The Muslims who will not choose
Cape Town’s gay men won’t abandon Islam, despite the censure they sometimes face
Bearded and dressed in a thawb and kufiah, Mogamat Benjamin is, in appearance at least, much like any other Muslim man. His eye-catching walking stick, covered in tiny, shiny blue-and-pink flowers, however, hints at something different — the time when, competing in drag beauty pageants, he was better known under his stage name, Kafunta.
Sitting at a coffee shop a little more than a block away from Cape Town’s District Six Museum, the 61-year-old says he took the name from one of his favourite singers, PP Arnold’s 1968 album.
“You know her records?” he asks. Not waiting for a response, he whips out his phone and plays one of her songs, Letter to Bill. Smiling, he sings along to the tinny sounds of the lyrics: “I still remember the good times we had/ When we thought that life was just a game.”
It was in District Six, where he was born and raised before being evicted along with thousands of others, that Benjamin says he had many good times. “We were always three. There was Freddy, whose name was Debbie Reynolds; Saan, who was Sharon Tate and became Mandy. And of course myself, Kafunta. We were always wonderful, wonderful, wonderful together.”
The day we meet is the same day on which the Sultan of Brunei, Hassanal Bolkiah, implements a penal code, based on Sharia law, that decrees homosexuality is punishable with death by stoning.
“It’s terrible. Really sad,” Benjamin says. “These people have so much hatred in their hearts. I don’t think the world will allow them to do this, because God is the ultimate judge.”
Although the situation for queer Muslims in South Africa is far from the life-threatening one in the tiny country on the island of Borneo, judgment is something Benjamin has lived with for most of his life.
“It was difficult,” he says. “They