Who was Simon Nkoli?
Through his dedication and courage, black
gay anti-apartheid activist Simon Tseko Nkoli played a key role in the
fight for GLBT liberation and human rights for people with HIV/AIDS in
South Africa.
Nkoli was born in Soweto in November 1957.
He spent part of his childhood living with his grandparents, tenant
farmers on a white estate, before moving to Sebokeng township to join his
mother and stepfather.
Nkoli became an anti-apartheid activist at
a young age. After multiple arrests for civil disobedience, including
participation in the Soweto student uprising in the summer of 1976, he
joined the Congress of South African Students (COSAS), the African
National Congress (ANC), and the United Democratic Front (UDF). Fellow
COSAS members debated removing him from his position of regional secretary
when his sexual orientation became known, but a large majority ultimately
voted in his favor.
Long aware of his same-sex attractions,
Nkoli began his first serious relationship at age 19, with a white bus
driver. After Nkoli revealed this to his mother, she sent him to a series
of local healers, a Christian priest, and finally a psychologist, who
turned out to be gay himself and advised the lovers to live
together—even if Nkoli had to pose as his partner’s servant to evade
racial segregation laws.
In his early 20s, after coming out in an
interview with a black newspaper, Nkoli joined the newly formed Gay
Association of South Africa (GASA), which consisted mostly of middle-class
white men. Resolutely apolitical, the group resisted Nkoli’s requests to
hold social events at nonsegregated venues, leading him to form the
Saturday Group, the country’s first black gay organization, in 1984.
Around the same time, amid growing racial
discord, Nkoli stepped up his anti-apartheid activism, helping organize a
tenant rent strike in the town of Delmas. Charged with killing a man by
throwing a rock during a protest, Nkoli was arrested, tortured, and
imprisoned. Along with 21 other black activist leaders, he was tried in
1986 for the capital crimes of subversion, conspiracy, and treason.
While in prison awaiting trial, Nkoli
revealed his homosexuality to his co-defendants—ANC and UDF members who
would later hold high-level positions in the post-apartheid
government—and they came to respect and support him as a gay man.
“This country will never protect the rights of its gay and lesbian
citizens unless we stand up and fight—even when it makes us unpopular
with our own comrades,” he later wrote. Nkoli came out more publicly
during the trial, when he used his attendance at a GASA meeting as an
alibi to counter claims that he had been present at a clandestine
political meeting. In 1988, the charges against him were dropped and he
was released.
During his imprisonment, Nkoli became a
cause celebre for gay rights activists around the world, but he received
minimal support from the accomodationist GASA. This stance led the
International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) to suspend GASA for its
failure to condemn apartheid, and the latter group soon collapsed.
After his release, Nkoli co-founded the Gay
and Lesbian Organization of the Witwatersrand—the country’s first
genuinely integrated GLBT organization—and later the National Coalition
for Gay and Lesbian Equality (now the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project).
“I am black and I am gay,” he proclaimed at the first South African
Pride march in 1990. “I cannot separate the two parts of me into
secondary or primary struggle. They will be all one struggle.” Nkoli
traveled widely speaking about the situation in his country, served as an
ILGA board member representing Africa, and earned numerous honors for his
work.
Nkoli’s anti-apartheid activism and ties
with movement leaders proved instrumental in winning the ANC’s support
for gay rights. In 1994, he met with Nelson Mandela, whose election as
president marked the end of the apartheid era. As the newly integrated
country crafted its constitution, Nkoli lobbied for sexual orientation to
be included in its anti-discrimination provisions, and also argued for
repeal of sodomy laws. In 1996, South Africa became the first country to
include explicit constitutional protection for GLBT people. A decade
later, in fulfillment of a court mandate based on the constitution, the
South African parliament legalized same-sex marriage.
Yet even as the gay movement gained
strength and the apartheid regime crumbled, the AIDS epidemic reached
crisis proportions in the 1990s, reintensifying racism and homophobia.
Having been diagnosed with HIV himself
(likely contracted in prison), Nkoli turned his focus to AIDS activism,
co-founding groups including the Positive African Men’s Project and the
Township AIDS Project.
As the decade wore on, Nkoli experienced
increasing bouts of ill health; he died of an AIDS-related infection on
November 30, 1998, in the company of his long-time partner, Roderick
Sharp. Though Nkoli himself was not able to benefit from effective new HIV
drugs, his work for universal treatment access inspired fellow gay and
anti-apartheid activist Zackie Achmat to form the Treatment Action
Campaign, which today is widely regarded as the strongest AIDS activist
group in the world.
Liz Highleyman is a freelance writer and
editor who has written widely on health, sexuality, and politics. She can
be reached care of Letters from CAMP Rehoboth or at PastOut@qsyndicate.com.
For further reading:
Gevisser, Mark, and Edwin Cameron
(editors). 1995. Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa (Routledge).
Vargo, Marc. 2002. “An Arrest for
Homicide: Simon Nkoli and the Delmas Treason Trial.” In Scandal:
Infamous Gay Controversies of the Twentieth Century (Harrington Park
Press).
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