The Unfulfilled Promise of LGBTQ Rights in South Africa

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series about the gay-rights movement and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.

CAPE TOWN, South Africa—On a recent foggy morning, Ndodana boarded a minibus and traveled more than 20 miles to the Ivan Toms Centre for Men’s Health to collect his free HIV medication. The gay-friendly clinic lies in a predominantly white neighborhood of Cape Town, wedged between a strip of restaurants, upscale hotels, and the V&A Waterfront, a major tourist attraction.

The bimonthly trip is a long one and, on the surface, unnecessary: Mfuleni, the impoverished township where he rents a room, has its own HIV-treatment center. Yet to Ndodana, a slender, dreadlocked Zimbabwean in his early 30s, going there is not an option. The clinic is run-down and often overcrowded. Most of all, though, he fears harassment for being gay.

“The officials don’t do their jobs,” Ndodana, who asked that he be identified only by his first