Nerve-wrecked and excited would probably be the best delineation of how I felt when I first met Bev Ditsie on a very chilled Sunday morning in the artsy suburb of Melville. I recall watching a documentary in high school called “Simon and I” and feeling a sense of belonging when I finally saw a story that depicted a similar existence to mine. I had always imagined what it would be like to meet with Bev; to me it was pretty much like one of those moments where many of us have longed to meet our most influential leaders in the world – this for me (as an Activist) was a dream that came true.
I think for me there was great sense of clarity personally when we initially spoke about Bev being a youth activist. She made me aware how innate her activism was; growing up as a little girl she was prone to many a hidings due to her unending personality to question and her need to understand why in most circumstances no one reacted when it was evidently wrong for certain things to have occurred. She recollected growing up in the apartheid era and witnessing the injustices of the regime when she would walk in town with her mother who was a performer and a singer and would question why they were never allowed to go into certain places. Bitter-sweet memories she reminisced about and she candidly admitted that her biggest problem as a little girl is that she asked too much.
Currently recognised as a filmmaker she took me on a journey of when her art or love for art initiated. At a very early age she did a lot of acting and voiceovers but concurrently was encountering a lot of personal issues as largely she would be cast as a boy. Bev grew up believing she would become a boy – conflicted and confused she would every now and then ask her neighbour and friend to check if she had transformed into a boy round about the age of ten. She grew up in a very maternal home with her mother, aunts and grandmother and so she never really had any frame of reference as to what it entailed to be a boy physically. Devastated was Bev when her friend informed her that her body looked nothing like of a boy and that brought up many conflictions within her as she did not understand who she really was relative to her expectations to become a boy.
Her issues around sexuality really began in her teens when she realised her attraction for other girls. This was probably the most depressing time of her life because she could not fathom how she would live in light of perceived societal norms. Meeting up with other homosexual people at the ages of 14/15 was really what transformed her life. She reminisced about her first PRIDE march which she described as an occasion where seven or eight of her and her peers flamboyantly walked down the street which set tongues wagging as everyone they passed would ask with astonishment whether they were male or female. There was no political history to what they were doing, they were simply just being. She shared her memories of her sixteen celebration where her neighbourhood saw, for the first time, such a large number of gay people in her township in a common area. That was testimony to her family and her neighbourhood that indeed gay people existed.
Things became politicised when Bev and her friends attended their first GLOW (Gay and Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand) meeting when they had heard about an activist called Simon Nkoli who had just come out of prison who was bringing people together for an address. All they knew at that time is that they were being discriminated against because everywhere they went they would be pushed around and harassed. She described her first GLOW meeting as an encounter that put everything she had wanted to know about into context and not just from a sexual orientation point of view only but from a racial standpoint in light of the country’s political standing. The first GLOW meeting blew Bev Ditsie’s mind, she would be fighting for Human Rights on all fronts. Her journey with GLOW was the beginning of her political journey with queer politics, with woman politics and with human rights politics.
We spoke about Bev’s current activism which she drives through media and film. She is currently working on films and documentaries as well as working on her second draft of her book which she is going to publish as well as launch in 2013. The book is biographical in nature but it also addresses many issues around gender, sexuality and human rights. She spoke about her concerns at the lack of urgency from the LGBT community itself when it came to actually acting and standing up for ourselves as a community. When freedom was achieved and a new constitution was adopted she expressed her concerns at how relaxed we became as a society when everyone believed we had finally achieved what we had all been longing for; however that was the beginning of embarking on a journey to actually working towards being free. In light of the LGBT community other pertinent issues arose where largely everything seemed to focus more on the liberation of male homosexuals however she was fighting for spaces that also catered for women and most importantly black lesbians.
Her concerns rose when she attended a workshop in PTA where there was a mandate for police to protect homosexuals largely in “white” areas by a certain organisation and when she questioned the protection of homosexuals in townships she realised that initially we were all fighting for one goal; however, post 1996 the whole “struggle” would seem to benefit a small minority and would exclude everyone else who did not fit within that ambit. The whole “struggle” clearly seemed to have been for the white gay man to fit within the status quo. In essence the whole idea was not to change the status quo it was rather for white gay men to fit into the normal state of affairs. Organisations that existed before GLOW such as the Gay Association of South Africa which had refused to support people like Simon Nkoli because they viewed him as a terrorist really wanted to be a part of the normal state of affairs within the country and they have achieved that.
This took us to the talk of what happened at JHB PRIDE in October 2012. Everything that happened was of no surprise to Bev. The white LGBT community really has everything to celebrate however the rest of the LGBT community will continue to march. The reality is that we are separate and our attempts as a people to even try boycott JHB PRIDE will merely be a drop in the ocean because in truth we have never been a part of the focus of JHB PRIDE she stated. Bev asked me a very pertinent question as a woman, a lesbian and an activist in light of the many issues we encounter on a day to day basis what exactly it is we are doing as a people. She made it crystal clear that another march to parliament or anywhere else would do absolutely nothing to evoke any change. “What are we doing?” she asked me so many times. Her biggest gripe with the LGBT community is how much we do not love ourselves as lesbians or each other and most importantly expressed her concerns about the double standards we have as lesbians - the hate and the disrespect for ourselves is a big issue for her. I asked Bev if she still considered herself an activist in this day and age. Her whole existence is activism, her work in media and the fact that she has never hidden her sexuality is her activism she said.
The one thing Bev would really love to do before she dies is to change the media in South Africa. Her greatest love is history and her greatest fear is that there is great potential to repeat our history as a country because of how we refuse to acknowledge our history in our media. She would love to make programming that makes sense and is relevant to who we are. As an artist Bev is really concerned of how artists are treated in this country. She believes that a country without art is a country without direction.
There were so many things we spoke about with Bev which I personally will hold near and dear to my heart. This was the most profound homosexual chat I have ever had. The relevance of knowing who we are, the significance of loving who we are and acknowledging who are as a people are some of the things that are of the utmost importance. She made reference to Steve Biko, my heart, who had once stated that there will come a time where we are in celebration of the foreign worlds. The importance of growing our own minds is probably one of the greatest cautions I took from Bev. I count myself lucky to have met one of the many people who have inspired me in my lifetime. I think it would be a lovely story to tell my children one day about the day I spent with the first South African black woman to have ever publicly come out and proudly said they are lesbian so that today I can safely claim that too and proudly stand up and not fear being black and gay.
B y Kutlwano Khali
Bev Ditsie - "My activism is borne of my love for my people. All my people!"