Otherwise, prospective adoptive parents may be single, married, or divorced. Same-sex couples are prohibited from adopting Swazi children. Same-sex couples are not allowed to marry. Nevertheless, LGBT groups have been critical of this approach: "To us, it sounds like holding a gun and saying your policy is not to shoot." They have argued that the only way to repeal the country's sodomy law is to go through the courts. The Minister of Justice has repeatedly said that their policy is not to prosecute consenting adults. However, Swaziland's sodomy law is in practice not enforced. The International Lesbian, Gay, Trans and Intersex Association claims that Swaziland's definition of "sodomy" is the same as South Africa's and that female same-sex sexual acts are legal. Whether these developments in South Africa had an effect on Swaziland's common law is uncertain. The remaining population consists of Africa's largest communities of European (White), Asian (Indian), and multiracial (Coloured) ancestry.īy the mid-twentieth century, "sodomy" in South Africa had been defined by its courts as "unlawful and intentional sexual relations per anum between two human males." This narrow definition left out a residual group of proscribed "unnatural sexual acts" referred to generally as "an unnatural offence", which included at a minimum those sexual acts between men that did not involve anal penetration and apparently never included sexual acts between women.
About 80 percent of South Africans are of Sub-Saharan African ancestry, divided among a variety of ethnic groups speaking different African languages, nine of which have official status. It is the southernmost country on the mainland of the Old World or the Eastern Hemisphere. South Africa is the largest country in Southern Africa and the 25th-largest country in the world by land area and, with over 57 million people, is the world's 24th-most populous nation. It is bounded to the south by 2,798 kilometres (1,739 mi) of coastline of Southern Africa stretching along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans to the north by the neighbouring countries of Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe and to the east and northeast by Mozambique and Eswatini (Swaziland) and it surrounds the enclaved country of Lesotho. South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa ( RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. Sodomy was a crime under the 1907 common law, punishable with either death or a lesser punishment at the discretion of the court. The principal source of this common law in 1907 was the common law as then applied in the Transvaal Colony, which ultimately became a part of South Africa. Laws regarding same-sex sexual actsĪccording to Section 252(1) of the Constitution of the Kingdom of Swaziland, the principles and rules of Roman-Dutch Common Law that applied to Swaziland since 22 February 1907 (as those principles and rules existed on 6 September 1968, Independence Day) are applied and enforced as the common law of Swaziland. Swaziland's first pride parade was held in June 2018. The legal and social status of between 400,000–over 2 million lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex South Africans has been influenced by a combination of traditional South African mores, colonialism, and the lingering effects of apartheid and the human rights movement that contributed to its abolition.
South Africa has a complex and diverse history regarding the human rights of LGBT people. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in South Africa have the same rights as non-LGBT people. Additionally, they face a very high rate of HIV/AIDS infections (Swaziland has the highest prevalence of HIV in the world, with reportedly 27% of the Swazi population being infected). As such, most choose to remain in the closet or move to neighbouring South Africa. LGBT people in Swaziland regularly face societal discrimination and harassment.
Activists believed that the term gay community did not accurately represent all those to whom it referred. In use since the 1990s, the term is an adaptation of the initialism LGB, which was used to replace the term gay in reference to the LGBT community beginning in the mid-to-late 1980s. LGBT, or GLBT, is an initialism that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender.