Meet South African sister — Beverley Palesa Ditsie
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver Velez
I’ve had the wonderful opportunity this month to travel to several conferences and events highlighting the activities and activism of black women. One of those events was sponsored by the University of Virginia in Charlottesville — the Global History of Black Girlhood Conference which took place March 17-18, 2017. I was on a panel, “Global Black Girl Politics: Activists Reflect on Youth, Justice, and Girlhoods” which included two powerful sisters from South Africa — Phindile Kunene, Curriculum Developer, Tshisimani Center for Activist Education, South Africa; former member of Young Communist League of South Africa and South African Student Congress and Beverley Palesa Ditsie, Filmmaker, Activist, Co-Founder of Gay and Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand (GLOW), South Africa.
After the formal events took place I was blessed to get to spend some quality time with Beverley or “Bev,” and have hopes that one day I’ll get to hook up with her on her home turf in Soweto.
Too often when we think of South Africa we reference Nelson Mandela, in the same way we do Martin Luther King. And just as the civil rights movement forcing the signing of Civil rights legislation here in the U.S. did not end racism — systemic and individual, neither did the end of apartheid— on paper—end the systemic oppression of black South Africans.
Struggles against the oppression of South Africa’s black population continue and also deal with the oppression of black women, and black women who are lesbian or black men who are gay.
Bev’s film ”Simon & I“, about her activism and relationship with anti-apartheid gay AIDS activist Simon Nkoli should be required viewing for anyone interested in fighting for LGBT rights and human rights.
This review was written by Lourdes Vazquez and Jane Sloan, from Rutgers University:
Although Simon & I relates the story of GLOW, The Gay and Lesbian Organization of Watersrand - South Africa, and its founding organizer Simon Tseko Nkoli, a gay, black, anti-apartheid activist and AIDS patient, this documentary is even more an intimate autobiography of Beverley Palesa Ditsie, black lesbian, activist, singer-songwriter, and filmmaker. Bev was born in Orlando West, Soweto, Johannesburg, South Africa. She became involved with the Lesbian and Gay movement at the founding meeting of GLOW in 1989 and together with Simon organized the first Lesbian and Gay Pride March. At eighteen years old she was the first black lesbian to come out publicly in South Africa, an action that had extraordinary personal consequences, as the publicity sent she and her family into fear and hiding for many weeks.
How Bev became aware that she is lesbian, the development of her political persona, and the connection of her politics to her relationship with Simon, unfolds in a complex of narration, interviews, newspapers clippings (both she and Simon are public figures), and archival footage of speeches and parades, all presented with a soft narrative tone. Her extraordinary love for the magnetic Simon - “Captured by love” she wrote in one of her songs - continues through his three year prison term for treason, through his HIV diagnosis, and despite his lack of attention to the needs of the lesbian community. Simon is someone “prepared to be himself at all costs,” and that is the quality that she wants most to emulate, and to show in the film. One of the primary scenes is of the two of them watching sports (and sometimes footage from her film) on television - it is fragmented, the camera stuck in the living room corner. Returned to throughout the film, this scene displays their camaraderie, and the endearing, soulful quality of their relationship. The historical footage showing the development of the Gay and Lesbian movement in South Africa and their influence in the writing of the new Constitution in South Africa - the first document of its kind in the world that includes “sexual rights orientation” - is of particular importance.
As the filmmaker becomes stronger in her politics and her ambition, her relationship with Simon becomes strained. His lack of support for her attendance at the United Nations IV World Conference in Beijing (as a delegate of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, the International Lesbian Information Service, the International Lesbian and Gay Association, among others) was the final reason for their split. “It ain’t working,“ she sings. But Bev did travel to China and became the first African Lesbian to address the United Nations. As she subsequently gravitated towards songwriting, performing, and filming, she saw less of Simon. Towards the end, she attends an outdoor celebration of the 10 year anniversary of GLOW, and he comments to the camera on the long time since he’s seen her, then gibes her about the film paraphernalia she’s brought with her. This kind of openness, typified also by the interview of herself (apparently by herself) holding a guitar, is one of the film’s many strengths. As she describes how Simon “pulled her in,” alternating singing with remembrance, she displays the intent and precise tone that effectively pulls in her audience. In conceiving this film, she credits Simon with the enormous success of the Gay and Lesbian movement in South Africa. In the execution, she showcases her own artistry in unfolding and bringing to the table the contradictions of the Gay and Lesbian movement, contradictions that still affect the Lesbian community.
Bev recounts some of her experiences “coming out” in Soweto and the danger involved, in both the film, and in this passage in “African Sexualities”.
Violence and rape against black women, and black lesbian women in South Africa is still a key issue that is still unresolved and cannot be whitewashed or papered over.
Bev has a long history of fighting on multiple fronts — I think of her as “intersectionality in living color.”
She delivered this statement at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, 13 September 1995:
Madam Chair,
It is a great honor to have the opportunity to address this distinguished body on behalf of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, the International Lesbian Information Service, the International Lesbian and Gay Association, and over fifty other organizations. My name is Palesa Beverley Ditsie and I am from Soweto, South Africa where I have lived all my life and experienced both tremendous joy and pain within my community. I come from a country that has recently had an opportunity to start afresh, an opportunity to strive for a true democracy where the people govern and where emphasis is placed on the human rights of all people. The Constitution of South Africa prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, gender, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, or language. In his opening parliamentary speech in Cape Town on the 9th of April 1994, His Excellency Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, State President of South Africa, received resounding applause when he declared that never again would anyone be discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes the "inherent dignity and . . . the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family," and guarantees the protection of the fundamental rights and freedoms of all people "without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language . . . or other status" (art.2). Yet every day, in countries around the world, lesbians suffer violence, harassment and discrimination because of their sexual orientation. Their basic human rights -- such as the right to life, to bodily integrity, to freedom of association and expression -- are violated. Women who love women are fired from their jobs; forced into marriages; beaten and murdered in their homes and on the streets; and have their children taken away by hostile courts. Some commit suicide due to the isolation and stigma that they experience within their families, religious institutions and their broader community. These and other abuses are documented in a recently released report by the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission on sexual orientation and women's human rights, as well as in reports by Amnesty International. Yet the majority of these abuses have been difficult to document because although lesbians exist everywhere in the world (including Africa), we have been marginalized and silenced and remain invisible in most of the world.
In 1994, the United Nations Human Rights Committee declared that discrimination based on sexual orientation violates the right to non-discrimination and the right to privacy guaranteed in the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights. Several countries have passed legislation prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation. If the World Conference on Women is to address the concerns of all women, it must similarly recognize that discrimination based on sexual orientation is a violation of basic human rights. Paragraphs 48 and 226 of the Platform for Action recognize that women face particular barriers in their lives because of many factors, including sexual orientation. However, the term "sexual orientation" is currently in brackets. If these words are omitted from the relevant paragraphs, the Platform for Action will stand as one more symbol of the discrimination that lesbians face, and of the lack of recognition of our very existence. No woman can determine the direction of her own life without the ability to determine her sexuality. Sexuality is an integral, deeply ingrained part of every human being's life and should not be subject to debate or coercion. Anyone who is truly committed to women's human rights must recognize that every woman has the right to determine her sexuality free of discrimination and oppression. I urge you to make this a conference for all women, regardless of their sexual orientation, and to recognize in the Platform for Action that lesbian rights are women's rights and that women's rights are universal, inalienable, and indivisible human rights. I urge you to remove the brackets from sexual orientation. Thank you.
Thanks to attending the conference at UVA, I now have a new little sister. Though she may be about 8,000 miles away from my home in NY — she’s only a tweet away.
You can follow Bev on Twitter.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The March for Science, planned for April 22 on the National Mall in Washington, DC, has a lot of momentum in its favor. President Donald Trump’s blueprint budget proposal released last week contains cuts that would “cripple” science funding as we know it. Many scientists are livid.
The rally on the Mall and the satellite demonstrations across the globe seem likely to attract at least thousands. The movement has received endorsement from the country’s major science interest organizations, which are powerful nonpartisan sources of science advocacy.
So why the planning for it “plagued by infighting”? On Wednesday, Stat reported that a few members of the march’s organizational committee had resigned over debates of how strongly the movement should champion not only the cause of science-based decision-making, but other issues that challenge science, such as longstanding roadblocks to getting minorities and people of diverse backgrounds in scientific careers.
“Science” has never come together in such a broad display of political action. So it makes sense there’s some friction, and debate about the movement’s goals.
But the movement needs to reckon with this fact: Science has long struggled with diversity and inclusion. And scientists — who will plan and attend a march that seeks to bring all scientists in a unified front — need to remember that. On Twitter, geneticist Michael Eisen summed it all up well:
For those who followed the debates around the Women’s March, this should sound familiar. In the lead-up, critics of that event worried that its intersectionality — acknowledging that “women’s issues” include the concerns of minority women, LGBTQ women, and other marginalized groups — would water down the impact of the event. By all accounts, it didn’t. The Women’s March was a resounding success, and it turned out to be a broad show of Trump opposition that made room for a wide range of grievances.
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The Congressional Black Caucus reached out to the Justice Department and FBI, asking the federal agencies to help local police investigate a rash of black and Hispanic missing teens in the capitol. Associated Press: Black lawmakers call on FBI to help on missing black girls
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Black members of Congress are calling for the Justice Department to help police investigate a large number of missing children in Washington, D.C.
The District of Columbia logged 501 cases of missing juveniles, many of them black or Latino, in the first three months of this year, according to the Metropolitan Police Department, the city's police force. Twenty-two were unsolved as of March 22, police said.
The letter, dated Tuesday and obtained Thursday by The Associated Press, was sent by Congressional Black Caucus chairman Cedric Richmond, D-La., and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who represents the District in Congress. They called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director James Comey to "devote the resources necessary to determine whether these developments are an anomaly or whether they are indicative of an underlying trend that must be addressed."
An email sent to the Justice Department seeking comment was not immediately answered Thursday. Richmond said he hopes to meet with Sessions and bring up the issue. No meeting is currently scheduled. But President Donald Trump assured caucus members on Wednesday that he would make his Cabinet secretaries available to them.
D.C. police officials said there has been no increase in the numbers of missing persons in their jurisdiction. "We've just been posting them on social media more often," said Metropolitan Police spokeswoman Rachel Reid.
According to local police data, the number of missing child cases in the District dropped from 2,433 in 2015 to 2,242 in 2016. The highest total recently, 2,610, was back in 2001.
But the increased social media attention has caused concern in the U.S. capital area, which has long had a large minority population and is currently about 48 percent black. Hundreds of people packed a town-hall style meeting at a neighborhood school on Wednesday to express concern about the missing children cases.
"Ten children of color went missing in our nation's capital in a period of two weeks and at first garnered very little media attention. That's deeply disturbing," Richmond's letter said.
Derrica Wilson, co-founder of the Black and Missing Foundation, said that despite the assurances from police, it was alarming for so many children to go missing around the same time. On Tuesday night, she noted, her group had four reports of missing children and only one had been found.
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In 2016 it seemed as if cops killed a black man every few minutes, but maybe all the attention finally got them to realize the error of their ways. We hardly ever hear about police shootings anymore, and it is good to see that law-enforcement officers have figured out how to stem the alarming epidemic of police killing people of color.
Except they haven’t.
According to the Washington Post’s database that tracks police shootings, 237 people have been shot and killed by police this year. That is 14 more people than had been shot and killed by police at this point last year. If you count all the people who died during encounters with police, including Tasers, physical force and other methods (as the website Killed by Police does), the total jumps to 278 for the year, five more than last year at this time.
So why haven’t police killings been on the front pages of all the newspapers this year? The same reason the Soulja Boy-Bow Wow album didn’t go platinum. No one cares anymore. People have moved on. Black America has always been aware of and screamed about police brutality, but the larger popular culture only started caring about it when they happened upon the Eric Garner video on BuzzFeed or Reddit, or whatever the Caucasian equivalent of The Root may be. Police brutality only made front pages because it was trending on white Twitter, because black lives are like twerking, cornrows, rock ’n’ roll, full lips and everything else in the American zeitgeist: Black people can do it for years, but it never becomes popular until white people notice.
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Ana Barbara Ferreira, from Sao Paulo, said her student was "sad" after being ridiculed by a boy, who had said her hair was "ugly".
"At that moment, the only thing I could tell her was that she was wonderful and shouldn't care about what he was saying," she wrote in a Facebook post that went viral.
A bigger show of support came in the following day, when she went to work wearing the same hairstyle as her pupil, much to the girl's surprise. "When she saw me, she came running to hug me and say that I was beautiful," Ms Ferreira said. "I told her: 'Today I'm beautiful like you!'"
She posted a picture on Facebook of her with the pupil - both smiling and with similar hairstyles.
The teacher has been widely praised on social media. Her post has been liked by more than 142,000 people and shared 30,000 times.
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Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
I’ve been caring for my elderly mother these last couple of years now. She’s pretty tough, but gravity seems to slow her down a bit more recently. She complains of how little she gets done in a day to what she could accomplish last year. She’ll be 80 in May and still insists on vacuuming a room or three, still wants to mop a floor and weed the garden. It’s a bit of a tightrope. I don’t want her to over do it, but activity and meaning gives her Life. No family is exempt from sickness and loss. When it does come, a renewed appreciation arises, an appreciation of how motherly love and warmth envelopes us. No matter the academic tract, or the spiritual text I read now on the irrevocable passing of life, it all reminds me of my Mother and of all the women here and elsewhere who have embraced me and us. How none will be forgotten and they will warm us still. Because their memories and lives are gifts that can be stitched onto...
Quilts
Like a fading piece of cloth
I am a failure
No longer do I cover tables filled with food and laughter
My seams are frayed my hems falling my strength no longer able
To hold the hot and cold
I wish for those first days
When just woven I could keep water
From seeping through
Repelled stains with the tightness of my weave
Dazzled the sunlight with my
Reflection
I grow old though pleased with my memories
The tasks I can no longer complete
Are balanced by the love of the tasks gone past
I offer no apology only
this plea:
When I am frayed and strained and drizzle at the end
Please someone cut a square and put me in a quilt
That I might keep some child warm
And some old person with no one else to talk to
Will hear my whispers
And cuddle
near
-- Nikki Giovanni
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY PORCH