"I'm gonna beat you ugly! -er..." - Tracy

It's been a long time since last posted, possibly because I simply haven't had much to say about life. But over the past few weeks I've accumulated enough thoughts to actually fill an entry, so as I sit here in my family's living room, half-heartedly watching the Stormers vs the Reds in the rugby Super 14, I feel I might as well begin to write them down.

It was Freedom Day yesterday, comemorating thirteen years since Suouth Africa had its first democratic elections. Every year there're always events happing country-wide, usually to do with racial freedom. I'd never really paid much attention to it, for me it's always been a day when I didn't have class, so it's always cool. But yesterday I figured out that I actually do have something to be thankful for.

I'm a Pagan. My basis is in Wicca, but I take from so many other belief systems that it's hard to classify me under any specific one. I've always been able to practice my beliefs, to stand up and say, "I'm a witch," without any fear of retribution. Buty of course, it hasn't always been this way. Before democracy, there were anti-witchcraft laws in this country, laws both condemning and prohibiting even mention of its practices. After the first elections and the adoption of a new constitution which allowed for complete religious freedom, Pagans everywhere were able to completely step out from the broom closet.

So yesterday, Spiral, who runs the FireFly news letter and Pagan networking group, as well as the website www.lizardstead.co.za, hosted the fourth annual Pagan Freedom Day at Delta Park environmental centre. There were hundreds of us, looking at the various stalls, where you could buy anythjing from swords, to robes, to pentacles, to bumper stickers, visiting fortune tellers (everything from tarot-readers, to psychics, and even a Sangoma). There were workshops on working magic and talks on South African Paganism and what it means to be a witch. Afterwards, several of us held and informal healing circle where, after which everything looked blue for about ten minutes. It was wonderful, a whole bunch of us just sitting around and being with one another, just being ourselves and learning new ways of doing things in a way that would have been impossible twenty years ago.

It was a truly wonderful day. It was nice to realise that even I have something to be thankful for on that day.

And it got me thinking, wondering, what else I had to clebrate, and it led me to another inportant part of my life - my sexuality, my being a lesbian. Until 1994, it was illegal to be gay. At least, for men it was. No one really thought about lesbians, I guess. But then came the new constitution, the first in the world to specifically condemn descrimination on the grounds of sexuality. This meant that people were now free to love whoever they wanted without fear of retribution from the law (although there were many cases wherethe conservative were against us - though they were now the ones who could be prosecuted!). Over the course of the last few years, several laws have been passed allowing more and more privaledges to homosexuals, the latest of which being the right to marry. This makes South Africa the first country in Africa and the fifth in the world to pass this law.

And none of this would have been possible without democracy, without the scarifices made during apartheid. So I have many things to be thankful for.

And even though there are still thousands of racists, homophobes and people who hate Pagans and call us satanists for wearing our pentacles, they are becoming a dying breed slowly but surely. Maybe in the next thirteen years, there will be true freedom.

P.S. It looks like the Stormers are going to beat the Reds. YAY. At least one South African team is doing well, people don't even want to think about the SA vs Australia cricket match in the world cup semis.