Namibia News Reports

July 11, 2000

by Tangeni Amupadhi
Windhoek, Namibia - A fire gutted the office of the Sister Namibia magazine yesterday, prompting the editor of the publication to blame gay bashers. The fire was discovered yesterday morning in the Sister Namibia Windhoek office on Nelson Mandela Avenue. It had already burnt most files and research material before fire fighters could extinguish it.

Sister Namibia is an organisation that campaigns for women's rights and gender equality. Liz Frank, editor of the magazine, said somebody broke into the office in the early hours of yesterday and set fire to bookshelves before closing the door, resulting in the gutting of the room where the magazine is published. Frank ruled out the possibly that electricity might have caused the fire, saying that the corner where the electrical appliances were standing did not burn. Computers, blackened by smoke, were still switched on after firefighters had killed the fire.

"Maybe we are being targeted because we are a human rights organization [dealing with gay issues]," said Frank. "I don't think the President [Sam Nujoma] and those who speak out [against gays and lesbians] realize that other people turn violent when they these statements," she added.

President Nujoma has said on numerous occasions that homosexuality is unacceptable and has criticised gays and lesbians as unAfrican and ungodly. Frank said three gay men were beaten up by people in Rescue 911 vehicles and charges were laid on the night of the same day last month that Nujoma verbally attacked gays and lesbians at a memorial for late Swapo leader Nathaniel Maxuilili at Walvis Bay. A Rescue 911 spokesperson confirmed the incident but could not give details.

The amount of goods destroyed by the fire has not yet been estimated, but Frank said work on the magazine had been delayed. She ruled out the possibility that insiders were involved. Another employee of the publication, who was the first person to get into the building, said the alarm was not on.

2
Pandemonium in Namibian Parliament

October 2000

Homophobic members of Parliament from the ruling Swapo party continuously disrupted proceedings in Namibia's National Assembly Oct. 31 to delay debate on creation of the African Court on Human and People's Rights.

The outbreak began when MP Rosa Namises noted that gays and lesbians have been under attack from Namibian authorities. "As far as I know, sodomy is still a crime in this country," shouted MP Jerry Ekandjo.

In October at a police academy graduation ceremony, Ekandjo, who is also the minister of home affairs, told 700 new police officers: "We must make sure we eliminate them [gays] and lesbians] from the face of Namibia. [The] constitution does not guarantee rights for gays and lesbians."

Deputy Home Affairs Minister Jeremiah Nambinga has said: "Homosexuality is evil. Homosexuality is anti-social and should not only be condemned but should also be legislated against. Homosexuals are patients of psychological and biological deviations." Namibian President Sam Nujoma has said: "Those who are practicing homosexuality in Namibia are destroying the nation....Homosexuals must be condemned and rejected in our society."

Minneapolis Star Tribune, Minneapolis, MN, ( http://www.startribune.com/ )

December 21, 2000

3
Hard times for Gay Dogs in Namibia

In October, Jerry Ekandjo, Namibia's home affairs minister, told police academy graduates in the capital city of Windhoek that constables must "eliminate [gays and lesbians] from the face of Namibia" and must also kill any "gay dog" that belonged to a gay or lesbian. (George Stephens Finley, 58, was convicted in June in Ocala, Fla., of killing his male poodle-Yorkie because he thought it was gay; it had become very playful with the other male family dog.)

Daily Dispatch, http://www.dispatch.co.za/

March 22, 2001

4
Gay Rights Challenge to Nujoma

Windhoek, Namibia A Namibian gay rights coalition challenged President Sam Nujoma yesterday to state under which laws gays and lesbians could be prosecuted, after remarks against homosexuals he made earlier this week. "Nowhere does our constitution state that gay and lesbian people are not members of the human family and therefore do not enjoy the same rights as all other citizens," said a spokesperson for the Rainbow Project coalition, Ian Swartz.

"We would also like to know whether the president has made arrangements with the prison authorities to accommodate some 10 percent of the population." Swartz demanded to know whether Namibia had made deals with other countries for the deportation of its homosexual population.

Nujoma told university students earlier this week the constitution did not allow for homosexual practices and called on police to arrest, imprison and deport gays. "The Republic of Namibia does not allow homosexuality, lesbianism here. Police are ordered to arrest you, and deport you and imprison you," Nujoma said at the University of Namibia.

Swartz responded that Namibia's constitution forbade any discrimination based on individual differences and it did not exclude the rights of sexual minorities. The South West Africa People's Organisation claims homosexual practices result from foreign influences. But those contesting this point out nearly all indigenous languages, including Oshiwambo spoken by most Swapo supporters, have a word for homosexuals.

Over the past few years, Swapo's conservative culture has repeatedly been at odds with the civil rights enshrined in the constitution. Prime Minister Hage Geingob was forced to explain to parliament last year that Home Affairs Minister Jerry Ekandjo's call to police recruits to "eliminate" gays and lesbians from Namibia was made in Ekandjo's private capacity. -- Sapa-AFP

Wall Street Journal, 200 Liberty Street, New York, NY, 10281
(http://www.wsj.com )

5
Another African Epidemic

March 26, 2001

Add another item to the list of Africa's woes: state-sanctioned gay bashing. Last week, Namibian President Sam Nujoma ordered his police to "arrest, deport and imprison" homosexuals. This follows on recent comments by other African leaders that homosexuals are a "scourge" (Kenya's Daniel arap Moi), and "lower than pigs and dogs" (Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe).

Similar vitriol from Zambia and especially Uganda. "I have told the [police] to look for homosexuals, lock them up and charge them," said Yoweri Museveni, the newly re-elected leader of that country. The subtext of these attacks is sub-Saharan Africa's skyrocketing HIV-infection rates. In South Africa, an estimated one in eight adults is HIV-positive; in Namibia, Zimbabwe and Zambia the figure is closer to one in five.

By contrast, the HIV infection rate among adults in the U.S. was never more than about 0.3%, and most of the infected now have access to life-prolonging medication. For Africa's failed leaders, blaming a national catastrophe on a minority is certainly convenient. It is also totally misleading. While HIV infection in the West is in fact a largely homosexual phenomenon (notwithstanding politically correct scaremongering that heterosexuals were equally at risk), in Africa the reverse holds.

Why? First, because the prevalence of other venereal diseases in the population tends to increase the risk of HIV infection. And second, because prostitution and solicitation, through which the disease is quickly disseminated, remains disturbingly commonplace in Africa. In other words, AIDS in Africa is not a "gay disease," and targeting homosexuals for attack, aside from being odious in itself, only distracts attention from the real sources of the problem.

These are manifold, but perhaps chief among them is the frightful poverty into which African leaders have led their people through decades of corruption and incompetence. Mr. Mugabe -- recently welcomed by Europe's ever-cynical heads of state -- is perhaps the worst offender, having gone to war against Zimbabwe's law-abiding and productive white farmers. But Mr. Nujoma isn't far behind; among other things, he maintains a force of 2,000 soldiers at war in the Congo, despite a declining economy at home.

Recently, too, the government of this erstwhile national liberator has been making threatening noises against independent media and other nongovernmental organizations. One would wish that some day African leaders will eschew the politics of scapegoating, be it against their former colonizers, multinational corporations, nonblack minorities, and so on.

Alas, this latest attack on homosexuals -- along with the current demonization of pharmaceutical corporations -- gives little reason to hope. Meanwhile, perhaps this latest episode of African gay bashing will serve as notice to campus "multiculturalists" and other fashionable purveyors of anti-Western cliches that the enemy, after all, is not us.

The Gully
http://www.thegully.com/essays/africa/010327gay_na.html)

March 28, 2001

6
Namibia--The Bermuda Triangle of African Homophobia

by Ana Simo
On Monday, March 19, two days before his nation celebrated the 11th anniversary of its independence, President Sam Nujoma of Namibia used the occasion of a major speech at the University of Namibia to attack lesbians and gay men.

" The Republic of Namibia does not allow homosexuality, lesbianism here. Police are ordered to arrest you, and deport you, and imprison you, too," he told a hushed audience. He then once again blamed "foreign influences" for homosexuality in Namibia, which he said threatened to destroy the nation.

Demonizing Queers
President Nujoma's homophobic outburst is just the latest in a chilling campaign to demonize Namibian queers as a national threat. It started in 1995, when Nujoma's then Finance Minister Helmut Angula, Minister Nahas Angula, and Deputy Minister Hadino Hishongwa, first denounced homosexuality as "an un-African social evil." Helmut Angula also called it a "mental disorder" which "can be cured." The two Angulas are big shots in Nujoma's ruling SWAPO Party: they are members of its Political Bureau, the top decision-making body.

Hishongwa, who was Deputy Lands, Resettlement and Rehabilitation Minister, said, "Homosexuality is like cancer or AIDS and everything should be done to stop its spread in Namibia." Gay men and lesbians, he declared, "should be operated on to remove unnatural hormones in them."

In December 1996, President Nujoma himself told the national conference of the SWAPO Women's Council that gay men and lesbians were "un-African and unnatural." He added, "Homosexuals must be condemned and rejected in our society."

" Extinction of the Nation"
A year later, in 1997, Nujoma heightened the rhetoric when he accused gay men and lesbians of being "European" and destroying Namibian culture by imposing "gayism," and he vowed to "uproot" homosexuality. "It [homosexuality] is a foreign and corrupt ideology and such elements are exploiting our democracy," he said.

At the National Assembly, in 1998, Nujoma's Home Affairs Minister, top cop, and new anti-gay point man, Jerry Ekandjo, threatened to increase penalties for "lesbianism and homosexual acts," telling the Assembly that "the so-called gay rights can never qualify as human rights" and "if not guarded against, will lead to the extinction of the nation."

Ekandjo sparked violence in 1999 when he asserted that the police had been ordered "to eliminate all gays and lesbians" in Namibia. Although the police itself took no such action, several people were attacked, according to Phil na Yangoloh, the Executive Director of the National Society for Human Rights in Namibia (NSHR).

Last year, Ekandjo urged newly graduated police officers to "eliminate [gays and lesbians] from the face of Namibia" and compared being gay to "other unnatural acts, including murder." Like Nujoma, his Home Affairs Minister blames his country's rising HIV-infection rate on gay people.

Shockwaves of Fear

President Nujoma's latest threats sent shockwaves of fear through Namibia's lesbian and gay community. The morning following his speech, the Rainbow Project, the country's only lesbian and gay rights organization, was besieged with phone calls, many by frightened queers who wanted help leaving the country. Founded in 1989, The Rainbow Project has about 1,000 members, according to its coordinator, Ian Swartz, who told BBC News Online that there are "many more Namibians who are afraid to reveal their sexual orientation."

Both The Rainbow Project and NSHR, the country's preeminent human rights group, publicly slammed Nujoma for his attack on queers. The Rainbow Project called it "shocking" and "malicious and hateful" and questioned which laws he would use to carry out his threat to arrest, imprison, and deport gay men and lesbians. While sodomy is a crime in Namibia, being lesbian or gay is not. And in spite of the authoritarian Nujoma, the country still has a democratic framework, however hobbled, which includes a constitution with an equal protection clause.

Homophobia, Racism: Same Cancer
NSHR called Nujoma's "orders" to the police "not only unconstitutional, but devoid of mature logic." The President's "latest homophobic attack [is] dangerous, as violent words from a popular leader may lead to violence against innocent citizens," the human rights group added.

" Targeting people because of their sexual orientation is extremely similar to discriminating against people because of the color of their skin. In a country that has emerged from the horrors of apartheid, it should not be such a leap in logic to recognize that homophobia is a form of the same cancer that is racism," the group said, asking Nujoma "to publicly retract these recent remarks and desist from attacking this minority group."

NSHR's Phil ya Nangoloh told the Nairobi-based IRIN news agency on March 21 that "We cannot pretend that gays or lesbianism were imported by Europeans. It is African. I know that in my own language (Ovambo) there is a word, 'Eshinge,' for a gay person. We would not have a word for it if it was imported."

The only logical explanation for Nujoma's comments, according to Phil ya Nangoloth, "is that it is a diversionary tactic aimed at taking public attention away from burning issues like unemployment and other social ills in this country—things like Namibia's involvement in foreign wars (in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Angola.)"

The African Bermuda Triangle of Homophobia
The diversionary use of lesbian and gay people as national scapegoats has turned parts of the region into a kind of dangerous Bermuda Triangle of homophobia. It was neighboring Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe who was the first in the area to identify gay people as a useful national enemy, ripe for consolidating dictatorial powers. And since the beginning of Namibia's anti-gay campaign, the homo-rants by Nujoma and other SWAPO hierarchs have sounded eerily like Mugabe's.

Jerry Ekandjo was badly paraphrasing Mugabe's snappier "If cats and dogs know their mates, why not you?" when he told the Namibian legislators in 1998, "Gay and lesbian rights can never qualify as fundamental rights because, if a male dog know its right partner is a female dog, how can a human being fail to notice the difference?" Not coincidentally, Mugabe's deliriously logical conclusion had been the terse, "Gays and lesbians are sick-minded people who should not be given rights."

Ironically, both Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe and Namibia's Sam Nujoma had begun as respected liberation movement leaders and first presidents of their newly independent nations. Both had enjoyed international adulation and funding, and little close scrutiny, partly because their enemies were so awful (racist Rhodesia and apartheid-era South Africa). Both now feel irresistible autocratic urgings—Mugabe, so far, acting out on them with more alacrity than his neighbor.

Like other autocrats everywhere, both now use the vague national threat of the homosexual menace to undercut democratic political competition, and the efforts of civil rights workers, including feminists. Nujoma's 1996 attacks on lesbians at the SWAPO Women's Council conference were seen as a swipe at Sister Namibia, an independent feminist group that supported human and civil rights for lesbians and gay men, and was perceived as a potential threat to the governmental SWAPO female group's lock on "women's issues." (Both the official women's group and the Namibian Minister for Women's Affairs are bitterly opposed to lesbian and gay rights.)

The escalating war of words by Mugabe homophobic-copycats like the President of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, and Zambia's President Frederick Chiluba, besides Namibia's Nujoma, may well translate into a disaster—a flood of tortured, dead, imprisoned, deported queers, instead of the current, nearly invisible trickle.

No Democracy Without Queers
Over the years, government attacks against queers in Namibia have only elicited faint peeps from human rights groups abroad, for whom gay rights continue to be a poor relation. Locally, however, the government has been criticized harshly, and often, but only by the few groups that dare confront SWAPO's virtual one-party state dominance, notably NSHR, The Rainbow Project, the Legal Assistance Center, and Sister Namibia, whose office was gutted by fire in a suspected anti-gay attack last July. Some of the local independent media has also covered the issue impartially, in particular the daily newspaper The Namibian.

The newspaper risks becoming the first casualty of President Nujoma's latest hate speech. On the same day The Namibian covered critical reactions to the speech, the government announced that it was cutting off all its advertising in the newspaper because it was "too critical of its policies."

The measure apparently had been taken in December, but not enforced until now. Another independent newspaper, the Windhoek Advertiser, folded a few years ago when it also lost crucial government advertising. The Namibian government is the country's biggest advertiser.

The advertising ban on The Namibian was announced on March 22, a day after Namibia's independence celebration.

BBC News,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/953657.stm

27 August 2002

7
Namibia gay rights row Namibia's controversial Home Affairs Minister

Jerry Ekandjo is reported by state television to have urged newly graduated police officers to "eliminate" gays and lesbians "from the face of Namibia". He was reported to have told the 700 police men and women "even if gays and lesbians had a gay dog they would murder it." A spokeswoman for an organisation promoting gay and lesbian rights in Namibia called on the government publicly to reject the remarks.

Namibia's President Sam Nujoma has previously criticised gays and lesbians calling them "unnatural", thereby taking a similar stance to his close ally, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. Unrepentant Speaking to the BBC's Focus on Africa, Mr Ekandjo refused to confirm or deny the remarks, but asked the journalist if he was a homosexual. "Have the homosexuals there sent you?" he asked, and added he would only discuss the matter with homosexuals.

"Let the homosexuals themselves phone me, then I can give them the answer." Mr Ekandjo said, "in Namibia they are happy about my statement". Dispute A representative of the Rainbow Project, an organisation that promotes gay and lesbian rights, Elizabeth Kahas, condemned Mr Ekandjo's statement. "I think it is a very outrageous statement to make from a minister who is supposed to protect all the people of Namibia regardless of their sexual orientation," she said.

She also disputed Mr Ekandjo's claim that the constitution did not guarantee rights to homosexuals. "I think that we have to do a lot of human rights education for our politicians in that this particular minister is not knowledgeable about the constitution of this country," she said. Constitution She added that the constitution guaranteed the rights of all Namibians, regardless of sexual orientation.

This is not the first time Mr Ekandjo has been in the news for his views. In August he said he would withdraw the work permits of foreign judges who made judgements that were perceived as against government policy. He was later forced to retract his remarks and issue an apology.

The Namibian (http://www.namibian.com.na )
http://allafrica.com/stories/200305200048.html
(E-Mail: graham@namibian.com.na )

May 20, 2003

8
Politicians Accused of Failing Gay Community

by Lindsay Dentlinger
Windhoek, Namibia - Namibia's gay community says despite the country's leaders having vowed to defend and protect all citizens, homosexuals are being failed by the system. In effect, only one piece of Namibian legislation pronounces itself specifically on sexuality - the Labour Act.

Yesterday, Human Rights Watch (HRW), in conjunction with the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, launched a report in Windhoek entitled 'More Than a Name: State-Sponsored Homophobia and its Consequences in Southern Africa'. HRW investigates human rights abuses in about 70 countries worldwide.

The report details research carried out between 1998 and 2002 on discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people in Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Zambia. In particular it focuses on the spread of so-called "state-sponsored homophobia". In this light, Namibian politicians follow hot on the heels of their Zimbabwean counterparts in discriminating against gay citizens. Widney Brown, Deputy Program Director for HRW, conducted a substantial proportion of the research documented in the report, and says homophobia has become a very "politicised" topic in the region.

In Namibia, the President and a number of politicians have in the past publicly vilified the gay community, interestingly enough, at totally unrelated occasions. Brown, however, commended civil society in Namibia for speaking out against this kind of defamation, unlike in Zimbabwe, where she says, they are too scared to do so. While South Africa is noted as the only country in the region whose constitution has an equality clause, the research found that prejudice against the gay community is still rife.

The Rainbow Project (TRP) and Sister Namibia, both advocates of the rights of homosexuals locally, say politicians are too scared to stand up for gay rights, for fear of pressure they will receive from their colleagues. The two groups are most disappointed to note that same sex relationships have been omitted from the recently passed Domestic Violence Bill. Informal research by the TRP indicates that both verbal and physical attacks on male and female homosexuals are daily occurrences which go largely unreported out of fear of further discrimination by health officials and the Police. The TRP's co-ordinator, Ian Swartz, says it is really disheartening to note that President Sam Nujoma, whom he has always considered one of his heroes, is among the perpetrators when it comes to discrimination.

In 1998, Home Affairs Minister Jerry Ekandjo went as far as to tell the National Assembly that he planned to introduce new legislation against homosexual acts saying that so-called gay rights can never qualify as human rights. No such legislation was ever introduced. However, two years later the Minister returned to the subject, urging newly graduated Police officers to "eliminate gays and lesbians "from the face of Namibia".

Following President Nujoma's 1996 call to "reject and condemn homosexuals in our society", Swapo swung strongly behind its leader, effectively making homophobia a political platform in Namibia. The President has repeated his threats regularly since then. On the other hand, advocates for gay rights note that ironically politicians have in recent years become gay rights activists, by putting the issue on the front burner. The country's gay rights activists have however vowed not to back down and to face the discrimination head-on by lobbying for inclusion in Namibian laws.

Chicago Tribune, Chicago, IL, ( http://www.chicagotribune.com )
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0406090188jun09,1,4800195 .story

June 9, 2004

9
Africa's gays persecuted as cause of ills Even blamed for drought, homosexuals are widely condemned, increasingly threatened

by Laurie Goering, Tribune foreign correspondent
Windhoek, Namibia - As a boy, Telwin Owoseb wanted to wear lime green. His mother told him blue was for boys and pushed him out the door to play ball, over his protests. At the end of high school, he told his family he was gay. While his mother accepted the news, his brothers and family friends were horrified. "A man should be a man and marry and have kids," he remembers them saying. Since then he has been called a "moffie" - an Afrikaans slur for homosexuals - on the streets of Namibia's capital, and he has faced trouble finding work and a partner in this nation where being gay is considered unnatural, un-Christian and un-African.

But he considers himself lucky compared with Namibia's rural gays and lesbians, an estimated eight out of 10 of whom are forced to marry and have children as a result of fear, ignorance and social pressures, according to gay-rights activists in Namibia. "The government says homosexuality is a European import," said Owoseb, 21, a member of the country's Damara ethnic group, which tends to be more accepting of homosexuality. But "if it were European there wouldn't be names for homosexuals in our own languages, from before the Europeans arrived. It's not a European thing. I'm not a European." Africa is not an easy place to be homosexual.

Across the continent, millions of gays and lesbians find themselves increasingly under threat and pointed to as a source of Africa's ills. Homosexuals have been shot by warlords in lawless Somalia and stoned in northern Nigeria, activists say. Hundreds have been arrested in Egypt on debauchery charges. Zanzibar has proposed 25-year prison sentences for men convicted of sodomy. Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, the most homophobic of Africa's presidents, dismisses gays as "lower than pigs and dogs." Uganda's Yoweri Museveni has threatened them with arrest, prosecution and deportation. And former Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi long characterized them as a "scourge."

In Namibia, homosexuals have been blamed for severe drought by religious leaders, who insist their wicked behavior displeases God. Government officials, who have threatened to deport gays, accuse them of trying to depopulate the country and describe their lifestyle as a kind of cancer, threatening to lead to "social disorder." While gays generally are not blamed for the spread of AIDS in Africa - the disease is a largely heterosexual one on the continent - they are dismissed as "unnatural." "Homosexuality is an unnatural behavioral disorder, which is alien to African culture," Helmut Angula, Namibia's agriculture minister, once observed.

Some Namibian gays find themselves subject to brutal "cures." Families arrange to have lesbian daughters raped to show them the "right" way to behave. Gay men are held down by police and earrings are ripped from their ears. A leading government official has written a treatise describing how homosexuals can be "cured" by sawing off the top of the skull and washing the brain with a chemical solution.

What is remarkable is that Namibia's outspoken homophobia is relatively new. A decade ago, gay men held hands on the streets of Windhoek, seen as a homosexual mecca for southern Africa. For generations lesbians and to a lesser extent gay men were quietly accepted in at least some of Namibia's ethnic cultures.

What has changed, gay activists believe, is the country's confidence in its future. Since Namibia won its independence from South Africa in 1990, "the euphoria has been wearing off," said Ian Swartz, director of The Rainbow Project, a gay-rights organization. Namibian leaders promised better times after independence but have found stubborn problems such as poverty and southern Africa's AIDS epidemic difficult to solve.

In frustration - and sometimes to divert the public's attention from their own shortcomings - they have begun looking for someone to blame and have settled on minorities, including homosexuals, according to human-rights activists. "There's a sense of economic and political powerlessness, and when you feel powerless about your economy and your country's politics there's a tendency to turn to culture as the one thing you can exert control over," said Scott Long, director of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered Rights Project at Human Rights Watch. Namibia's public campaign against homosexuals began in 1996, after a group of cross-dressing gay men used the women's bathroom during a meeting of the ruling South West Africa People's Organization.

Days later, President Sam Nujoma gave his first anti-gay speech, insisting that "homosexuals must be condemned and rejected in our society." Since then government officials - most of them from northern Owamboland, Namibia's richest, most populous and most traditionally homophobic region - have tried to criminalize gay sex and threatened to deport homosexuals. In heavily Christian Namibia, the government has promoted a view of homosexuality as un-Christian and as an imported European deviation. The problem with that view, gay-rights activists say, is that Christianity itself is a European import in much of Africa. Over centuries of colonization most of the continent's rich oral tradition was lost, making Africa's traditional views on homosexuality unclear. What is evident, however, is that gays were an accepted part of at least some African societies. In northern Namibia, many homosexuals traditionally served as healers and spiritual leaders, said Daniel Somerville, editor of Behind the Mask, a Web site for gay Africans.

Even today, large numbers of lesbians practice as traditional healers in neighboring South Africa, one of the few nations worldwide where homosexual rights are protected under the constitution. "People say it's imported colonial behavior," Somerville said. "But in fact the opposite is true. The colonialists, if anything, tried to stamp it out. They were, after all, the Victorians."

`Welcoming and belonging'
The All Africa Rights Initiative, a gay-rights movement that met in Johannesburg in February, issued a statement saying "we have and have always had a place in Africa." African traditional culture, the statement said, is based on "principles of welcoming and belonging," not on exclusion. Reversing the image of homosexuality as a European import has been difficult, largely because Africa's gay activists have tended to be white.

That is changing, but only slowly. Most gay Africans, like their heterosexual neighbors, are too busy trying to feed themselves, earn a living and take care of their families to get involved in politics. "That white people brought [homosexuality] here is a lot of nonsense, but our own black community believes that," said Linda Baumann, 21, a lesbian who lives in Windhoek. "The only answer is education, and more of us speaking up for ourselves." That isn't easy, particularly in the conservative Owambo community where Baumann grew up. Her partner and housemate was thrown out of her childhood home when her family discovered her orientation a few years ago. Baumann, who said she lost most of her friends when she came out, counts herself lucky that she got only a lecture, largely because her strict father had moved out years ago. "I was lectured about the Bible and God, and mom cried and said I wasn't raised this way," she said.

Today her mother and one of her two sisters accept her, but it is an acceptance forged out of necessity - her salary puts food on the table. "If my father knew, he would say I am no longer his child, that the devil is in me and I need to go to a traditional healer and be healed," she said. But she is thankful she doesn't live in a rural Owambo community. If so, "I would have a husband and kids by now."

Many Namibian gays who emerged from the closet in the 1990s have gone back in as a result of the government support of homophobia, activists said. Gay men who married and later divorced have married again, Swartz said. But the attacks also have spurred new activism.

Gay Namibians have turned to the country's hugely influential churches, seeking their acceptance and help in rebuffing myths about homosexuality. The response has been mixed, but at least some denominations, especially the Lutherans, have been relatively welcoming.

Gay-rights activists also have teamed with other troubled minorities - white farmers, AIDS patients, abused women - to work for improved human-rights protections for all. The country now has an annual human-rights parade, dominated by gays.

Across the continent, gay-rights groups have formed in nations such as Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone and Uganda, largely in response to government hate speeches.

That mobilization suggests "it's not always a bad thing to have these outrageous statements," Somerville said. Perhaps the best news for Africa's gay men and lesbians, however, is that plenty of their neighbors do not take homophobic government messages to heart. Gays and lesbians have quietly been part of African society for centuries, anthropologists argue.

Too hungry to care
And on a continent struggling to feed itself, "a whole number of issues come before worrying about other people's sexual behavior," Somerville said. That means "the levels of homophobia one hears about in the press and from leaders is not necessarily reflected in the populace. People could care less." Activists say the best way for gay Africans to overcome prejudice is to be good neighbors. "You have to take away all the myth, and the best way to do that is just to live and be open," Swartz said. "When all you talk about is sex, you forget there's a person behind that label."

Washington Post Foreign Service

October 24, 2005

10
Namibia Chips Away at African Taboos on Homosexuality

By Emily Wax
Windoek, Namibia - As a boy of 14, Petrus Gurirab worried that he was gay. Seeking advice from a trustworthy adult, he went to see a teacher who had treated him kindly. " I have feelings for other boys," Gurirab recalled telling her. "Like love feelings." There was a long silence. " My advice is that it's not African" to be gay, the teacher replied, using a slur for the term. "Ignore those feelings and try girls."

She also apparently gossiped with colleagues. Other teachers started teasing Gurirab, asking him why he didn't play soccer and why he spent so much time around his mother. Then one morning, he said, the gym teacher invited him into his office, locked the door and forced him onto the desk for sex. " Let's see how good you are at it," the teacher said, according to Gurirab, now 25, who recounted the story through tears. The ordeal left his legs and arms with red bruises. The next day, distraught and confused, he had sex with a female classmate. " I wanted to change so badly and not be gay . . . but I couldn't," he said. "I knew I liked men. I decided I would kill myself. . . . I was so desperate I called a lifeline in London. They saved my life."

Un-African. Un-Christian. Anti-family. Witchcraft.
In many African countries, being gay is considered all of those things. It is also illegal in most of them, so taboo that a conviction for homosexual acts may bring more jail time than rape or murder. Only in South Africa is being gay widely accepted and protected by law.

From Uganda, where homosexuality is punishable by life imprisonment, to Sierra Leone, where a lesbian activist was raped and stabbed to death at her desk last year, homophobia has long trapped gays in a dangerous, closeted life. With no places to meet openly, no groups to join, it seems sometimes that gay men and lesbians in Africa don't exist at all.
But in Namibia, a growing national debate about homosexuality has followed a period of harsh condemnation, and gay rights groups now operate openly in the capital, Windhoek.

One of them is the Rainbow Project, where Gurirab works as a suicide prevention counselor. The organization has interviewed gay Africans from across the continent, and its leaders say they believe the time is right to challenge prejudices and start a wider discussion on what being gay really means.
" The only answer is education," said Linda Baumann, 21, who grew up in a tribal community and was expelled from it when she revealed she was a lesbian. She now lives in Windhoek and hosts a radio program about gay issues. "We have to have courage and stick up for ourselves."

The Rainbow Project has joined forces with other interest groups, including the women's movement, people with AIDS and progressive political parties, which have been lobbying for equal rights for all Africans. Unlike in many Western countries, gays have never been blamed for the AIDS pandemic in Africa, where the disease is largely transmitted through heterosexual sex and blood transfusions.

The continent's gay population, which is mostly youthful and active in cities, has also benefited from Africa's rapid urbanization. These days, TV programs such as "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" are beamed via satellite from the West, and a smorgasbord of gay-oriented Web sites can be accessed at Internet cafes.
One Web site based in South Africa, "Behind the Mask," receives hundreds of hits each day, along with e-mail messages from gay men and lesbians across the continent asking about how they should reveal their sexual orientation to their parents or how to meet the right partner.

Even so, the Rainbow Project must use extreme discretion when trying to conduct research outside Namibia -- let alone urging other gays across Africa to demand their rights. In Somalia, for example, armed militiamen frequently stone gays. In Egypt, Baumann said, "you will just get killed."
Ian Swartz, the Rainbow Project director, said that even when he was in Nairobi, the cosmopolitan capital of Kenya, he had difficulty meeting gay men until he arranged a late-night meeting with a stranger. He arrived at a club after midnight, "and there it was -- an underground gay community in Kenya." The men he met told him "harrowing" stories, he said. "I felt really sad afterward, but I learned a lot."

Treatment of gays, group members said, ranges from social ostracism to physical attacks. In rural Namibia, they found, about 80 percent of gay men and lesbians were forced to marry and have children. In many countries, gay people were often depressed and reported having covert same-sex relations outside heterosexual marriages.
Gay students may drop out of school or face beatings for being "funny," Baumann said. Some are put through violent "cures." In Tanzania and Botswana, there were more than a dozen reports of lesbians being raped in an effort to persuade them to marry men.
But Swartz said the Rainbow Project also found a long history of ethnic groups giving tribal labels to those who are gay -- some negative, but others neutral.

" That proves that it wasn't a European import," Swartz said. "It's as African as being straight, and it was always here."
Throughout African history, gays have been accepted in some tribes. Lesbians were sometimes seen as having mystical powers, and in South Africa they acted as traditional healers. In times of conflict or drought, however, gays were used as scapegoats and blamed for not producing babies to repopulate their regions, according to researchers of same-sex practices in Africa.
European missionaries further demonized homosexuality, and church pulpits remain bastions of anti-gay rhetoric in Nigeria and several other countries. Politicians also have found gay-bashing a useful way to deflect criticism from unpopular policies.
Daniel arap Moi, who ruled Kenya for 24 years, once declared: "Kenya has no room or time for homosexuals and lesbians. It is against African norms and traditions and is a great sin." Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe recently dismissed gays as "lower than pigs and dogs."

In Namibia, gays said there was a relatively relaxed climate in large cities in the years before and after independence from South Africa in 1990, and gay couples in Windhoek could hold hands in the street. But in the mid-'90s, they said, a chilling change occurred.
" The first five years after independence it was like a utopia," Swartz said. "People were proud to be gay. But when Namibian leaders' promises fell through and poverty did not improve, the government became increasingly unpopular. . . . The leaders were looking for a smokescreen and someone to blame."

In 1996, the public campaign against homosexuals began, after a group of cross-dressing men used a women's restroom during a rally of the ruling party. At the time, unemployment was at 60 percent and opposition parties were on the attack.
Days later, then-President Sam Nujoma gave his first anti-gay speech, saying that "homosexuals must be condemned and rejected." Suddenly, many officials were bashing gays. One minister called homosexuality a "behavioral disorder which is alien to African culture."
In response, the Rainbow Project was formed. Members went to churches and schools, and showed up on TV talk shows. They held workshops with Namibia's Human Rights Organization, which was respected for protesting corruption, police brutality and domestic violence.

There were heated debates, with some people saying that homosexuality was a threat to tradition and that men needed sons to inherit their land. That raised the issue of women's rights in the country's largest ethnic group, the Ovambo, which is deeply patriarchal and does not allow women to own land.

As the climate has improved in Namibia, Rainbow Project members now say they hope to replicate their success in other countries.
" What is hopeful is that we are having a national conversation. When I saw people from the Rainbow Project on TV, I knew they were helping young gay people out there who were really suffering," said Helmuth Oxurub, 35, who works in a furniture store in the coastal town of Swakopmund. "We want to say to people, 'You know us in everyday life, we are here and we aren't so bad.' People really seem to accept that message."

One recent evening, Oxurub arrived at a cafe in Swakopmund with his partner of seven years, Harold Uchman, 30, who works in the uranium mining industry. They were joined by another openly gay friend, Victor Honeb, 34, who works for the government.
They spoke about how they had revealed their sexual orientation to their parents and how stressful and confusing their childhoods had been. Oxurub said his mother had ordered him out of the house after neighbors started telling her he was gay.
" I said, 'Mom, accept me or not . . . I am your son and I am still the same person,' " Oxurub recalled. "She just started crying and hugged me. Then no one bothered us."

Lately, the three friends agreed, being gay in cities such as Windhoek and Swakopmund has even begun to acquire a certain image of urban hipness and going against the grain. So should there be a "Queer Eye for the Namibian Guy"?
" Maybe," Honeb said with a smile, adjusting his fashionable black-rimmed glasses. "A neighbor came over to me recently and said, 'Gay people are really cosmopolitan. . . . Being gay is so in right now.' I was really surprised and so happy. I hope that spreads to all of Africa -- one day."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Kaiser Network
http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_index.cfm?DR_ID=34627

January 06, 2006

11
Namibia Law Banning Male-to-Male Sex Is Hindering Condom Distribution, HIV Prevention in Prisons, Advocates Say

A 30-year-old law in Namibia banning male-to-male sex is preventing condom distribution in the country's prisons and hindering HIV prevention efforts, according to HIV/AIDS advocates, South Africa's Mail & Guardian reports.

According to government officials, condom distribution would promote sex between men, which is outlawed under the 1977 Criminal Procedures Act.

Ignatius Mainga, a spokesperson for the country's Ministry of Safety and Security's prison services, said, "By giving (prisoners) a condom, you are telling them to go ahead and do it." Mainga added that the "majority" of cases involving men who have sex with men in prison are consensual and that inmates do not want condoms because they do not "want to be known as having sex with other men."

However, Michaela Hubscle, former deputy minister at the now-closed Ministry of Prisons and Correctional Services, said instances of rape still occur between men in prison and condoms are needed to protect inmates. "We are sitting on a time bomb.

The prevalence rate will increase if we do not protect those who enter prison (HIV-)negative and those who are positive from reinfection," Hubscle said (Tibinyane, Mail & Guardian, 1/4).

pinknews.co.uk
http://pinknews.co.uk/news/articles/2005-6974.html

27th February 2008

12
African lesbian conference demands equal rights

by PinkNews.co.uk staff writer
Lesbians from across Africa have held a conference in Mozambique to highlight the homophobia and prejudice they face across the continent. Most nations in Africa criminalise same-sex relationships and in some countries gay people can be put to death. The Coalition of African Lesbians conference was attended by more than 100 delegates.

Women from 14 African countries gathered in Namibia's capital Windhoek in August 2004 to develop the Coalition of African Lesbians. Lesbian organisations and a number of individual women from Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, Liberia, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa, Mozambique and Namibia are members of the organisation. "Our main goal is that lesbian and homosexuality can no longer be seen as a criminal offence," the group's director and conference spokeswoman Fikile Vilakazi told Reuters. "You should not be arrested and charged for how you use your own body."

The coalition lobbies for political, legal social, sexual, cultural and economic rights of African lesbians by engaging strategically with African and international structures and allies and to eradicate stigma and discrimination against lesbians. South Africa, one of the few countries on the continent where gay men and lesbians are allowed to marry and legally protected from discrimination, has been rocked by several murders of prominent lesbian activists.

Sizakele Sigasa, 34, an activist for HIV/AIDS and LGBT rights, and Salome Masooa, 24, were discovered dead at field in Soweto, Johannesburg, on July 8th. They had both been shot and, it is suspected, raped.

On 22nd July Thokozane Qwabe, 23, was found in a field in Ladysmith, KwaZulu-Natal with multiple head wounds. She was naked and it is thought she was also raped.