A Look at Women's Liberation and the Lesbian and Gay Movement in Zimbabwe

by Terry Moon

In 1983 we wrote in News & Letters: "Zimbabwe cannot get to full freedom in any way that doesn't draw on the human creativity of the whole people….." Rather than build on the inventiveness of the revolutionary process, Robert Mugabe and his government have done the exact opposite, attacking the forces that made the revolution. As a result, 18 years after the 1980 revolution, the country is sinking into crisis. Part of that crisis is revealed in the conditions and struggles of women, lesbians and gays.

The revolution in 1980 was made by women, youth, workers, and peasants who wanted land. Women wanted their own land, so that they could have a material basis for fighting a culture that treated them as less than human; they wanted the right to speak at meetings, control of their reproductive lives, and totally new human relations. A rural Zimbabwean woman said at the time: "I think we women in this new Zimbabwe want to progress more than men. We want to show men that our heads are the same. We want to consolidate the power that we showed during the war." (See "We Carry a Heavy Load": Rural Women in Zimbabwe Speak Out or News & Letters, "Zimbabwe: women and land," June 1983.)

Nowhere is the betrayal of the revolution more glaring than in the struggle for land. As Zimbabwe's minister for land resettlement, Moven Mahachi, said at the time of the revolution: "People fought for land, they went to jail for land, they died for land." After the revolution, 162,000 families were to be resettled by January 1983, but today, only 70,000 Black families have been resettled on formerly white-owned land. This in a country where the white population, less than 2% of Zimbabwe, owns 70% of the land.

The distrust of Mugabe on this question of land reform was articulated recently by the independent legislator Margaret Dongo: "There is a need for politicians to declare to the public the number of farms they own. Government took many farms in 1990 and nobody knows who is leasing these farms. We need transparency and accountability." Dongo fought in the revolution and is still fighting--not white Rhodesians, but now Mugabe's government.

Immediately after the revolution women were demanding land of their own: "We want to have our own land so that we can be free to grow anything we like, even trees." Another woman expressed how to her, the fight for land and for new human relations go together: "We have no land ownership but we need our own lands. We want to work with agricultural demonstrators, and learn to improve our farming methods, but our husbands won't allow us to. If we owned our own land nobody would be able to prevent us." But this has never been allowed and in 1994, Mugabe, in a televised public discussion, came out against a feminist campaign to get women joint property rights with their husbands. He said: "I cannot have it that property that is family property be registered in two names. If the woman wanted property in her own right, why did she get married in the first place?" What Mugabe knows very well is when a women's husband dies, his property is given to his family, who often throw the widow and her children off the land and into poverty and homelessness.

Mugabe's motivation is that of all tyrants--to stay in power. In 1995 he decided that scapegoating lesbians and gays would help him. He deliberately set about turning Zimbabwe society against lesbians and gays as a way to create a diversion from his own corrupt government. This began in 1995 when Zimbabwe organized one of Africa's largest book fairs around the theme of human rights. The organizers then turned around and banned the gay rights exhibit. Participants at a writers' seminar on free expression being held as a preview to the fair were outraged. South African author Nadine Gordimer said: "It is very strange to stand here under the banner of freedom of expression and know that a group has been denied the opportunity to express themselves."

Mugabe publicly called lesbians and gays "worse than dogs and pigs," and The New York Times pointed out that "Gay-bashing seems to work for him much the way it does for Jesse Helms: the newspapers are full of letters praising his stand." In 1995 a local journalist was able to report that "gay bashing goes on only at the highest political level." But three years later Mugabe's policies have reached into the police force and the press. The New York Times reported that "the press and society in general have become homophobic in a country that was once tolerant of gay men and lesbians." Tina Machida, a leader of Gays and Lesbians Association of Zimbabwe (GALZ) said that "People don't accept us anymore. The bouncers from the bar next door to a club where we held our last party tore down our decorations and got violent. They were saying, 'The president doesn't like people like you.'"

In complete defiance of Mugabe, and on an occasion of international significance, GALZ marched openly for the first time. On Dec. 10 at the observance in the capital, Harare, of the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they carried a huge banner that proclaimed "GALZ -- Out and Proud in Zimbabwe." Over 300 participated in this march, including Women's Liberation groups, AIDS support networks, and many who came to the Eighth Assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC) held in Harare.

When asked what he thought of GALZ participation at the WCC assembly, Mugabe sputtered about how the church "can purge them." But rather than the church dominating GALZ, the issue of human rights for lesbians and gays transformed the WCC assembly by confronting it with an expanded concept of human rights. As GALZ's program manager proclaimed, "Gay rights are human rights. We are not saying that we want special rights but our rights are also human rights and we need to be respected."

Mugabe attacks women for the same reason he attacks lesbians and gays, to take the spotlight off of his corruption and to win support from reactionary segments of society. Women have been attacked on the streets for wearing short skirts and tight pants. They cannot turn to the police for protection as police have joined in the attacks against them. Women have been stripped, and beaten in the streets and at bus stations. Conditions have gotten so bad that recently the UN Human Rights Commission criticized Mugabe's government for its gender discrimination and noted the rise in violence against women on the streets and in the home. The women's movement has responded by writing to Mugabe and demanding that he introduce laws punishing all forms of violence against women. They also took their protest to the streets and in April 1998, over 100 Zimbabwean women demonstrated in front of the city government hall in the capital, Harare, waving banners that proclaimed they have the right to dress as they please.

The attacks on women even reached into the parliament when Zimbabwe's former army chief had to be physically restrained to keep him from attacking MP Margaret Dongo. Dongo is the only independent member of the 150-seat Parliament. She's described as "outspoken, fearless, totally self-confident," able to "speak in detail on abuses of power, state monopolization of the media and constitutional reforms." A big deal is made out of the fact that Dongo doesn't drive. This is because those opposed to Mugabe's government tend to die in car accidents, often with army trucks. When Dongo was 15 years old she ran away from boarding school and walked 200 miles to join the resistance in Mozambique. Of that time she says that rape was common and the commanders chose the recruits they wanted to sleep with. "We weren't allowed to use contraceptives. Some women got babies and had to carry the ammunition and the baby and their food on their back." She notes that after the revolution, "women were pushed back into the kitchen." Her first speech in Parliament after she was elected in 1990 was an attack on polygamy, given in a room full of men with many wives.

Now Dongo speaks for thousands when she says: "We didn't fight to remove white skin. We fought discrimination against Blacks in land distribution, education, employment. If we are being exploited again by our Black leaders, then what did we fight for?"

What Mugabe forgets at his peril is that he is ruling over a country that made a revolution less than twenty years ago. Zimbabwe is on the edge, and those like Dongo seem willing to push Mugabe over that edge and work out anew what they fought the revolution for, to work out their liberatory vision of the future.

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