Memory at work — choosing to remember the queer histories of South Africa

On 15 October 2025, we, at the GALA Queer Archive, came across an op-ed by Herman Lategan in Daily Maverick, critiquing the queer community and young people for not recognising its own history. Setting aside small gripes we may have with his linking to GALA materials before reaching out to us, we feel that his concerns of “Memoricide” are unfounded.

The complexity of LGBTQIA+ Pride events in Johannesburg reflect the complexity of the queer community and how we engage with remembering our history. The first Johannesburg Pride was held on 13 October 1990. Neither of us were there. Simon Nkoli led a march on the streets that we commute through daily. We, alongside so many others, sit among the proliferation of his work.  

Nkoli did not work alone, though. Alongside him were other activists such as Bev Ditsie, Phybia Dlamini, Edwin Cameron and Donné Rundle. Activists who are still alive, who remember Nkoli, and who activate his legacy in spaces with young people. We wrote this response to Lategan on the night the Wits Law Students Council and Wits Activate hosted a Queer Lawyers Night, with keynote speaker Justice Edwin Cameron (15 October 2025). Earlier that day, Rosebank College in Braamfontein hosted its own Pride event. Two events, then, were held within one square kilometre of the GALA office. The forgetting he mourns is not as total as he imagines.

The forthcoming Johannesburg Pride might not look like that first Johannesburg Pride in 1990. But it offers a space to engage with queerness in ways that were unimaginable in the past. We deserve the opportunity to celebrate, have fun and get messy – even as we remember. And while Johannesburg Pride in its current form might not be for everyone, there are many Pride events slated to occur all over the country. Several in Gauteng alone. Soweto Pride, Ekurhuleni Pride, Vaal LGBTI Pride, Pretoria Pride and numerous university-based Prides. Some might be small in numbers, but they are impactful for the groups that they serve and showcase the growing visibility and mobilisation of the contemporary queer community. 

On 26 September, the Forum for the Empowerment of Women held its 21st Soweto Pride protest. The central feature of the march was the Bring Your Father to Pride campaign spearheaded by PFSAQ (Parents, Families and Friends of South African Queers). A cohort of Zulu men came out in support, calling on the fathers, uncles and brothers of queer people in Gauteng to protect their children. This comes a week before Ngizwe Mchunu led a crowd of Zulu men wielding sjamboks, attempting to evacuate queer people from the Kwa Mai Mai Market. 

The proximity of these two engagements makes it clear that, although it may not be illegal anymore, holding hands in public remains a defiant and dangerous act. Queer visibility still carries risk; it is simply a different kind of risk than what Lategan remembers.

The recent funding cuts to USAID have meant that queer people who cannot afford private healthcare have to reckon with South Africa’s overburdened public health sector to access HIV/Aids prevention medication and the gender-affirming hormones. These daily confrontations with precarity are also forms of remembering. Remembering what it means to fight. To exist.

We may not know the terror of police raids on discos or the names printed in newspapers, but we know the fear of “Grindr gangs”, of entrapment through digital screens, of friends who vanish after meeting strangers. We share warnings in WhatsApp groups, gather outside courtrooms to demand justice, and build our own archives of survival. We remember differently, because the danger looks different.

As we continue to fight for justice for the queer people who have been murdered, abused and discriminated against in our own country (still no justice for Imam Muhsin Hendricks?), we stand in solidarity with our siblings across the continent. Currently, queer activists across the world are mourning the death of Jholerina Timbo, a Namibian trans activist, mobilising to raise funds for her funeral. We watched in fury as President Cyril Ramaphosa awarded Yoweri Museveni the Order of South Africa medal a month before Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill was passed in 2023 – a law that the Ugandan constitutional court upheld in 2024, cementing harsher criminal penalties for queer people. So yes, while it may no longer be illegal to be gay in South Africa, it is still dangerous to be queer. And across much of the continent, still criminal.

We take exception to Lategan’s claim that the utterance of Nkoli’s name is fading. Just last year, Nomancotsho Pakade contributed the text, Simon Nkoli’s Practices of Freedom, in the publication Wondering Hand(s) and Spirited In: Snapshots into the Black Public Humanities. Pakade is also co-founder of the Simon Nkoli Collective, which maintained a relationship with Nkoli’s mother and her queer activism until her passing last year. That too is remembering. It just does not take place in the bars and beaches Lategan longs for.

And speaking of beaches, Lategan mourns Graaff’s Pool and the “gay ghetto” in Green Point, but says little of Langa, Nyanga or Khayelitsha. Where, we might ask, is his memory of those places? Who does he see when he thinks of a queer Cape Town? Memory is not erased only by forgetting, it is also distorted by whose stories we choose to recall.

Nkoli: The Vogue Opera is testament to the remembering that is happening. There is defiant, bold and challenging memory work alive in our time. 

There are numerous social media accounts, influencers and organisations sharing stories and histories of queerness in South Africa, such as @siyafanafana, who curates thoughtful and detailed sharing of content that links the past and the present.

There is remembering happening in contemporary art. The After Library, a project by Thulile Gamedze, features a garment inspired by the history of Pride in South Africa and the art of Peter Clarke. The project considers the very embodiment and activation of memory, through thrifted garments and embroidered memories. It considers the intimacy that one can have with a history they weren’t there for.  

It is not the underlying conceit of Lategan’s article that we contest, though. We support more remembering, in all the forms this may take. But let’s also ask: who decides on what pasts are preserved? Public remembering requires work; it is considered, intentional, messy and ongoing. But ironically, as Lategan scolds us for not doing better by our forebears, his accusation refuses to acknowledge the work, effort and remembering that is happening now – in our art, our marches, our vigils, our hashtags, our laughter. 

There is indeed a lot of forgetting happening. It is happening in violent and heartbreaking ways. The deaths of queer activists whose lives and stories have not yet been recorded or appreciated are failures of collective memory. Nkoli’s legacy lives on indefinitely, and we are grateful for it. But it is the Ayanda Denges, Leah Davids, Nare Mphelas, Sinky Mashininis and Generous Mirembes – the names not yet carved into marble edifices or university syllabuses – that we worry about forgetting. And it is in remembering them too that our queerness remains radical.

So, while we respect and appreciate the histories and queer utopias Lategan laments, we would like to caution against the nostalgia held in one person’s memory. The queers are sprawling and diverse within our own acronym, and speaking to or about them without meaningfully engaging with them creates only a shallow image of the present situation. We would like to emphasise that the histories and memories held by this community are as sprawling and complex. 

Mr Lategan, we would like to reassure you,