When two Ugandan women were hospitalised this summer after a five-week hunger strike, protesting at conditions at Yarl’s Wood, activists were enraged. Likened to a Category B prison – where CCTV cameras and heat-seeking detectors trace people’s movements – detention at Yarl’s Wood can last anywhere from a couple of days to an indefinite time. It’s a place where people have been driven to make desperate statements in a bid to draw attention to their situation.

Last month, Yarl’s Wood was the scene of yet another suicide, when Angolan immigrant Manuel Bravo decided to hang himself in a stairwell rather than risk being deported, along with his eight-year old son.

The stories that led both Lindiwe, 24, and Thando, 29, there are tragic – a litany of abuse from savage beatings, attempted suicides and gang rape. The fact that they’re now separated, after Lindiwe was released in July, makes their relationship all the more poignant.

Lindiwe was expelled from her school in Zimbabwe, aged 16, after being found having sex with another girl. In a country where homosexuality is a criminal offence and where the president openly abuses gay women and men as ‘worse than pigs and dogs’, to be outed is life-threatening.



‘There are no laws to protect [us],’ she says. ‘One time, I went with my friend to report that we’d been abused and the police said, “If you’re going to be kissing other women, it’s obvious you’re going to get beaten up”.’

After her expulsion Lindiwe found herself in a relationship with a boy: ‘I tried to act what they call “normal” – but I wasn’t happy.’

When her boyfriend discovered that she was still seeing women, he revealed Lindiwe’s secret to everyone in the village community – with disastrous consequences.

‘One night, eight or nine men came to my house. I was alone,’ she recalls. ‘I heard someone outside and opened the door, and they started shouting and abusing me. They slapped me. They were calling me a lesbian. There’s a slang word for lesbian, mgotshame; it’s like when someone is called a nigger. They said, “We’re not going to have it in the neighbourhood”, and they beat me up. I had a cut on my ear – I was bleeding, I was very hurt.’

She left Zimbabwe, making a perilous and illegal journey from Bulawayo across the border to South Africa, the first country in the world to enshrine lesbian and gay rights in its constitution.

‘When I was in Zimbabwe, people called me names, shouted at me, pushed me around, sometimes tore my clothes, threw stones at me – I can’t predict what would have happened if I’d stayed.’

Thando also fled to South Africa when her community tried to discourage her hanging around with girls. Her father called her three uncles and together they beat her with belt straps and a cord from an iron in an ordeal that lasted four hours.

In South Africa, both found themselves in limbo – avoiding police and authorities for fear of being placed in a detention centre because they were illegal immigrants. Thando asserts that claiming asylum in South Africa wasn’t an option.
‘They’ll only take people from countries where there has been a war, like the Congo or Nigeria,’ she says.

Thando didn’t have forged identification papers which many illegal immigrants purchase and, unable to get a job, to find a permanent place to live, she became a prostitute.

Despite South Africa’s pro-gay stance, both women claim they still faced intense homophobia. To escape, Thando lived with a man and eventually became pregnant and had a son. However, she was savagely beaten when he discovered she was gay – and is still unable to walk properly as a result.

Having shown public affection for another girl in Johannesburg, Lindiwe was brutally raped by a homophobic gang.
‘I was sitting outside the flat [where I lived], and another man came to me and started talking to me, pretending he wanted to ask me out. “I don’t go out with men; I prefer women”, I said. “We know; we heard from some people you’re gay”, he replied. “If you can’t sleep with men, we’re going to show you”.

‘They pushed me inside, to the back of the room,’ continues Lindiwe. ‘They started tearing my top and forcing me to sleep with them.’

Both fled to the UK where they ended up in Yarl’s Wood. Authorities tried to send Lindiwe back to Zimbabwe, using a barrage of insults at the airport – go back to a ‘black country’, she was told. In a desperate bid to escape the situation, she cut her wrists in the toilets.

‘I felt very frightened, and thought maybe it would be better to just kill myself,’ she said. While Lindiwe was eventually released from Yarl’s Wood this summer to await a hearing on her asylum claim, Thando remains because authorities believe she’s South African and not from Zimbabwe.

‘Lindiwe sends me cards and letters,’ says Thando. ‘They keep me going.’

Their situation isn’t unique, yet there’s little information to indicate exactly how many women claim asylum because of their sexuality and how many are successful.

But while the recent hanging of two teenage boys in Iran prompted a huge protest from Britain’s gay community in October, the brutal treatment of gay women in countries which outlaw homosexuality, like Uganda, Zimbabwe and Iran, receives little coverage.

The Home Office refuses to discuss individual cases and doesn’t give out details on anyone claiming asylum.
Emma Ginn from the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns, who has worked with gay asylum seekers, says: ‘I rarely have to deal with cases from lesbians – they just never cross my desk. It’s nearly always gay men. Whether this is due to the fact that lesbians aren’t claiming asylum because they’re too scared to is unclear – we just don’t know.’

Sarah Green from Amnesty International says that because lesbianism isn’t strictly outlawed in some homophobic countries which ban sodomy, UK authorities might feel that they’ll be safe when they’re returned home. ‘Quite often, people are expected to lie low and keep their heads down if they’re returned,’ she says.

Both Lindiwe and Thando must play a waiting game to see whether they’ll be allowed to stay in the UK and whether they’ll see each other again.

As Lindiwe says: ‘I don’t want to stay here forever – I’m only asking to stay until gay men and women have protection in my country. Until then, I’m not going back.’

Legal Action for Women, a UK-based grassroots anti-sexist, anti-racist legal service for all women, is currently campaigning on behalf of the detained women. For more information, contact Legal Action for Women, Crossroads Women’s Centre PO Box 287 London NW6 5QU, Tel: 020 7482 2496 minicom/voice, 07958