Namibia's Rainbow Project

Namibia's Rainbow Project

Abbreviation	TRP
Formation	1996
Type	Non-governmental organization

The Rainbow Project (TRP) was a non-governmental organization that advocatesd on behalf of LGBT people in Namibia. It provided resources to these marginalized communities, and worked to counter homophobia, and its consequences, for both sexual minorities and the broader Namibian community. At its inception, TRP was the only organization of its kind that focused on the injustices against, and abuse of, all sexual minorities in the country. This was in contrast to other prominent Namibian LGBT organizations like Sister Namibia, which primarily supported lesbians.  

Central to the mission of TRP is the provision of resources to the LGBT community, including education, social services and suicide prevention counselling. It also does advocacy work, and, since 2006, it documents hate crimes against sexual minorities. It also works against damaging stereotypes. For instance, Namibian leaders have publicly attributed the HIV epidemic to homosexuals, even as official government reports demonstrate that heterosexuals engaging in unprotected intercourse are the main transmitters of the disease in Namibia. In response, TRP advocates for HIV–AIDS prevention strategies that are sensitive to the experiences of sexual minorities--and do no use homophobic misinformation--in the pursuit of ending the epidemic.

Origins

Prior to 1989, Namibia was under the colonial rule of South Africa. Under South Africa's Apartheid government, homosexuality was condemned. Upon becoming an independent nation, and the SWAPO Party coming to power, LGBT Namibians hoped they would finally be able to live in peace. The SWAPO party had a political platform of "equality for all Namibians", however 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. When it began, 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.

TRP's founders were mostly white and coloured LGBT-identified, middle class, non-Namibians. By 1997, however, it was documented that the organization's membership was mainly young, black, and unemployed Namibians. In response, 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. They also hosted 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), stating that there were 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.” The radio show 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. They argued that the criminalization of sodomy was 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 Legal Assistance Centre (LAC) on how best to proceed with their campaign. LAC, initially on the behalf of TRP, worked to clarify Namibian prosecutor's interpretation and enforcement of anti-sodomy laws in the country. LAC would later continue the public campaign without TRP as TRP's visibility made them targets for SWAPO's increasing antigay antagonism.

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 was not. It didn’t lead to visible action beyond compelling public officials to clarify how the law would be enforced. As recently 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" and “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 claiming 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 condemned the Deputy Minister's homophobic statement as 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 Namibian president, Hifikepunye Pohamba, enforcement of her resignation, asserting that her endorsement of homophobia posed a threat to the lives of all Namibians.

In July 2006, TRP issued an official statement condemning the remarks of former SWAPO Party President, Dr. Sam Nujoma. Nujoma used the term “homosexual” to refer to Phil ya Nangoloh, the director of NSHR. While in power, the SWAPO party carried out government-sanctioned repression of LGBT-identified and suspected individuals across Namibia.In their statement, TRP explained that Nujoma’s use of the term “homosexual” to refer to the NSHR director 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 President Pohamba to condemn the verbal attack and to “maintain his government’s pro-human rights stance.”

Contributions

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 to 2007, the soup kitchen was operated twice weekly and served the needs of the majority young, black and unemployed membership. The resource center provided and maintained entertainment materials and a collection of literature on safe sex practices, HIV/AIDS, and 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 “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, literature, 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: Gender and Sexuality in Namibia, scholars argued that the scarcity of economic resources, gender inequality, and social stigma pose 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-identified as heterosexual, even while engaging in homosexual acts, refusing to wear condoms because they believed HIV is a disease only homosexuals could catch.

Criticisms

In 2015, Robert Lorway published Namibia’s Rainbow Project, in which he discussed 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 HIVOS's leadership were self-identified as coloured and white, university-educated people South Africans while the TRP Rainbow Youth was composed of poor, Black Namibians without a university education. 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.”

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.