Africa: Slowly moving from the Unthinkable to Policy

Organisations for inclusivity

Four years ago, today, I met up with my colleagues in a bar in London, we were preparing for a march that our company was the headline sponsor of. We were going to be in the front of the parade with a decorated double-decker bus in tow. Barclays Bank has been the headline sponsor of the London Pride since 2014. [Barclays]

Today in my Barclays T-shirt

Now, Barclays did have a progressive diversity and inclusion policy with forums for the exchange of ideas and much else. The new CEO of the bank had a backstory, his younger brother revealed to him in the mid-80s that he was first gay and was also HIV positive.

A bombshell of information and realisation that forged compassion, empathy, and love, first between brothers and then for causes. The causes that have helped the research for and availability of antiretroviral drugs for the treatment of HIV/AIDS. [Wikipedia: Peter Staley]

Governments for equality

This morning, I read that lawmakers in Gabon had voted to decriminalise homosexuality. 48 voted for, 24 voted against and 25 abstained. One of those who voted against decriminalisation said, “Forty-eight lawmakers have shaken an entire nation and its customs and traditions.” [Reuters: Gabon lawmakers vote to decriminalise homosexuality]

Whilst I understand the sentiment, for all the customs and traditions we hold dear, a sense of fairness and justice must prevail to the point that we are persuaded of the better of our humanity, accepting that people might be different without morally impugning them for who they are. The record shows that 48 were persuaded of the argument for decriminalisation, 24 were implacable and 25 sat on the fence.

What was also endearing was that it was the government that proposed the initiative. The Overton Window of policy and persuasion had moved the thinking about homosexuality to the right traversing the Unthinkable to the Radical to the Acceptable to the Sensible to the Popular and now to Policy. A lot of work must have gone into this initiative and I know we are still a long way from same-sex marriage, but this is a good start.

The Overton Window

Blog: Thought Picnic: In Support of Activism

Individuals for justice

Just over a year ago, it was the Botswana High Court that decriminalised same-sex relations, unanimously. It was Letsweletse Motshidiemang, a student at the University of Botswana that filed the suit and won through. Governments, organisations, individuals, and supporters are working on systems, structures, laws, and institutions to address the criminalisation of homosexuality in Africa. It is a human rights issue above all else. [France24: LGBT activists in ‘disbelief’ after Botswana strikes down laws criminalising homosexuality]

South Africa constitutionally affirms sexual orientation rights with same-sex marriage. A feature we hope to avail ourselves of at the earliest opportunity. As human beings, we are spiritual and emotional beings, we seek to live our lives free of persecution and prosecution, loving the people we choose to love without judgement or shame. There is no agenda at play, but freedom and justice without criminalisation on moral grounds is the battle on our hands, one at a time, change will come, and freedom will reign.

ACT UP brought the focus back to the urgency for human lives

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Setting the scene

I was all emotional when I left the cinema on Monday having gone to watch a film titled 120 BPM (Beats per Minute) [French with English subtitles] that was brought to my notice by my friend.

It was a historical perspective of ACT UP Paris in the early 1990s created along the lines of the direct-action advocacy group ACT UP in the United States.

To the many of us who live with HIV or have had the amazing turn-around from full-blown AIDS, we owe the greatest depth of gratitude to the people who initiated the ideas behind starting the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and how they carried through their advocacy until governments and Big-Pharma were responsive to the plight of all afflicted by the scourge.

At the expense of the dying

From the early discovery of that disease that began to cut a swathe through first the homosexual community, then drug users and unto haemophiliacs, the governments of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Francois Mitterand simply ignored the fact that people were suffering and dying from this new disease.

We saw pictures of emaciated bodies, scientists were involved in a race to understand the disease and especially in the United States mostly for personal glory and national one-upmanship rather than for those who stood to benefit the most from their research efforts. The people who were dying cut down in their prime out of institutional indifference and corporate inertia, there appeared to be no urgency towards the emergency.

I could not have felt a better sense of justice when The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2008 honoured the French side of the research efforts and spurned the American side of the battle. Some of the people were playing with lives that were precariously at the precipice of total annihilation through AIDS.

Dragging their feet as people died

It was in the light of this discovery and understanding of the virus that pharmaceutical companies began to work on new drugs but were holding back research results and preventing the early adoption of experimental drugs that could possibly immediately health outcomes for people who already had HIV.

This is where ACT UP’s advocacy forced the question, pushed the debate and ultimately compelled governments and institutions to not only recognise the health emergency but get engaged in eradicating AIDS.

A primer on direct action advocacy

The film centred around the debating forum of ACT UP Paris with their Chatham House type of rules of engagement, the strategies for making the headlines, the resistance they faced from the authorities and pharmaceutical companies before they could no more be ignored and the real issue itself, for all the protests and advocacy, it was essentially about real human-beings, their private fears, their public rage, the loves of their lives and the loss of many who succumbed to AIDS.

More poignantly, ACT UP in its concept and activity was a model of activism that had people normally marginalised, usually persecuted, and generally ostracised decide they had had enough of being isolated and ignored by society, maybe even criminalised by the establishment to identify with a cause for which they had nothing to lose because many in their community including themselves were dying.

It was a movement of existential urgency and by that, it brought attention, engagement and radical change to the way HIV and AIDS was tackled and managed. There is no doubt that advocacy groups like ACT UP are needed today to fight for rights and freedoms that the comfortable and unafflicted enjoy. It is to those who found the courage to upset the status quo that I dedicate this, for without you, we would not be here.

If it is the only film you watch this season, it would have been worthwhile. 120 BPM (Beats per Minute) [98% on Rotten Tomatoes]