‘Pride Belongs to the People: Images of Soweto and Ekurhuleni Pride’ (presented by Daniel Conway) documents the struggles, circumstances and demands of black LGBTQ+ activists in Soweto and Ekurhuhuleni, South Africa.
The exhibition includes pictures taken at Soweto Pride in 2018 and Ekurhuleni Pride in 2022, extracts from interviews with LGBTQ+ activists and includes a drinks reception.
Johannesburg hosted the African continent’s first Pride march in 1990. Yet Pride in Johannesburg has been the focus of controversy and division for most of the post-apartheid period, and in particular since the 2012 parade was disrupted by black lesbian and non-binary protestors. These divisions mirror broader socio-economic, spatial, and ethnic tensions in South African society, but also reflect divergent beliefs about the purpose of Pride, who it should represent, and what issues it should engage with.
Johannesburg is now a city of at least three public Pride events, Soweto Pride, Ekurhuleni Pride, and Johannesburg Pride, with none taking place in the streets of the city centre. These separate Prides have emerged out of a fraught and complex history of LGBTQ+ organising, but also reflect the distinctive geographical, social, and political contexts of the city.
Soweto Pride, organised by the Forum for the Empowerment of Women (FEW), a black queer and feminist women’s NGO aims to raise issues faced by black, LGBTQ+ South Africans, and in particular the widespread homophobic and gender-based violence faced by black lesbians from so-called ‘corrective rape’ to murder. Ekurhuleni Pride is a grassroots Pride event that seeks to highlight homophobic murders and sexual violence and in 2022 took place in the township of Wattville.
The exhibition draws from research funded by the Leverhulme Trust and is supported by the School of Social Sciences, University of Westminster’s Festival of Social Sciences.
Dr Daniel Conway is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster. He is the author of ‘Whose Lifestyle Matters at Johannesburg Pride? The Lifestylisation of LGBTQ+ Identities and the Gentrification of Activism’, Sociology, (2022), vol. 56, no. 1: pp. 148-165 and is currently writing The Global Politics of LGBTQ+ Pride: Queer Activism and Complicity in Africa, Asia and North America (Bloomsbury).