SIMON NKOLI
South Africa was the first country in the world to add specific LGBT+ protections to its Constitution, in part thanks to Simon Nkoli.
Born in 1957, Simon’s childhood and adolescence were spent in a South Africa still ruled by apartheid. The strict laws designated who could go where when, and were separated by race. Nkoli’s family was fragmented and scattered, and would risk everything when they made moments to see each other.
Simon himself had been sent to live with his grandparents on a white-owned farm. While there, he engaged in a pen pal system he found through a magazine. His pen pal, Roy Shepherd, would eventually become Nkoli’s lifelong romantic partner.
Simon’s mother would bring him to priests and tribal healing men to try and combat his homosexuality, but his home life wasn’t the only place Nkoli would face discrimination. His early attempts to join activist organizations like his college’s Congress of South African Students or their Gay Association of South Africa would illuminate each group’s lack of acceptance for the other part of his identity.
But Nkoli managed to remain part of the two organizations until his 1984 arrest and trial, one of the longest in South African history. GASA threw him out, so Nkoli went on to establish GLOW: the Gay and Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand.
After the country achieved independence, GLOW would be instrumental in getting those constitutional LGBT+ rights protections. Today’s activists can only strive to glow the way Simon Nkoli did.
SOURCES: Freedom Fighter, S. African History.