That’s the South Africa soundbyte, but what about the lesbians?   Like a lot of countries, the lesbian nightlife and social scene is less present and flamboyant than the gay male one.  We’ve had a few lesbian glossy mags in the past, but now we’re reduced to one agony aunt column in a free monthly gay newspaper, who don’t even respond to queries about lesbian content.  Tough luck if the month’s topic doesn’t interest you or have any relevance to you.  We do have some damn good regular lesbian events; mostly in Cape Town and Johannesburg, where the scene is general is at its liveliest, but things happen in other cities too.  Doesn’t matter what country you’re in either, there are always a couple of lesbian hiking clubs and soccer teams, aren’t there?  We have those too.

Soweto has had its own pride march for the past four years and they hold lesbian evenings too.  I mention Soweto on its own, because it is largely populated by a culture that disapproves of lesbians to the extent where in some cases; rape is seen as a cure.  Two women returning home from a Soweto lesbian bar last year were murdered and their killers treated very lightly in the opinion of the gay community.  I saw that whole case as a very African thing until I read about the torture of gay people in Iran, poor Michael Causer in the UK and the slaughter of an elderly gay couple in Indianapolis recently.

We are fortunate in having some amazingly good pressure groups and activists who battle constantly to make the tolerance of our constitution a reality.  You’ve probably heard African AIDS statistics, so that is another issue that’s prominent here.

It’s definitely not all doom and gloom though.  Whatever cultural issues we have, from tribal taboo to conservative Afrikaner Christian bigotry and so forth, we know how to have fun too.  Crowds at lesbian parties are racially integrated and the younger generation of dykes is emerging with far more style and confidence than we did back in the day.  We even have two clothing brands aimed specifically at lesbians.  At the recent Joburg Pride, there were dykes on bikes, a lot of women in Soweto Pride shirts, a lesbian singing on stage … lots and lots of out, proud lesbians under the African sun.

If you’re into the social scene, the lesbian population, again, as in much of the gay world, is small enough so that eventually you know most of the crowd and depending on your level of activity and morals, you find you’ve slept with a fair proportion of it too.  We have all the good old lesbian stereotypes that other countries do too.  Things I’ve noticed from living in other supposedly more sophisticated societies are that our bdsm scene is less overt and also the butch-femme dynamic not quite so apparent.

And Seether isn’t South Africa’s only musical export to America, whether you know it or not, we’ve sent you one of our favourite lesbian singers too i.e. Karma.  She played London Pride this year and she’s living in and touring all over the USA now.

For me, as a relatively old dyke, if I compare myself to nightclubbing lesbians, the clearest proof of progress I’ve noticed happened to me last year, at the annual Out In Africa film festival.  I was at a screening of a French lesbian porno.  Now, we don’t get a lot of those here and buying them is becoming even more prohibitively expensive when you consider, not only the levels of poverty here, but the exchange rate and our anorexic currency.  So the audience was oozing anticipation and while OIA stalwart Nodi Murphy was, for the umpteenth year, reminding us to switch our cellphones off, there were even more giggles than usual.  The film began with some pretty fierce strap on action and just in from of me, three rows of watchers who’d arrived in a bus from one of the townships, went “eysh!!!”   Eysh is a particularly South African exclamation and it comes from black culture, but is used by everyone to express surprise or disbelief.  The next reactions were things like, “Who’s your daddy?” answered a row or so down by, “Who’s your mommy?” and interspersed all the while with things like “Oh my God!” and finally, “Hey, I’ve done that!”   The exclamation marks were almost audible.

The two granola dykes next to me began to tut and suck their breath in disapprovingly and make muttered grumpy remarks.  I was grinning.  I finally turned to them and said, “Hey isn’t this AMAZING?  Who’d have thought a few years back that the previously disadvantaged community here would be able to not only come and watch a lesbian porno, but feel liberated enough to react to it without fear of arrest or worse?”

Civil rights and gay rights are ongoing struggles everywhere, but the brave and beautiful lesbians I see here give me hope.