It has been two weeks since Nelson Mandela, the father of the modern free and democratic South Africa, passed away. The achievement for which he will always be remembered is the obliteration of apartheid, the racist policies implemented by the white government to disempower any citizen who was not white. However, that was not his only achievement in the field of human rights. The Constitution of South Africa that Mandela negotiated was the first one of any national government in the world that recognized the rights of LGBT people. He was a very early supporter of marriage equality, and he appointed openly gay people to cabinet and judicial positions.
Where did this acceptance of LGBT people come from? Men of Mandela's generation, even those with a revolutionary bent, were generally not sympathetic to the plight of gay people. However, Mandela had had the opportunity to get to know and befriend a gay man who was a fellow freedom fighter in the African National Congress during the 1950s, a white man named Cecil Williams. Williams made it possible for Mandela to travel undetected when the police were looking for him, though a crucial slip-up precipitated their arrest, which resulted in Mandela's 27 year prison term.
For more about Williams, peek below the fold...
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[Most of the information in this diary came from the film The Man who Drove with Mandela, a documentary about the life of Cecil Williams.]
In 1928, Cecil WIlliams moved to Johannesburg, South Africa, from his native Cornwall in Great Britain. For about a decade he taught English at King Edward's School, the graduates of which became the ruling class of South Africa. During this time, Williams joined the Communist Party. One can only imagine the cognitive dissonance of teaching the children of the upper classes during the day while plotting against them at night.
When World War II started, he quit teaching and joined the British Navy to serve as a broadcaster. After the war, he came back to Johannesburg and became involved in the theater. He rose to become one of South Africa's leading theater directors.
Meanwhile, the postwar political atmosphere in South Africa was becoming more oppressive. The election of 1948 is among the most historically important in South Africa, as it brought about the apartheid regime. The election was won by the National Party, whose elements consisted of people sympathetic to the Nazis during the war. Throughout the 1950s, the government enacted laws designed to keep the races (as the government classified them) separate, and to cement the power of white people over all the rest. Any political groups that protested any of these acts, or advocated for political power being granted to non-whites, were continually harassed.
Williams and other whites opposed to the racist system in South Africa attempted to defeat the National Party in the 1948 elections. Not long after, he (and many other white Communists) joined the African National Congress. Professionally, Williams became frustrated at the limits put on him. It was impossible to stage a play for a multiracial audience, as he wished to do. If he wanted to stage on one of his productions for a black audience, he had to do it in a substandard venue not designed to be a theater at all.
Williams lived two double lives during this period. In addition to the care he had to take in meeting with others with the objective of ending apartheid, he also had to take care in his interactions with contemporary gay society in Johannesburg. As in almost all other countries in the world at that time, homosexual acts were illegal in South Africa, and homosexuals were, by and large, hated by society in general. Williams was very much old-school in his participation in gay society, attending and hosting parties for the like-minded, always with an eye out for "Priscilla," that is the police. By the way, these parties were multi-racial. He never directly came out to his ANC comrades, but most of them were able to figure it out on their own. Furthermore, and most importantly, he raised their consciousness on the issue of persecution of homosexuals, particularly after Williams was put in the hospital after a brutal anti-gay hate-crime during the 1950s. This is most likely where Nelson Mandela came by his sympathy for the plight of LGBT people.
After the ANC renounced nonviolence, and Mandela became a wanted man, it became very difficult for him to travel around the country. However, a method was devised whereby Mandela would impersonate a chauffeur. Who was his passenger? Cecil Williams. Anyone looking at the arrangement saw a servant transporting his employer somewhere, when in fact the true relative status of the two men was reversed. On long drives through unpopulated country, the two men would trade off on driving duties, and this is how they got caught. Williams was the one driving when the police stopped them in 1962, and they were arrested. Williams was released the next day, and Mandela spent the next 27 years in prison.
Not long after the arrest, the government started placing ANC members under house arrest, a condition Williams would not submit to, so he found a way to escape South Africa and returned to England, where he was later joined by his lover John Calderwood (a Scot). Williams died in 1979 in London. Eleven years later, Nelson Mandela was finally released from prison, after which he negotiated a Constitution guaranteeing full civil and human rights to people like Cecil Williams.
It is fitting to remember Nelson Mandela's role in ending the last regime of de jure racial discrimination in the world, but we should remember his role in establishing the first national guarantee of LGBT rights in the world, and thank him for that. Nor should we forget the role played by Cecil Williams in achieving that goal.
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TOP COMMENTS
December 20, 2013
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From koNko:
Punctuation isn't everything, but in this comment by Dr Erich Bloodaxe RN, it's the only thing. And he nails it. H/T to Glenn the Plumber for his inspirational material. From kos' diary 2014: The year of community.
From your humble diarist:
Mark Mywurtz's comment in Jaxpagan's recommended diary My Facebook Note Re: Phil Robertson really doesn't need more attention, given that it's going to show up in tomorrow's Top Mojo, but it's a great comment, so I'm linking it anyway.
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December 19, 2013
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