http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/world/africa/19malawi.html?ref=global-home">Law a holdover from British Colonialism
JOHANNESBURG — A gay couple in Malawi were found guilty on Tuesday of unnatural acts and gross indecency, the consequence of their holding an engagement ceremony in an insular nation where homosexuality is largely seen as nonexistent or something that must be suppressed.SNIP
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 Bingu 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.” SNIP
The couple have been in jail since Dec. 28, two days after they threw themselves an engagement party — a chinkhoswe in Chichewa — 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 article 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 that 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.”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.”Nice to see that suppressing homosexuality is the biggest problem facing Malawi.
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