NEWS Mugabe gay hate campaign spawns rampant blackmail of gays October 29, 1998 HARARE - Tendai is a big, heavily built 25-year-old black Zimbabwean gay who found himself being blackmailed last year by a former lover who threatened to tell his wife about the affair. It was no problem for Tendai, who is now divorced and calls himself Yvonne. "I beat him up," he said. But for scores of other homosexuals in Zimbabwe, a rapidly growing industry of extortion, unleashed by President Robert Mugabe's notorious persecution of gays, makes ordinary social interaction with other men, let alone the gay penchant for "cruising" for sexual partners, fraught with danger. "If you whip up an extreme climate of homophobia and the laws are against sodomy, obviously blackmailers are going to climb on the bandwagon," said Keith Goddard, programmes manager of Zimbabwe's beleagured gay organisation, Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ). The few bars and clubs frequented by gays in Zimbabwe's bigger urban areas have drawn to them groups of young black men with deliberately cultivated camp mannerisms who declare themselves homosexual. Sex, or even an ordinary casual encounter, is followed soon by demands for money and threats of exposure and reporting to police. Zimbabwean law deals with homosexuality by making sodomy an "unnatural offence". Blackmailers usually claim they have been raped, which - if proved - can bring a jail sentence of up to seven years. "Probably one or two cases I get to hear about every week," Goddard said. "And if these are the cases that come to us, it's extremely likely there are others that carry on without us hearing about it." Zimbabwe's small, low-profile gay community was dragged into the limelight in August 1995 when authorities banned GALZ from setting up an unobtrusive stand at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair. Mugabe stunned the civilised international gathering of writers and publishers with a fire-and-brimstone execration of the "Western perversion" of homosexuality. Gays were "worse than dogs and pigs," he said, and exhorted Zimbabweans to arrest them and hand them over to police. Mugabe's rhetoric "frightened everyone very, very severely," says Goddard. But it was after the revelation in a court here in February last year that the Rev. Canaan Banana, Zimbabwe's titular state president at independence in 1980, was a predatory homosexual who forced aides into having sex with him, that the gay blackmail industry "really started to hot up," Goddard said. "People read the paper, they thought, he (Banana) is in trouble, he has money, and there are others like that," said Goddard. Ironically, his view is shared by Yunus Omeerjee, until recently the director of public prosecutions in the ministry of justice. The London-based academic journal, Social and Legal Studies, quotes him as saying that "the main effect" of Zimbabwe's laws on sodomy is the emergence of blackmail. The blackmailers are usually jobless young blacks and the victims mostly white, professional men, quite often married. "If something like this is exposed there is a strong possibility they would lose their jobs," said Goddard. "There is the family disruption, the social humiliation and the general shame." Goddard found himself the victim of a blackmail attempt in May last year, and took the courageous decision to become the first gay person in Zimbabwe to press charges against a blackmailer and force the issue into open court. But the affair has demonstrated the risks of having to rely on a police force and a judicial system where obedience to politicians can come well before the rule of law. It took a year for police to bring Goddard's charges before a magistrate. As soon as Stephen Vuma was charged, he laid counter-charges, claiming that Goddard, a physically frail professional pianist with a horror of violence, had raped him at gunpoint, three times in rapid succession on top of a piano. His case was brought to court in a matter of days. Police searched Goddard's home for the firearm alleged used in the alleged rape. They confiscated two brightly coloured water pistols. Both matters have dragged on since May with repeated postponements. Goddard's lawyer is now appealing to the high court for the matter to be resolved. A gay artist in the western city of Bulawayo, writing anonymously in GALZ's magazine, Avid Reader, said he reported an extortioner to police, but found himself being blackmailed by the policeman to whom he reported. "It turned out that my lawyer had another six clients with similar complaints against the same policeman," he wrote. Goddard tells blackmail victims "never to make a single payment to a blackmailer". If other blackmailers find out, "you will have the rest of them around you like flies". He also advises victims to call the blackmailer's bluff. They know extortion is illegal and are reluctdant to have anything to do with police. The basic rule is to be extremely careful about people they associate with. "You would have to be a complete idiot to pick up young men off the street, take them home and have sex with them," says Goddard. -Sapa-DPA