raped/killed/assaulted hanging over their heads. I'm very proud of our constitution that allows homosexuals to marry and protects them from discrimination in the workplace and feel very sorry for our fellow African brothers and sisters. We mustn't become despondent and must continue guarding and fighting for our rights.