‘We see you, we love you’: Building bridges for Cape Town’s LGBTQI+ refugees
In South Africa, refugee-led organization PASSOP is working to boost the social inclusion of LGBTQI+ refugees in innovative ways. It’s not easy work, but it can be joyful.
Sport might not be the solution you first think of when contemplating the challenges facing LGBTQI+ refugees around the world. But, it’s one of the creative ways that PASSOP — an organization led in large part by forcibly displaced people in Cape Town, South Africa — is working to build bridges between the queer refugee community, other displaced people, and host community members.
PASSOP (People Against Suffering, Suppression, Oppression, and Poverty) is one of 17 remarkable organizations endorsed by UNHCR’s Refugee-led Innovation Fund in 2022. Their innovative project is implementing a series of community initiatives in Cape Town that provide sustained, positive contact between LGBTQI+ refugees and other community members.
On the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia, we’re exploring how PASSOP is changing narratives, fighting discrimination, championing diversity, and furthering social inclusion.
Understanding intersectionality
“Usually when people look at refugees, we see those people who are running away from war, that sort of thing,” says Willson Tarusarira, PASSOP’s Project Manager, who is originally from Zimbabwe. “But we don’t see certain persecution.”
PASSOP got its start in 2006, when violence against foreigners in South Africa was at its height. While the organization still provides essential services to refugees and asylum seekers — housing, legal assistance, food — they now also focus on refugees experiencing intersectional discrimination (in other words, people for whom multiple aspects of their identity expose them to overlapping forms of marginalization). This includes people forced to flee due to persecution on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
Many people PASSOP serves are from countries in southern Africa where LGBTQI+ individuals face particular challenges. When they arrive in South Africa, a country where their rights are enshrined in the constitution, their experience is nevertheless often shadowed by both xenophobia and homophobia.
Through their project supported through the Refugee-led Innovation Fund, PASSOP seeks to strengthen ties and increase understanding between Capetonians and the community of LGBTQI+ refugees.
Ethan’s story
Ethan Chigwada, PASSOP’s Community Outreach Coordinator, is a member of that community.
I’m a Zimbabwean. I ran away from home in 2014 because of my sexuality. So, for me, the only place I had in mind to come was South Africa — not because I knew someone but because I was looking for safety. I remember taking truck after truck and staying in the train station before I came to Cape Town. So, I really know what my community goes through, each and every day: the hunger, the joblessness.
Ethan situates a lot of that struggle in the lack of documentation and the fight to secure it. But, it’s also about feeling disconnected and out of place. So, PASSOP connects the displaced people they work with to services, to each other — and to the host community.
A two-way street
“In South Africa, if we want to fight xenophobia or homophobia, we cannot stand alone as refugees and say stop attacking us. They will not understand. They will say: Who are you? Where are you from? Why don’t you go back to your county?” says Victor Mdluli, PASSOP’s Executive Director. Like Ethan, Victor came to Cape Town having fled his own country, Malawi.
When he took on his current role, one of Victor’s first priorities was to engage with South African civil society organizations. This outreach resulted in strong partnerships. The next step? To interact more broadly with local communities. “We need to find a way of integrating the LGBTQI+ community into the local places where they are actually residing,” Willson notes. “Those who are from the LGBTQI+ community face a mammoth task to be there.”
With each programme, PASSOP seeks to find ways to encourage South Africans to be curious about refugees — to imaginatively engage with their experience and to see them in a new light. Ethan says:
It’s been a bumpy ride, but we’re trying each and every day to bridge that gap and bring them some fun, bring them some talks, any activity so they can be together. They’ve been opening up! Most people really don’t know why we are here, so it is also our job and my job to make them understand the reason. We really need to be patient with them, because we also expect that from them: it is a two-way street.
Competition and conversation
PASSOP leverages the power of sports to bring people together. In April, they held a netball tournament in a Cape Town township, Langa, with a team of refugees facing off against the host team, and two others from the townships of Khayelitsha and Gugulethu.
This kind of playful competition, in PASSOP’s experience, can create a greater sense of equality and respect. It also combats some of the stereotypes against the LGBTQI+ community — especially when, as in the latest tournament, they happen to win. It’s also, quite simply, fun!
“Most of the people are getting tired of sitting in workshops,” Ethan says. “They will just come and listen but there’s not much of getting to know each other. Through a netball tournament, you get people talking, sharing, and just having engagements.” Following the play, PASSOP invites a discussion based on a topic, to extend and deepen those relationships.
Focusing on the issues
Smaller focus group discussions, another element of PASSOP’s project, are an effective way of uniting people and strengthening the network, according to Victor. Most recently, their discussion focused on the situation in Uganda (where a new bill stipulating the death penalty for homosexual acts and criminalizing anyone identifying as LGBTQI+ has, after uproar, been slightly adjusted).
PASSOP has already started receiving Ugandans who have fled south. “So, we thought we should start discussing that,” Victor says. “How are we going to help, as people who are already in South Africa and as people who fled our countries because of the same situation?” The discussion was held on the day that South Africa’s queer community and allies marched against the Ugandan bill, in Pretoria and Cape Town.
That discussion, like previous ones, included only members of the LGBTQI+ refugee community. In itself, this is a powerful way of increasing the ties among that community and ensuring they have safe spaces and support networks to share and learn. Ethan notes:
Most of us are from different countries, different cultures. But we come to that focus group, with those bonds we’ve been creating, which helps us bridge the gap and also learn new cultures, new languages. It’s been a very great space to be in. Because you feel safe, you can ask anything.
But here, too, PASSOP is looking to extend a hand to their South African hosts. For the next discussion, they will be seeking to include local voices. “Sometimes, when we’re discussing some of these issues that are affecting us, we need to involve those who are part and parcel” of those issues, Victor says. “We should not leave them behind.”
Getting to know your neighbors
One way PASSOP has encouraged a great sense of identification and curiosity among host communities is by quite simply asking them to step into the shoes of newcomers to the country. At a previous event, groups of South Africans were given the name of another southern African country — say, Malawi. Victor explains: “So, their job as South Africans will be: What food do they eat in Malawi? What clothes do they wear in Malawi? What is their flag looking like? What is their language?”
Each group explores various facets of a country they don’t know much about and against whose people they might harbor some misapprehensions. Then they present their findings to a panel — wearing the garments of that country, cooking the food, performing the dances. “It’s part of helping them know other African countries,” says Victor, “and knowing why people are coming into South Africa.”
PASSOP hopes to hold another iteration of this event — an exercise in joyful celebration and radical empathy — on World Refugee Day, June 20.
The hard work of healing
The PASSOP team is hopeful about the impact the project is having and pleased with the engagement so far. Nevertheless, with funding an ever-present issue (as for so many refugee-led organizations — hence the need for mechanisms like the Refugee-led Innovation Fund) and in an unpredictable socio-political landscape, their optimism is cautious.
Victor notes the cyclical or recurrent nature of many of the challenges facing the displaced LGBTQI+ community. “Unfortunately for us, the more we feel like we are healing from those wounds and progressing, another problem comes.”
For PASSOP, the partnership struck through the Refugee-led Innovation Fund has arrived at a crucial moment. Ethan explains:
The funding is coming at a time just after COVID, when people are asking, OK what happened to PASSOP? Because our work now was more into these peak needs: food, rent, social support. But not really [so much] into the community work. So this will help us to be out there and to be visible in a way that will show: We’re still here. We see you, we love you.
Read more about the Refugee-led Innovation Fund here. You can follow PASSOP and learn more about their work on Instagram.
