TsiTsi Tiripano is a pseudonym she chose in order to speak freely and have her words published without having to worry about Mugabe's government tracing the stories and retaliating. Tiripano uses it still, because it is how she is known internationally, though she no longer hides her real name, Poliyana Mangwiro. Sitting in Amnesty International's New York headquarters last March, the day before a three-week speaking tour in 11 U.S. cities, she translates the pseudonym in a soft, confident voice. "Tsitsi means 'mercy,' tiripano means 'we're here.'" She pauses. "Everyone must have mercy with gays and lesbians because we're here."
Tiripano grew up the oldest of four children in Harare, a small Shona village in Manicaland, a northern Zimbabwean province. The Shona, who make up 71 percent of Zimbabwe's population, practice polygamy and value women for their ability to procreate. Tiripano never went past the seventh grade because her father refused to pay the tuition, saying that girls are not worth the investment.
In 1982, at 15, Tiripano became the second wife to a 55 years-old man. Tiripano cried for many reasons, but leaving her girlfriend, whom she met three years before, brought the most tears. At that time, Tiripano didn't know what being gay meant. "There's a Shona word, ngochani, which means 'gay.' I remember wondering, what does an ngochani look like? He must stay in the mountains."
During her first year of marriage, Tiripano gave birth to a son but considered sex with her husband a loathsome chore, one she often refused. "I was more interested in my husband's first wife!" she says, smiling. "All the time, I was pushing to sleep with her."
Her husband complained to Tiripano's father, who forced her to see a traditional healer. "If you don't want to have sex with your husband," she says, "they think something is wrong and take you to be cured." The healer had her bathe in an herbal mixture, as if, she says, "I could wash [my lesbianism] away."
Tiripano wasn't "cured," and so, pregnant with her second son, she fled to Breaside, a small town near Harare, where she stayed with a friend and sold vegetables to feed her family. Two years later, her father tracked her down and demanded that she return to her husband. When she refused, he took the boys, a prerogative sanctioned by patriarchal customs.
"He thought I would teach them to be gay," she sighs. Ironically, Tiripano didn't even know the word "lesbian" until she met a drag queen and his boyfriend in 1988 while living in Harare. "I told them that my partner was a woman, and they said, 'So you're a lesbian?'" They gave Tiripano a GALZ pamphlet and, she says, "My head popped. I said, 'You mean, there are women like me?'"
In 1993, she became the first black woman to join Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ), then a virtually all-white and all-male organization, which is now mostly black and the nation's only gay activist group.
From 1995 to 1997, GALZ members were constantly harassed by the police, politicians, and the public. State-run newspapers refused to carry GALZ ads yet published letters from readers who denounced homosexuality as immoral. Zimbabwe's Catholic Church fanned the antigay fires when the bishop's newsletter referred to homosexuality as a "disorder." Tiripano, an ex-Catholic, rolls her eyes at that. "I used to go to church," she says, "but when they said, 'Homosexuality is condemned by God,' I said, 'Fuck off,' and stayed home."
A newly politicized Tiripano did, however, want to join activist organizations beyond GALZ, but she encountered homophobia there, too. "Other NGOs said we [GALZ members] should go to the psychiatric unit to be cured," she says. Tiripano has since joined Women in Law and Development in Africa (WiLDAF), a pan-African women's rights network. But here, too, her sexuality has become an issue.
Amnesty International named Tiripano one of 50 Human Rights Defenders in 1998. International accounts of the book fair helped Tiripano's first girlfriend, now living in Australia, contact her for the first time since they were separated almost 20 years ago. And Tiripano's sons, now 16 and 18, are beginning to understand their mother. Even though Tiripano was able to reconnect with her sons (and her father) in 1988, it was only after the 1996 book fair that she and her children could honestly discuss her sexual identity.
Despite the progress, lesbians and gays are certainly not home free. In 1998, as President Robert Mugabe's popularity hit rock bottom, he launched a new witch-hunt. Mugabe, Zimbabwe's ruler since independence, launched a vicious homophobic campaign when his government banned GALZ from Zimbabwe's International Book Fair in 1995. Calling homosexuals "sodomites and perverts," Mugabe declared gays had "no rights at all."
The state-run papers published stories about homosexuals raping men at gunpoint and claimed GALZ was a front for a brothel, which incited public rage. Several GALZ members were harassed, blackmailed, and arrested. The following year, GALZ's application to participate in the fair was again rejected, prompting the group to take the government to court. GALZ won, and Tiripano attended the book fair, distributing GALZ pamphlets even as the government filed an appeal.
While there, a throng of students pelted her and a colleague with fruit, then destroyed their stand as the police passively looked on. The next day, her photograph accompanied newspaper reports of the incident, and Tiripano was "outed." When she returned home to Marondera, an hour from the capital of Harare, another angry mob met her, waving placards and clenched fists. Tiripano was forced to retreat to the capital until the furor settled, but she soon emerged on the world stage as GALZ's most prominent ambassador, representing it at international gay rights conferences and Amnesty International-sponsored tours.
When not traveling, she's at the new GALZ center in Harare at least twice a week, counseling people who are coming to terms with their sexuality, as well as those living with HIV/AIDS. But most important, Tiripano is an inspiration. She now lives in Marondera.
