Dr. Bev Ditsie on The Jazz Standard with Brenda Sisane

Dr Bev Palesa Ditsie is a South African activist, filmmaker, writer and cultural worker whose work has connected gender, sexuality, race, memory and human rights. They were a founding member of the Gay and Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand, or GLOW, which organised South Africa’s first Pride march in 1990. In 1995, Ditsie became the first African lesbian to address the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, where they called for the recognition of discrimination based on sexual orientation as a human-rights violation. Ditsie’s film work includes Simon & I, a documentary about their relationship with activist Simon Tseko Nkoli and the history of GLOW, and Lesbians Free Everyone, which revisits the Beijing address and the continuing struggle to place lesbian lives inside the language of human rights. Their latest documentary project, Eaglette, turns toward their mother, the 1970s singer and performer Eaglette Ditsie, whose story raises difficult questions about authorship, ownership, gendered erasure and the cost of making a life in entertainment.