A Colonial Residue: historicising Namibia’s antihomosexual rhetoric (1995–2005)

After the South West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO) delivered Namibia from their own national liberation struggle against South Africa’s apartheid in 1990, SWAPO rose to power as the ruling political party in the country. The citizens of Namibia were promised a democratic future instilled with equality, instead, they were met with a future where SWAPO leaders deployed homophobic rhetoric that varied in intensity, content and scope. Thus reflecting the mutability of political homophobia. Despite SWAPO claiming to be a liberated party ‘on principle’, the change that came in 1995, when SWAPO initiated a campaign of political homophobia suggests otherwise. In this week’s article I delve deep into the history of the LGBT community in Namibia, with specific focus on how the government responded to this marginalised group and the success of organisations such as The Rainbow Project (TRP) in supporting the LGBT community.

Across southern Africa more widely, an antihomosexual rhetoric was sweeping nations in the mid-1990s, governments such as the South West African People Organisation stormed their respective nations with this agenda. Therefore, in some ways, the political homophobia instilled by Namibian leaders fitted into the general pattern of such pronouncements and policies in this period. Political homophobia was utilised by SWAPO leaders to expel gender and sexual dissidents from official accounts of history. By using this gendered strategy to stifle political dissent, political homophobia was in turn enhancing the SWAPO leaders’ masculinist position and legacy as liberators. Given that the sole target of their public campaign were Namibia’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) movement, the extent to which SWAPO should be branded as “liberators” is worth reconsidering. It is vital that I emphasise that LGBT activists were not the only targets of this homophobic political campaign. SWAPO leaders also used this campaign as an opportunity to quel political dissent and any preempted criticism of their leadership.

Historiography about political homophobia in Namibia tends to receive an uneven scholarly attention primarily because when historians analyse the persistence of political homophobia, they fail to systematically analyse the targets, content and consequences of this gendered strategy. For instance, one strand of research centres on the historical origins of homophobia. Historians such as Marc Epprecht have pointed to the continuity between colonial, apartheid and postcolonial homophobias. That is to say that this strand of research identifies the roots of postcolonial homophobia in colonialist, apartheid and Christian discourses and practices. While the physical legacies of colonialism are allowed to continue to exist through education and politics in many African countries with no objections, Namibia’s antihomosexual rhetoric revealed some inconsistencies. SWAPO leaders made it abundantly clear that they believed homosexuality was evil, unnatural, a threat to the nation, western, unchristian, unAfrican, a colonial residue and more alarmingly, they alleged that homosexuality was evidence of the ongoing need to decolonize Namibia between the years 1995 and 2005. Unsurprisingly, homophobic discourse during these years were illogical and unstable; with the roots of homophobia in apartheid and postcolonial southern Africa stemming from assertions that only white people are homosexual and that all Africans have always been heterosexual.

The emergence of western “lesbian” and “gay” identities should be perceived as a key instigator for political homophobia. So much so, that this gendered strategy produced African nationalism and new articulations of “tradition” and “modernity”. We can glean some insight by evaluating how political homophobia was regarded as a symptom of SWAPO leaders’ growing authorianism (Lafont;Melber 2007). The argument that political homophobia is a symptom of authoritarian rule or of failing democratisation efforts is incomplete and therefore does not carry much weight. This argument erases the gendered and sexualised contours of political homophobia by ignoring how this strategy fortifies phallic masculinity. This is the background that scholars like to forget when discussing political homophobia. By subsuming this gendered strategy under other measures, some scholars tend to overlook the material consequences of homophobic discourse for sexual protestors in southern Africa.

Those who are critics of the undemocratic developments in south African countries like Namibia and Zimbabwe partly centre their arguments around the failure of national liberation movements (in this case, SWAPO) to follow through on their promises to deliver equality. As a result, political homophobia soured the independence period for LGBT Namibians, thus leaving many with no choice but to flee the country.

However, as the establishment of The Rainbow Project illustrates (which I will go into more detail about later) not all LGBT Namibians fled, despite their poor quality of life. For example, Morgan and Wieringa (2005) quoted a Namibian lesbian woman who refused to let political homophobia exile her from a nation she helped to liberate. In spite of President Sam Nujoma’s promise to deport her and others like her, this woman refused, saying:

“What if I don’t want to go anywhere? If I just want to belong here in this country, I have helped to make independent?”

Going back to the material consequences that sexual dissidents faced in southern Africa, one key place to start is the invisibility of LGBT Namibians in HIV/AIDS prevention, education and treatment campaigns, especially those administered by state agencies. The trope of masculinist practices and discourses exerted by Namibian state leaders can be fully understood by Boellstorff’s (2004) use of “homophobia” instead of “heterosexism” or “heteronormativity”. Needless to say, heterosexism and heteronormativity reproduce the structural preference for heterosexuality, gender conformity and masculinity & the marginalisation of nonheterosexualities. (Schilt and Westbrook 2009; Stein 2005).

The Rainbow Project (TRP) was an international intervention project formed in 1996 with the intention of saving and protecting Namibia ‘s LGBT community from discriminations. Their main objective had been for law reform and political related legal matters, in essence, they fought for the rights of the LGBT community. The issue with this, however, is that the community needed social and economic emancipation, since it was often the case that queer people could not secure jobs unless it was as a cleaner. Robert Lorway’s Namibia’s Rainbow Project: Gay Rights in an African Nation reveals that the concerns of LGBT activists lay in the violent reality of living in Namibia as a lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender person. Deaths by AIDS, the sexual assault of lesbians and unemployability across the community was not unheard of within the marginalised community. The effectiveness of TRP can be criticised when we take into consideration that TRP staff members neglected the real work that needed to be completed on the ground in Namibia and instead, would attend conferences in Washington D.C.

What the community needed was for TRP staff members to organise more capacity-building workshops so that the community members themselves could attend the very same international workshops as the staff. Despite being an international intervention that claimed to save and protect the LGBT community from discriminations, the Directors of TRP were often found to be dismissive when challenged on their methods. For example, in a staff meeting held at the Rossing Foundation Centre (Windhoek, Namibia) in February 2008, several drawbacks were highlighted by the Rainbow Youth (the subgroup for TRP) as many community members complained about the unemployment of queer people in Namibia. In response, the Director countered that unemployment was a problem facing the wider Namibian society, “not just LGBT people”. It is inevitable that I question how exactly TRP expected to thrive when their very own Director couldn’t recognise the intervention’s drawbacks and further conceded that the mandate of the organization wasn’t to deal with poverty or find employment for LGBT individuals. Which then leads me to question, how exactly were the LGBT community expected to accommodate the children they were responsible for? Existing as an intervention organisation seems redundant when one fails to listen to their community members’ concerns and in turn fails to produce successful solutions to combat the poor quality of life that their members experience.

Albeit being closely linked to rights discourses assembled in Europe and the U.S. there is no disputing that TRP’s education and training programs initially enabled the Rainbow Youth with the necessary tools required to recognise the many local obstacles that lay on the road to freedom. Therefore, this only strengthened their resolve and defiance, as such the Rainbow Youth gained some immediate benefits of TRP interventions despite the organisers’ unintended consequences. These methods deployed by TRP were the neoliberal rationalities of individual autonomy and personal responsibility. Hence, scholars such as Lorway have argued that TRP programs inhibited important political possibilities while also sometimes reinforcing social inequalities.

As this article should have conveyed, the Nambian government stormed the nation with the same antihomosexual rhetoric that swept across southern Africa in the mid 1990s. This provides a fuller understanding about how The Rainbow Project were allowed to neglect their community members to the extent that they did. The success of TRP should be measured by the quality of life available to LGBT Namibians, as opposed to the legal rights. History has shown us countless times that even after laws have been reinforced, they remain idle as long as society fails to put these laws into practices. Since the government themselves were driving a 10 years long homophobic rhetoric, clearly it would be too much to ask the wider public not to follow what has been precedented by the hegemony and actually support the LGBT community in Namibia.

What’s change?

Since I don’t have any keywords to focus on in this week’s article, I thought I would add a very brief subtext on the situation in Namibia today. Unfortunately, same-sex relations are criminalised in the southern Africa country, so much so that the government sees no need to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. The lack of legal rights today contextualises the ineffectiveness of The Rainbow Project for the LGBT+ in Namibia. What has been an ongoing battle for 25 years only reveals that the LGBT+ citizens of Namibia have a high tolerance and that the country is yet to achieve the ‘modernity’ that they sought in 1995. What does modernity look like when a nation fails to progress for over two decades?

Recommended Reading

• Lorway, Robert. (2014) Namibia’s Rainbow Project: Gay Rights in an African Nation