Locating Sexual Rights in the Anti-apartheid Movement: Simon Nkoli and the Making of Post-apartheid Protest Theatre

While the anti-apartheid movement was in many ways one of the moral flagbearers of the global human rights project of the 1980s, its initial heteronormative impulses point to gaps in its conceptualisation of rights. This article offers a close reading of Robert Colman's Your Loving Simon (2003), a stage drama that examines the contested place of sexuality within discourses of the liberation movement. The play focuses on the imprisonment of Simon Nkoli, a leading gay rights and anti-apartheid activist. Through an analysis of Colman's drama, this article reflects on the anti-apartheid movement's shift towards a more inclusive understanding of human rights that recognises the overlaps between racism and heteronormativity. Throughout the study, however, the analysis returns to the politics of representation, problematising Colman's use of an apartheid-era protest theatre aesthetic in a post-apartheid context. The article argues that the play appears to be simultaneously progressive and regressive: while its content reintroduces into circulation a largely forgotten history, its literary aesthetic harks back to a strategic essentialism that seems out of place in post-apartheid literature.