Namibia's Rainbow Project

The Rainbow Project, referred to as ‘trp’, is an NGO in Namibia that advocated on behalf of LGBT people and provides resources to these marginalized communities across the country. At its inception, it was the only organization of its kind that focused on the injustices and abuse of rights of all sexual minorities in the country in contrast to other prominent Namibian lgbt organizations like Sister Namibia that are primarily directed toward lesbians in the country.  trp is engaged in work to counter the consequences of homophobia for sexual minorities and the broader Namibian community. Namibian leaders have publicly attributed the HIV epidemic to homosexual people in the country even as official government reports demonstrate that heterosexual individuals engaged in intercourse without protection is the main way that the disease is transmitted in Namibia. trp advocates for HIV AIDS prevention that is sensitive to the unique experiences of sexual minorities and void of homophobic misinformation in prevention of mass transmission and in pursuit of an end to the epidemic. Central to the mission of trp has been provision of resources to the LGBT community including education, social services and suicide prevention counseling along with its advocacy work documenting hate crimes against sexual minorities across the country beginning in 2006.

Origins

Prior to 1989, Namibia was under the colonial rule of South Africa. Upon becoming an independent nation, the SWAPO Party came to power in the country. Under South Africa's Apartheid government, homosexuality was condemned and after independence LGBT Namibians hoped they would finally be able to live in peace. The SWAPO party had a political platform of "equality for all Namibians" even as LGBT people were not granted equality under their leadership. In 1996, The Rainbow Project was formed in response to what they saw as the political homophobia characteristic of the SWAPO Party. The political homophobia enacted by SWAPO was not reserved for the LGBT community, rather it was a gendered mechanism of repression. SWAPO's leadership was characterized as "masculinist" and political homophobia as a tactic allowed for the maintenance of this style of power. TRP collaborated with Sister Namibia to respond to public attacks, both verbal and physical, on sexual minorities in the country and forged networks with international human rights and LGBT organizations to draw national attention toward the "invisibility" of their community. While social and economic "material realities of extremely high HIV prevalence, sexual violence, gender inequality, tribalism and underemployment" were experienced to some degree by most Namibians, their impact was compounded for the LGBT community.

When it was founded in 1996, TRP's membership was comprised of white and coloured, LGBT-identified, middle class non-Namibians. This would change by 1997 when it was documented that the organization's membership was mainly young, black and unemployed Namibians. In response to this change in membership, many of the original white and coloured members abandoned the organization. With economic challenges being an issue for many more of the members by this time, debates arose as to whether the organization should expand its social services or devote limited resources to launching public legal-reform campaigns. By 1998, multiple affinity groups within TRP were formed to meet the more specialized needs of different members. These included the Women's Caucus (later referred to as the Different Identities Group), the Male Think Tank and the Rainbow Youth.

LGBT advocacy

Much of TRP's early work was characterized by very public protests and press conferences to address the government's anti-homosexuality as well as public coming out testimonials toward the aim of embracing "open sexual expression in the broader Namibian society." Additionally, TRP held public forums each year during the Annual Namibian Human Rights Awareness Week beginning in 2000.

"Talking Pink" Radio Show

"Talking Pink" was an award-winning weekly radio show produced by TRP that discussed LGBT issues. In 1999, following remarks from Jerry Ekandjoe, former Namibian Minister of Home Affairs (SWAPO), exclaiming that there are no homosexuals in Namibia, the radio show ran an episode featuring a recording of the remarks followed by a recording of “TRP members declaring their ethnic and sexual identities.” It later became a vehicle for exposing Namibian communities to LGBT-themed films.

Anti-Sodomy Law Reform Campaign

At a meeting in 1998, TRP members began organizing their first public law-reform campaign to address the decriminalization of sodomy. TRP member understood the criminalization of sodomy as a “law inherited from the colonial regime.” LGBT activists from the South African NCGLE collaborated with TRP to devise a plan for their campaign given the volatile political climate towards LGBT identified people in Namibia. TRP was also consulted by human rights NGO LAC on how best to proceed with their campaign. From 1998 through 2000 the hostility of SWAPO members toward the LGBT community mounted in the form of threats to increase penalties associated with sodomy and calls for the police to “eliminate homosexuals from Namibia”. Given these developments, what was originally intended to be a public campaign didn’t lead to visible action beyond compelling public officials to clarify how the law would be enforced. As recent as 2006, however, TRP director Ian Swartz has continued to publicly condemn the nations criminalization of sodomy stating that:

"the government should be taken to court over male-to-male sodomy legislation."

“How is it that with a history like ours where people were dehumanised, we—15 years after independence—still have a situation where government decides who you should have sex with, and criminalises sexual behaviour between two consenting adults?”

Combatting SWAPO Anti-Homosexuality

During a public commemoration for Heroes’ Day on August 26, 2005, Namibia's Deputy Minister (PM) of Home Affairs and Immigration, Theopolina Mushelenga made a speech and is quoted as having claimed that “lesbians and gay men betrayed the fight for Namibian freedom, are responsible for the HIV/AIDS pandemic and are an insult to African culture.” Three organizations, The Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ), Sister Namibia and TRP, issued individual responses to this claim as documented by Outright International, an international lgbtq human rights organization based in New York City. On September 8, 2005 the statement issued by trp expressed that the Deputy Ministers homophobic statement was a “direct attack against the civil rights of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (lgbt) people of Namibia. In response, trp called for the resignation of the PM and President Pohamba’s enforcement of her resignation, asserting that her endorsement of homophobia poses a threat to the lives of all Namibians.

In July of 2006 the Rainbow Project issued an official statement condemning the remarks of former SWAPO Party President, Dr. Sam Nujoma. Nujoma used the term “homosexual” to refer to the director of NSHR. The SWAPO party while in power carried out government sanctioned repression of LGBT identified and suspected individuals across Namibia.In their statement, The Rainbow Project explained that Nujoma’s use of the term “homosexual” to refer to NSHR director Phil ya Nangoloh was an attempt to use him “as a scapegoat to avert attention from the current controversies within the SWAPO Party. Further, the statement was an appeal to current Namibian president, Hifikepunye Pohamba, to condemn the verbal attack and to “maintain his government’s pro-human rights stance.”

Resources

TRP opened and operated a homeless shelter, resource center and soup kitchen to address the social and economic hardship of the rainbow youths. Running from the late 1990s-2007, the soup kitchen was operated twice, weekly and served the needs of the majority unemployed, young, black membership. The resource center provided and maintained entertainment materials and a collection of literature on safe sex practices, HIV/AIDS, international LGBT human rights organizations. It also held organizational meetings, public forums and coming out testimonials, community social events and empowerment workshops on sexual and gender identity, self esteem and body image. In 2007, due to use by non-LGBT identified homeless youths, the homeless shelter was shut down.

The empowerment workshops led by TRP also featured self-awareness training. This training consisted of the topics such as:

“teaching how to distinguish between lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender identities; exploring ideas of traditional homosexuality in ethnic identity terms; reconciling being lesbian or gay and Christian; and encouraging open discussion about sexual desires in order to combat vulnerability to HIV infection.”

Additionally, these workshops were another place where the public telling and retelling of coming out stories could and did take place for the Rainbow Youth.

Workshops dealing with the societal tension between religious and sexual identities and religious persecution lead to the creation of the Namibian Assistance Project in 2003. Through this initiative, in partnership with Inclusive and Affirming Ministries (IAM) TRP “offered Christian religious training to help ease the moral uncertainties between sexual and Christian identities.”

TRP community social events, like their movie nights, were attended by women who did not identify as LGBT because they provided an enjoyable and safe space where they would not be bothered by heterosexual men.

Challenges

Although TRP provided resources in the form of workshops, literatures and counseling to encourage safe sex practices among LGBT-identified Namibians, it became apparent that lack of information was not the sole deterrent to safer sex. In Unravelling Taboos, the scarcity of economic resources, gender inequality, and social stigma are highlighted as posing additional difficulties in practicing safer sex that are not addressed by TRP's work.

TRP’s HIV education work with LGBT youth was undermined by the phenomena of men who self-identify as heterosexual even while engaging in homosexual acts and refuse to wear condoms because they believe HIV is a homosexual disease.

Criticisms

In 2015, Robert Lorway published Namibia’s Rainbow Project discussing the unintended consequences of the organization’s neoliberal shift after 2007. TRP’s principal donor was the Humanist Institute for Cooperation (Hivos) in the Netherlands and most of the organizations leadership were self-identified coloured and white, university educated people from South Africa while the Rainbow Youth was comprised of poor, Black Namibians without university education. In Out in Africa, Ashley Currier explains that TRP and organizations like it across the region could not have functioned without these private “northern” donors as they provided the resources necessary to maintain safe spaces that provided visibility for the community. To maintain this funding, though, the organizations were expected to adapt the “hierarchical structure and centralized decision-making” of western NGOs to prove themselves worthy of funding which made them less transparent to the communities they served.

The organization that had originated as one providing safe spaces and educational resources for the marginalized community became centrally focused with securing legal rights and recognition for LGBT people in Namibia. In Lorway’s observations as a medical anthropologist working directly with the ‘rainbow youth’, he argues that this organizational shift was inconsistent with the real concerns of the organizations members. Lorway recounts a meeting held in February 2008 in which the Rainbow Youths expressed their grievances with the new direction of the organization did not produce the social and economic emancipation they sought and was therefore insufficient. Lorway describes this period as being produced by “TRP’s unwitting collusion with wider neoliberal power arrangements taking place in Southern Africa at the time.” More specifically, Lorway outlines the “unintended consequences” of TRP’s LGBT intervention as:

“the pursuit of females to become ‘like men’ in order to escape sexual violence that leads to the intensification of their oppression at the hands of men; the longings for ‘real men’ by young feminine males who yearn for love, intimacy, and social acceptance that ends in their severe physical and sexual abuse; and the fetishization of foreign and local gay elites by impoverished young males in search for greater social mobility and erotic freedom that results in the loss of the bargaining power during negotiations about safer sex.”