In Africa, a step backward on human rights

By Desmond Tutu
Washington Post
Friday, March 12, 2010; A19

Hate has no place in the house of God. No one should be excluded from our love, our compassion or our concern because of race or gender, faith or ethnicity -- or because of their sexual orientation. Nor should anyone be excluded from health care on any of these grounds. In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights. We knew this was wrong. Thankfully, the world supported us in our struggle for freedom and dignity.

It is time to stand up against another wrong.

Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people are part of so many families. They are part of the human family. They are part of God's family. And of course they are part of the African family. But a wave of hate is spreading across my beloved continent. People are again being denied their fundamental rights and freedoms. Men have been falsely charged and imprisoned in Senegal, and health services for these men and their community have suffered. In Malawi, men have been jailed and humiliated for expressing their partnerships with other men. Just this month, mobs in Mtwapa Township, Kenya, attacked men they suspected of being gay. Kenyan religious leaders, I am ashamed to say, threatened an HIV clinic there for providing counseling services to all members of that community, because the clerics wanted gay men excluded.

Uganda's parliament is debating legislation that would make homosexuality punishable by life imprisonment, and more discriminatory legislation has been debated in Rwanda and Burundi.

These are terrible backward steps for human rights in Africa.

Our lesbian and gay brothers and sisters across Africa are living in fear.

And they are living in hiding -- away from care, away from the protection the state should offer to every citizen and away from health care in the AIDS era, when all of us, especially Africans, need access to essential HIV services. That this pandering to intolerance is being done by politicians looking for scapegoats for their failures is not surprising. But it is a great wrong. An even larger offense is that it is being done in the name of God. Show me where Christ said "Love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones." Gay people, too, are made in my God's image. I would never worship a homophobic God.

"But they are sinners," I can hear the preachers and politicians say. "They are choosing a life of sin for which they must be punished." My scientist and medical friends have shared with me a reality that so many gay people have confirmed, I now know it in my heart to be true. No one chooses to be gay. Sexual orientation, like skin color, is another feature of our diversity as a human family. Isn't it amazing that we are all made in God's image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people? Does God love his dark- or his light-skinned children less? The brave more than the timid? And does any of us know the mind of God so well that we can decide for him who is included, and who is excluded, from the circle of his love?

The wave of hate must stop. Politicians who profit from exploiting this hate, from fanning it, must not be tempted by this easy way to profit from fear and misunderstanding. And my fellow clerics, of all faiths, must stand up for the principles of universal dignity and fellowship. Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice.

The writer is archbishop emeritus of Cape Town, South Africa. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.

Farewell (but not goodbye)

To mark the end of this stage of the InterACT! Project, the Theatre for a Change participants have made this final video addressed to all the participants in the UK who shared videos, stories and ideas over the last 6 weeks.



The participants in Ghana have completed a review of the first stage of this project and we are now working on ways to ensure that they can maintain, develop and grow the connections that they have made. We are really excited that some partnerships have already started talking about possible collaborations, visits and projects.

This blog will continue to run in the new year, recording new steps and connections and hopefully featuring new videos made by the TfaC practitioners, their UK counterparts and perhaps even some new participants.

We will also be reviewing ways in which the InterACT! video project can grow and expand - perhaps to even more countries and people.

Please keep checking back and do email us with your thoughts, ideas and questions.

If you would like to support the work of Theatre for a Change, please click here.

A final link

Nii Kwartelai Quartey's final video from Gabby Vautier at the Young Vic Theatre has arrived - and it is the last video postcard from this stage of the InterACT! project.

In the video Gabby introduces some more of her work in depth, including an interview with a project worker with whom she collaborated on a recent project.

As with all of the participants, Nii and Gabby will continue to communicate by email, with major developments, ideas and plans posted on this website.

Looking back

The TfaC participants in the InterACT! Project spent Saturday reviewing and evaluating the project so far, talking about what they've gained and learnt from the videos and how they can continue the project in the weeks and months to come. The UK participants have also been sending their feedback.

I am now travelling to the East and North of the country for the next 10 days. On my return we hope to have a new video from Gabby Vautier at the Young Vic to Nii Quartey and a special one-off video from all the TfaC participants here in Ghana.

In the meantime, if you have been reading this blog and following the video conversations we would really like to hear your feedback. What have you enjoyed and found interesting? What else could we have done? Whose conversations and videos have you most enjoyed?

You can comment on the project - all thoughts and contributions welcome - by hitting 'comment' at the bottom of this post or by emailing me.




Ned

A final postcard from Debra

In this final video postcard from Debra Glazer at Hampstead Theatre to Forster and Amanda, we learn some more about Hampstead Theatre's history, some games that Debra uses with her groups to help them generate text and dialogue and her hopes for the future - including a possible opportunity for the young TfaC facilitators to work on developing scripts in collaboration with one of Debra's groups in the UK.

You can watch Forster and Amanda's last video here.

Didi replies to Susan

Another video postcard drops onto the metaphorical InterACT! doormat, this time to Theatre for a Change's Monitoring Officer Susan Dartey from Didi Hopkins at the Roundhouse in Camden, North London.

In her original video to Didi, Susan showed us round the building that currently functions as the Community Theatre Centre in James Town.

A letter to Diana

Beckie Mills, the Projects Co-ordinator at the Almeida Theatre, made a video reply to Diana Quow's original postcard a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, encoding problems meant that the video played entirely in fast-forward, and there was nothing we could do about it.

So, instead of the video, Beckie has sent Diana this letter:


Dear Diana,

I hope you enjoyed watching me in fast forward – sorry about that!

Thanks very much for your video message, and for sharing one of the exercises you do.

My video showed the ‘Happy Mondays’ group which is made up of 16-19 year olds who have been involved with Almeida projects, and now want to come to the theatre on their own. We were doing several different exercises based on Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill, which is a play about gender politics, sexual politics, and subverting expectations.

One of these was a very simple ‘stop’ ‘go’ game, where you have to follow a series of commands (eg, stop when I say stop), and then the second time round, so the opposite (stop when I say go). It’s trickier than it might sound, and is really useful for thinking about breaking free of received patterns of behaviour.

You asked my about challenges in my job.

We’ve just finished a big project working with 75 young people form 2 of our partner schools in Islington, creating a contemporary second half to Cloud Nine, set in 2007 in Islington. (Act One is set in colonial Africa in 1879). One of my biggest challenges on this project has been enabling the participants to explore ideas that are controversial, or conflict with what they might believe, and then be open to creating theatre using this work. As a team, we’ve had to be sensitive to individual opinions, but not afraid to question them.

Some of the views expressed have been conservative, some very liberal on subjects such as:

• Sexuality
• The rights of men and women
• Racism
• Parenthood
• Nationality

The participants (all 75 of them) performed their scenes on the Almeida stage on Tuesday 27th November, to a great reception, especially from the cast of the production.

There’s definitely more territory to mine here, but we made an exciting start.

What are you up to at the moment, Diana? Do you have another song you could teach me?

Best wishes,

Beckie