Edwin Cameron is a former judge of South Africa's highest court, the Constitutional Court. He is also currently serving as a judge in Botswana's court of appeals.
Cameron is openly gay and openly HIV positive. He was appointed to the courts after coming out as openly gay and openly HIV positive by Presidents Mandela and later Motlanthe. He grew up in poverty as an orphan, obtained a Rhodes Scholarship to study law and became an anti-Apartheid activist in the Apartheid years.
In this interview he gives his thoughts on persecution of LGBT people across the continent, as well as on other social issues in South Africa from drug decriminalisation and xenophobia.
Next year, Cape Town will host two major conferences on LGBT rights. One is the World Pride 2026. The other is the so-called Family Values conference which will see African anti-LGBT groups and their international allies assemble in Cape Town to make declarations about "protecting" the traditional family unit from LGBT people. Cameron also comments on these developments.
South Africa recently celebrated 20 years of marriage equality legislation. Cameron is a living symbol of the tolerance and rapid social progress of the post-Apartheid era. But South Africa also suffers from horrible social and socioeconomic crises and persecution, most recently of immigrants. This article will be interesting to read because it shows you how one of the most progressive and powerful people from the early years of South Africa's democracy talks about and thinks about the ongoing challenges and failures in the country.
If I am frank, the article is also interesting simply because of the fact of the man himself. If you learn about South Africa from Reddit, you would never think that the post-Apartheid 'Black government' would appoint on HIV positive, White gay man to the highest court on the land. If the US had an openly gay, openly HIV positive Supreme Court justice we would all know their name. So on some level, what is interesting about this post is simply to know who Edwin Cameron is, how he thinks, and that such a person was involved in shaping modern South Africa at the highest level.
Posted by Top_Lime1820