When South Africa Beat Britain
We brag about rights, yet our law lagged: South Africa protected LGBT people while Britain argued over whether they deserved protection.
Martin Taylor-White
7/15/2024
Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as South Africa’s President on 10 May 1994. Within two years, the country’s post-apartheid Constitution went further than most democracies dared: it explicitly barred unfair discrimination on the ground of sexual orientation. South Africa didn’t just “tolerate” LGBT people; it wrote equality into the spine of the new state.
Britain, meanwhile, likes to see itself as the grown-up in the room: the nation of Magna Carta, fair play, and human rights lectures to the rest of the world. Yet our record on LGBT equality is full of blind spots, long delays, and a kind of institutional smugness that mistakes “not being the worst” for being good.
Let’s be clear: the UK decriminalised sex between men earlier than South Africa did. But “legal” is not “equal”. The question is when the state stopped treating LGBT people as a problem to be managed and started treating them as citizens protected by law.
In South Africa, constitutional protection arrived in 1996. Then the Constitutional Court struck down sodomy laws in 1998, explicitly framing criminalisation as an assault on equality, dignity, and privacy. Ten years after Mandela took office, South Africa had moved from apartheid to a legal framework that recognised LGBT people as part of the national “we”.
In the UK, we were still doing something else entirely: policing the conversation. Section 28, introduced in 1988, chilled schools and councils with a simple message – don’t “promote” homosexuality. It was not fully repealed in Great Britain until 2000 in Scotland and 2003 in England and Wales. That’s not ancient history; that is within living memory for today’s adults.
Even after Section 28, the shift into formal protections was piecemeal. Discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation in employment and vocational training only became unlawful across Great Britain from 2 December 2003. Wider protections – covering goods, facilities, services, education and public functions – landed later, in April 2007. The Equality Act 2010 finally pulled much of this into one clearer framework.
Now look at the optics. South Africa legalised same-sex marriage in 2006. The UK’s first same-sex marriages in England and Wales happened in March 2014. For a country that routinely markets itself as a global template for rights and decency, that should sting.
This isn’t about “Africa good, Britain bad”. It’s about the danger of national self-flattery. We tell ourselves we are naturally fair, so we don’t notice the quiet cruelty of our own laws until someone forces us to look. We talk about other countries’ intolerance as if it’s a foreign disease, while forgetting that Britain spent years legislating silence and delay.
If Mandela’s South Africa could write sexual orientation equality into a brand-new Constitution in 1996, Britain has no excuse for pretending we “never knew” what to do. The truth is uglier: we knew, we hesitated, and we wrapped the hesitation in confidence. That arrogance is not a harmless personality trait. It is how rights get postponed – for decades – in plain sight.
Sources
South African History Online – Mandela inaugurated as President (10 May 1994):
Constitutional Court of South Africa – Section 9 (sexual orientation): https://www.concourt.org.za/index.php/8 2-gay-and-lesbian-rights/section-9-sexual-orientation/143-section-9-sexual-orientation
SAFLII – National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality v Minister of Justice (decision 9 Oct 1998): https://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZACC/1998/15.html
UK Parliament briefing RP03-54 – Employment Equality Regulations (in force from 2 Dec 2003): https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/RP03-54/RP03-54.pdf
UK legislation – Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2007 (in force 30 Apr 2007): https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2007/1263/contents/made
Equality and Human Rights Commission – Equality Act 2010 came into force 1 Oct 2010: https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/equality/equality-act-2010
Government of South Africa – Civil Union Act 17 of 2006 (commencement 30 Nov 2006): https://www.gov.za/documents/acts/civil-union-act-17-2006-17-nov-2006
UK Government Legal Department – Royal Assent 17 Jul 2013; first marriages March 2014: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/10-year-anniversary-of-the-marriage-same-sex-couples-act-2013
The National Archives – Section 28 repeal (England/Wales November 2003):