We first reported few months back how two gay men in Malawi decided to get married. Few days later we reported how they were arrested and they were going to be prosecuted. Unfortunately we have to report now that they were convicted.
Steven Monjeza, 26, and 20-year-old Tiwonge Chimbalanga were convicted of unnatural acts and gross indecency, prompting anger and condemnation from activists in Malawi and around the world. The couple, who will learn their sentence on Thursday, could be jailed for up to 14 years with hard labour.
Monjeza and Chimbalanga became Malawi’s first same-sex couple to commit publicly to marriage at a symbolic ceremony last December. They were arrested two days later and detained in harsh conditions. Homosexuality in Malawi is outlawed and remains deeply taboo.
The case has drawn worldwide attention as another example of the broad anti-gay sentiment in Africa. A law recently proposed in Uganda calling for homosexuals to be executed in some cases stirred so much ire in the West that a presidential committee recommended withdrawing it from Parliament.
Malawi, a deeply-impoverished, landlocked nation of 14 million, has also received international condemnation for prosecuting the two gay men. But most of its leaders — political and religious — have reacted with defiance. Last month, President Bingo wa Mutharika was quoted as calling homosexuality “evil and bad before the eyes of God” and an act “we Malawians just do not do.”
Magistrate Nyakwawa Usiwa Usiwa, in delivering Tuesday’s judgment in a small courtroom in Blantyre, the country’s commercial capital, was similarly stern. He referred to the crime as “buggery,” using language from when Malawi was a British colony and the current law was written.
He found both men guilty of “carnal knowledge” that was “against the order of nature.” He said the two had been “living together as husband and wife,” which “transgresses the Malawian recognized standards of propriety.”
As the judgment was translated for them from English into Chichewa, the defendants barely flinched. Then they were hastened out of a back door, escaping a taunting crowd that already was celebrating their conviction.
The couple has been in jail since Dec. 28, two days after they threw themselves an engagement party — a chinkhoswe in Chichewan — at the Blantyre lodge where Mr. Chimbalanga worked as a cook and housekeeper, referring to himself as “Auntie Tiwo” and insisting that he was a woman.
This public celebration drew dozens of uninvited guests. Some hooted and jeered, and at least one phoned a local newspaper, which published a front-page story about “gay lovebirds” partaking in “the first recorded public activity for homosexuals in the country.”
When arrested, both men gave statements to the police that were later deemed incriminating. Though a doctor testified he could find no evidence the two had committed sodomy, the magistrate said he relied on the defendants’ own words “that they used to caress each other and had anal sex for five months before going public into a chinkhoswe ceremony.”
The verdict was a disappointment to the few Malawians who had openly supported the accused. “As much as I expected a guilty verdict, I still hoped for a miracle,” said Dunker Kamba, the administrator for the Center for the Development of People, a group that provides counseling about AIDS.
Undule Mwakasungula, the head of a human rights group, called the verdict another sign of the country’s rejection of what is commonly referred to in Malawi as “gayism.” He said, “We can’t keep denying that we have gay people in Malawi and that they deserve to be treated with understanding and justice.”
Mr. Monjeza grew up in the outskirts of Blantyre. His relatives repeatedly have said they feel disgraced and would never welcome him back.
Mr. Chimbalanga was raised in a small village beyond the huge tea plantations that dominate Thyolo district, 40 miles from Blantyre. His uncle, the village headman, banished him in his teenage years, but his five siblings remained loyal, thinking their brother “bewitched,” especially after he insisted he was really a woman in a man’s body.
At the end of Tuesday’s court proceedings, the magistrate asked lawyers from both sides if they had anything to offer that might sway the sentencing.
Mauya Msuku, a lawyer for the defense, said the gay couple suffered from “gender disorientation” and would benefit far more from forgiveness and counseling than “placing them with hardcore criminals.”
Speaking for the prosecution, however, Barbara Mchenga urged the magistrate to “consider the scar this offense will leave on our morality. The two showed no remorse and were somehow proud of what they did.”
Gift Trapence, director of the Centre for the Development of People, said: “I am not convinced of the conviction. Human rights have been trodden upon.”
Undule Mwakasungura, head of the Centre for Human Rights and Rehabilitation, said the conviction showed Malawi was not “accommodating on issues of human rights”. “We have been let down. Homosexuality is both a human rights and public health issue. Gays need to find a strategy to challenge … for a policy and legal framework that would allow them to operate as a minority group in Malawi.”
Richard Brigden, a legal consultant with the Southern African Litigation Centre, said the conviction was a “major tragedy for all Malawians who will now not be able to fight for human rights”. The judgment would make it difficult for people to fight for the rights of minority groups such as gays, he added. “The trial does not afford people protection and freedoms.”
Brigden said Malawi’s estimated 10,000 homosexuals would be unable to seek help to tackle HIV/Aids because they were unrecognised and would continue to live in fear.
Church leaders in Malawi have backed the government, saying homosexuality is “sinful” and the west should not use its financial power to force Malawi to accept homosexuality. Malawi relies on donors for 40% of its development budget.
Gay sex remains illegal in 37 countries in Africa and is widely vilified. There are fears that the Malawi judgment could set a precedent for other governments eager to crack down on increasingly assertive liberation movements.
Here is the telephone number to the embassy of the Republic of Malawi in Washington DC; 202-721-0270. Their email address is info@malawiembassy-dc.org . Please call them and send them an email telling them how you feel. If you live outside the United States please send an email to their embassy in your country. They need to hear from all of us!
