Zimbabwean Drag Queen Reveals All

By Lucy Fleming
BBC News website
Originally posted August 10. 2006

Looming over the audience on high heels and batting enormous eyelashes, voluptuous Zimbabwean drag performer - the Queen of Africa - demands attention.

"I'm gay; I'm a drag queen; I love sleeping with men; I love having fun and I was born gay," says Kudah Samuriwo, cooling himself with a fan after a performance in a hot and sticky London theatre.

During the 1990s, Kudah courted controversy in Zimbabwe, where homosexuality is illegal, when he became the first black drag queen to win the Jacaranda Queen beauty contest - a crown usually worn by coloured (mixed-race) transvestites.

At more than 1.8m (six feet) tall, he models himself on African pop divas such as Brenda Fassie and Yvonne Chaka Chaka, whose name he used as his original stage name.

"To me a drag queen is something outrageous, more than a woman. I'm proud to be a man. I'm a drag queen because I'm different."

Provocative

This in-your-face attitude put him on a collision course with Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe, who regards homosexuality as un-African.

Mr Mugabe infamously described gays as "worse than pigs and dogs" at the opening of the Zimbabwe's International Book Fair in 1995.

"That changed the world, just those words," says Kudah, who after subsequent harassment fled into exile to the UK.

Nearly four years on, he is taking a qualification to become a care-worker and is writing his show, Queen of Africa.

It is a work-in-progress - written in collaboration with Nigerian playwright Dipo Agboluaje - and is a funny, provocative and often moving account of his experiences.


"I don't know what Mugabe has against pigs and dogs; he must have had the worst sex ever with them.

"Maybe he's had gays as well that's why he makes comparisons. Experts can be so one-sided," he says during a workshop of the play.

Despite his outspoken performance, Kudah says he grew up a shy man "suppressing what I really wanted to do".

As early as seven years old he was aware that he was different, but as the eldest son of a local chief, coming out in such a conservative society was out of the question.

"I had to be an heir, a man who could go and hunt, so it was difficult hiding behind my mother's skirt," he says.

Spies

Kudah lost his virginity at 14 to a distant uncle, the night he returned from the post-independence war against the Ndebele people in the south of the country.

But it was not until he went to live in the capital, Harare, after leaving boarding school that his parents found out that he was gay.

To escape their anger he went to South Africa for several years, only reconciling with his family in his twenties after his father's death.

The play not only charts Kudah's personal story, but the crackdown on the gay community since 1995 when homosexuals have been repeatedly bribed, detained, beaten and sometimes raped by the authorities.

"My experience was very hard, because the policemen were clever. They would take us, arrest us and release us without charge, so we didn't have any proof," he explains.

Events organised by the Association of Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (Galz), which he helped form, were often infiltrated by government spies.

"I would end up sleeping with them and teaching them about oral sex."

Roll call of death

For Kudah, it has been HIV and Aids that has had the most devastating effect on the gay scene in Zimbabwe, where many cannot afford anti-retroviral drugs.

"Organising and attending funerals took a fair share of my time as one by one friends and relatives answered the roll call of death," he says in the play.

"We knew it wasn't a divine curse to punish us for what we are. Ignorance was killing more people than HIV."

In the end, it was the constant police intimidation - and petrol shortages that had crippled his minibus business - which prompted his departure.

He says he will not return to Zimbabwe until President Mugabe "has left", but he yearns for his former life.

"I had a nice car; I had money; I had friends to talk to in my language; I had a maid.

"I never used to do any washing, I didn't even know how to iron," he says.

Kudah now sees himself as a gay activist and "freedom fighter" and hopes his play will one day go into production so that he can continue "the struggle" and one day return home.

"A queen must protect her subjects even if the president refuses to do so," he says.

August 2006 TransGriot Column

We ARE Role Models-To The Entire World
Copyright 2006, THE LETTER

While I was in Philly collecting the Trinity I earned I spent some quality time reconnecting with my girls Jordana and Dionne. Thanks to her musical talents she's probably the most well known African-American transwoman on the planet. She’s also lived in London and Thailand and has friends and contacts all over the world.

During our conversations she and Dionne reminded me of something that I’ve observed over the years but didn't connect the dots until they pointed it out.

African-Americans are considered some of the wealthiest people of African descent on the planet because we live in the United States. Many of our brothers and sisters in the Caribbean, Africa and throughout the African Diaspora seek to emulate us. They look to us for guidance and leadership on many issues. In addition, our African cousins admire the Jamaicans and us.

What that means is that whatever we do as African-Americans has reverberations throughout the Diaspora. People in the Motherland take their cues from them and us.

How much, you ask? In addition to culture and style issues, the African colonial independence movement used the American Civil Rights movement as a model. Nelson Mandela borrowed Dr. King’s tactics when South Africans began waging their own successful battle against apartheid. He mentioned in a speech during the 90’s that support from African-Americans was critical to that success and that he and other South Africans listened to Motown, various R&B and rap artists for inspiration at various times during their decades long struggle for freedom.

Our influence even extends to attitudes about various social issues. Jordana pointed out that homophobic rap artists in the States influence much of the
homophobic content of Jamaican reggae. The sellout ministers anti-homophobic stances and US politicians using anti-gay attacks to divert attention from pressing domestic problems or to defuse political dissent has filtered back to the Motherland via Jamaica.

Here are some disturbing examples of it.

Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi has denounced homosexuality as a “scourge".

After hearing reports that a gay wedding had taken place in a Kampala suburb between a hairdresser and his boyfriend, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni spoke out against same sex relationships by saying that the full law should be used against such "abominable acts".

Nigeria was preparing in April to pass a punitive law that would not only prohibit same sex marriages, but would also punish people who witness, celebrate with or support couples involved in same sex relationships with mandatory five year jail sentences.

Our African cousins even have their own code word for their homophobia. Instead of screaming ‘special rights’ they will argue that homosexuality is "un-African." In other words they blame the European colonizers. They declare that homosexuality is foreign to the continent, against its teachings and traditions and even against what the Bible teaches.

In fact some Africans will go further in buttressing this bogus argument by stating that there is no word for homosexuals or homosexuality in their local African languages.

But it’s common knowledge on the continent that an ancient Ugandan king "paid special attention to boys in his court". A former national President and a prominent church leader on the African continent were recently convicted of sodomy and sexual assault.

The most enthusiastic practitioners of anti-GLBT policies are Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe and Namibia’s former president Sam Nujoma. Mugabe has been very outspoken since 1995 against gays and has been quoted as saying “homosexuals are lower than pigs and dogs". He has backed up his hate speech by relentlessly persecuting GLBT people in his country.

President Nujoma told University of Namibia students on March 19, 2001 that "The Republic of Namibia does not allow homosexuality or lesbianism here. Police are ordered to arrest you, deport you and imprison you."

Members of Nujoma's cabinet have made similar statements that homosexuals should be "eliminated" from Namibian society. The intolerant climate they created led to the death of a Namibian transwoman last year.

So when we say on TSTB that our images and perceptions in the African-American transgender community need to be more positive, we aren’t kidding.

The ability of people in the Diaspora and on the African continent to live their lives proudly and openly may depend on our ability in the United States to do just that.

The Johannesburg Statement on Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and Human Rights

I'm always hunting for information about my transgender bothers and sisters on the African continent. I've been deeply concerned about the increasingly repressive anti-GLBT attitudes that are manifesting themselves there.

Seems like I'm not the only one. On February 13, 2004 fifty-five participants held a meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa. They represented twenty-two groups from sixteen African nations. The following statement was adopted at this meeting.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To African member governments of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and of the United Nations:

We write to you as a coalition of African lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender organizations. If we do not sign the names of our organizations to this document, it is because of the climate of repression and fear that we face every day. We represent sixteen countries across the whole continent of Africa. We speak to you as fellow Africans, concerned that our continent develop and realize its full potential, steady in hope for African democracy, aware that repression and fear are inconsistent with peace and freedom, conscious that democracy and development can only be attained by mobilizing the energies of all Africa’s peoples.

We say to you: We, African lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people, do exist--despite your attempts to deny our existence. We are part of your countries and constituencies. We are watching your deliberations from our home communities, which are also your home communities. We demand that our voices be heard.

We ask you to support a resolution before the Commission on sexual orientation, gender identity, and human rights.

Across Africa, we face human rights abuses which threaten our safety, our livelihoods, and our lives. That we are targets of such abuse proves that we exist—states do not persecute phantoms or ghosts. It also proves the necessity for action to safeguard our real situations and our basic rights.

African lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people confront harassment from police; abuse by our neighbors and our families; and violence and brutality—sometimes punitive rape—on the streets. We are discriminated against in the workplace. Some of our families force us into marriages against our will, in the hope of changing our inmost selves. Some of us, among them the very young, are evicted from our homes because of prejudice and fear.

Our intimate and private lives are made criminal. Laws punishing “unnatural acts” or “sodomy” are enforced against us. Political leaders say these laws defend African “cultural traditions”—even though, without a single exception, these laws are foreign imports, brought by the injustice of colonialism.

We are denied access to health care and basic health information targeted to our lives and needs. We are blamed, unjustly, for the spread of HIV/AIDS (known by experts to be, in Africa, primarily transmitted by heterosexual sex); at the same time, we are omitted from HIV prevention programs. The brave contributions we have made to HIV prevention and treatment—doing outreach to our own communities and educating them in the face of state neglect or persecution—are ignored or actively harassed.

Schools teach intolerance, contributing to a harassment that denies young people whose sexualities or gender identities do not “conform” the basic right to an education. We are targets of media propaganda campaigns that call us “foreign,” “diseased,” “evil,” or “sick.” Political leaders promote hatred against us to solidify their own political situations. We are kept in silence and denied the right of reply.

At the same time, we have and have always had a place in Africa. Despite the pressure of prejudice that politicians and self-styled popular leaders promote, many of our families do not succumb; many of our neighbors, co-workers, and friends continue to love and to support us. Many of our communities continue to affirm that we are an integral part of their web of relationships. Many traditional cultures still are governed by those principles of welcoming and belonging that have always been central to African life; they do not allow themselves to be distorted by the politics of exclusion, and preserve our rightful place in the gathering. Many African religious leaders from many denominations speak to us of love and inclusion, not hatred and revenge. And, on our continent, South Africa, at the end of its long liberation struggle, became the first country in the world to include, in its post-apartheid constitution, “sexual orientation” as a status protected from discrimination.

In supporting the resolution on sexual orientation, gender identity, and human rights, you will be true to the real African tradition—which, in culture after culture, before colonialism cast its stultifying shadow, recognized the interrelationship and interdependency of us all.

We urge you to support this resolution.

Signed by representatives from:

Botswana
Burundi
Ethiopia
Ghana
Kenya
Namibia
Nigeria
Rwanda
Senegal
Sierra Leone
Somalia
South Africa
Swaziland
Tanzania
Uganda
Zimbabwe

What's A Griot?

You may be wondering how I came up with the name TransGriot for my now two year old column and this blog. When I started the column back in January 2004 I wanted to come up with a name that reflects my ethnic heritage, the history that I'm trying to document and my love of writing. Then it hit me.

I come from a long line of historians in my family. I'm also a voracious reader. I recalled something that I'd read about the griots of Western Africa, the storytellers who pass on the oral history and traditions of their people. Some griots can recite up to 500 years of their people's history from memory. It is said that when a Griot dies, a library has burned to the ground. They are mainly present in the Western African countries of Mali, Gambia, Senegal, and Guinea. There are also Griots among the Mande, Tulkuloor, Wolof and Serer peoples and Mauritanian Arabs.

A Griot is not just a human library, storyteller and historian. They are all of these things and more. Griots are a visible and tangible human link to the past. They are someone who not only could be touched, but could touch you with stories and facts that enlighten you and others about who you were and are as a person.

That's what this blog's mission is. I am going to be your guide to a world that many people have not seen or heard about until now. I'm going to introduce you to your African-American transbrothers and transsisters. We've played a much larger role in the history of our people than you've been led to believe. I'll also comment on the general stuff that goes on around me from time to time, too.