A Hijacking: The Opportunism Behind Calls to Boycott Johannesburg Pride

True solidarity starts in Africa — confronting the laws, hate, and hypocrisy that still criminalize and kill our own - rendering boycott foolish, cruel and counter-productive.

By Melanie Nathan, Oct 22, 2025

Johannesburg Pride, Africa’s oldest Pride celebration, is under attack, not from the usual homophobes or politicians, but from local activists. Several organizations are calling for a boycott of this year’s Pride because one of its sponsors, Amazon, is accused of supporting Israel. They claim that Pride is being “rainbow-washed” and “corporatized.” It is a familiar, cynical game — a politics of moral posturing that trades on outrage while ignoring the brutal realities faced by LGBTQI+ Africans across this continent.

Kaye Ally, Johannesburg pride

The Hypocrisy of Imported Agendas

The current call to boycott Johannesburg Pride, on the basis that it accepts corporate sponsorship from companies accused of links to Israel, reflects an opportunistic hypocrisy. It betrays the very values of solidarity, intersectionality, and liberation that Pride stands for.

Those shouting “boycott” claim moral superiority by invoking Palestinian “solidarity with the oppressed.” Yet, as Kaye Ally, one leads Johannesburg Pride with courage and conviction, pointed out, some of these same groups turn a blind eye to the regions and movements that criminalize, persecute, and execute LGBTQI+ people.

They invoke “liberation” while aligning with organizations that have harbored or refused to disavow figures who openly call for the death of queer people. That is not solidarity. It is betrayal dressed up as activism.

When a South African movement that still battles corrective rape, hate crimes, xenophobic violence, and state neglect is told to redirect its protest toward global geopolitical debates, we must ask, who benefits from this deflection? Certainly not the queer refugees fleeing Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act, Ghana’s “Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights” Bill, or Nigeria’s Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act.

Many of these refugees are languishing right now in South Africa, denied status by a corrupt asylum system, scapegoated by xenophobic mobs, and left without shelter or protection. Where are the “boycott” voices when those bodies are brutalized in their own streets?

Pride’s Purpose Is Local Liberation

Johannesburg Pride has always stood for the visibility, safety, and empowerment of queer people in South Africa, a country where visibility can still get you killed. Corporate sponsors like Amazon make it possible to create that visible, secure space. Pride is not a purity test for global politics. It is a protest, a community event, and a declaration of existence in a society where many still wish we did not exist at all.

Let us not pretend that “boycotting Pride” is a moral stance. It is a luxury position, possible only for those insulated from the daily terror experienced by lesbians in townships, by trans women denied healthcare, or by queer migrants begging on streets or locked in detention.

To conflate corporate partnerships with complicity in foreign wars is a grotesque distortion of what Pride represents. Pride is not the forum for geopolitical proxy battles; it is a fight for survival and de facto equality in South Africa, where the Constitution’s promise remains not only unfulfilled, but sonehwat battered and bruised.

A Call for Integrity and Courage

Kaye Ally said it best: “Johannesburg Pride stands for queer visibility and self-determination. We will not be used as pawns in anybody else’s political debate.”

That statement should resonate with every South African who remembers that Pride began as an act of defiance, not division. Those who now seek to hijack it for ideological gain are repeating the oldest colonial pattern: using imported narratives to fracture African agency and distract from the real oppressors within, in effect rendering them complicit with those who seek the demise of Queer!

True solidarity means standing with all who suffer oppression, including Palestinians, but not by aligning with those who uphold or excuse Sharia laws and death penalties for queer people. Solidarity cannot be selective. Liberation cannot be conditional.

Reclaiming the True Spirit of Pride

As a human-rights advocate who works daily with displaced LGBTQI+ Africans, mostly Muslim, I have seen how South Africa’s failure to protect queer asylum seekers mirrors the continent’s wider crisis. This is where our outrage belongs. This is where our fight must remain focused.

If we abandon our own communities to perform ill-fitting, contradictory, and borrowed outrage, we lose both integrity and impact. Johannesburg Pride deserves not condemnation, but solidarity — solidarity rooted in the struggle for justice at home, and on the Continent.

Let Pride be Pride, unapologetic, inclusive, defiant, and free from the opportunism of those who confuse moral theater with moral action. Melanie Nathan, directs African Human rights Coalition and is a country conditions expert witness in the U.S. and Global Immigration Courts for LGBTQI+ Asylum seekers from 20 African countries. Commissionermnathan@gmail.com

SEE KAYE ALLY'S VIDEO MESSAGE: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/17b2Yh8vDr/ READ MAMBA ONLINE : https://www.mambaonline.com/2025/10/21/johannesburg-pride-responds-to-boycott-call/