Malawi couple keep low profile after pardon

(Blantyre, Malawi) A couple from Malawi have kept out of the public eye after being pardoned and freed from prison, in what a relative said Sunday was a deliberate decision prompted by the conservative view of homosexuality in the southern African country.

Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza were released late Saturday, hours after President Bingu wa Mutharika pardoned them without condition. But in giving his pardon, which he said was on “humanitarian grounds only,” Mutharika warned that homosexuality remains illegal in the conservative southern African country.

Activists said late Saturday that they were searching for a safe house for the couple, fearing they could be attacked upon release.

The couple’s lawyer, Mauya Msuku, said he had not seen either of them since their release.

Maxwell Manda also said he had not seen Chimbalanga, who identifies as female and is related to Manda, on Sunday. He told The Associated Press days earlier that Chimbalanga wanted to leave Malawi upon her release.

“We heard that they were released but we don’t know where they are,” he told The AP on Sunday. “They are neither at their home in (a Blantyre suburb) or their villages. But I know they are keeping a low profile deliberately because of the sensitivity of their case.”

The two were not at their Blantyre home when an Associated Press reporter visited Sunday morning.

Malawi had faced international condemnation for the conviction and harsh sentence given to the couple, who were arrested in December, a day after celebrating their engagement.

Malawi is among 37 African countries with anti-gay laws, and strong attitudes against homosexuality.

A judge convicted and sentenced Chimbalanga and Monjeza earlier this month on charges of unnatural acts and gross indecency under colonial-era laws. Crowds of Malawians had heckled the two during court hearings, with some saying that 14 years at hard labor – the harshest possible sentence – was not long enough.

Their release was welcomed by the U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, international rights groups and the White House.

In Washington, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs praised the move, urging an end to “the persecution and criminalization” of sexual orientation and gender identity.

Malawi couple keep low profile after pardon

Activists said late Saturday that they were searching for a safe house for the couple, fearing they could be attacked upon release.

The couple’s lawyer, Mauya Msuku, said he had not seen either of them since their release.

The two were not at their Blantyre home when an Associated Press reporter visited Sunday morning.

Malawi had faced international condemnation for the conviction and harsh sentence given to the couple, who were arrested in December, a day after celebrating their engagement.

Malawi is among 37 African countries with anti-gay laws, and strong attitudes against homosexuality.

Their release was welcomed by the U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, international rights groups and the White House.

In Washington, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs praised the move, urging an end to “the persecution and criminalization” of sexual orientation and gender identity.

Vatican does U-turn to praise Oscar Wilde

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Oscar Wilde once said, ‘We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars’ and in a heavenly way the gay playwright found praise today from an unlikely source – the Vatican.

In its second U-turn in a week, the official mouthpiece of Pope Benedict XVI, L’Osservatore Romano, wrote that he was a man ‘always looking for the beautiful and the good but also for God’.

It also added that: ‘Wilde was a fortunate man, as more than 100 years after his death his works had not been forgotten and continue to fly off the shelves.’

The eulogy comes just days after the Vatican changed its stance to give its approval to JK Rowling’s Harry Potter – who it had once described as the ‘wrong kind of hero’.

Wilde, who converted to Roman Catholicism as he lay dying in a Paris hotel bed in 1900, served two years in prison for acts of gross indecency with men, and his behaviour shocked strait-laced Victorian England.

Given his homosexual tendencies and the Catholic Church’s strict view of homosexuality, the fact that it had now embraced him was all the more surprising.

The article praising the Irish-born writer was headlined ‘When Oscar Wilde met Pius IX’ and was a review of a new book on him called ‘A Portrait of Oscar Widle’ by Italian author Paolo Gulisano.

L’Osservatore Romano wrote: ‘Oscar Wilde was a man constantly looking for the beautiful and the good, but also for a God that he never challenged, respected and who he fully embraced after his dramatic experience of jail, concluding with his communion in the Catholic Church.’

Monda also noted how Dublin-born Wilde had said that ‘Catholicism was the only religion to die in’ and also recalled his little remembered audience with Pope Pius IX in 1877.

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