Editorial: Rights denied, history ignored

The long shadow of colonising and apartheid forces continues to impact basic human rights and attitudes in much of Africa, including Namibia.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who spoke out against apartheid's persecution of people for their ethnicity, drew a direct parallel between state-sponsored racism and homophobia.

"I could not keep quiet when people were hounded for something they did not choose, their sexual orientation."

Scholars widely agree that contemporary laws and anti-LGBTQ attitudes were, in large part, imposed by colonial powers.

"In fact, instead of bringing homosexuality to the continent, what white colonisers brought was the very idea that homosexuality should be treated as a criminal offence," writes sociologist Gustavo Gomes da Costa Santos.

Prof Abadir M Ibrahim goes further, arguing that legalised homophobia in Africa "is based on false premises" and that precolonial Africa expressed gender and sexuality through diverse, culturally specific frameworks, and that it was colonialism that introduced the religious and legal norms that policed them.

It is worth being clear: precolonial attitudes were not uniform across African cultures. But same-sex relations were present, recognised and in many places accommodated. The modern era’s pro-homophobia stance, Ibrahim argues, is "deceitful in how it legitimises a colonial imposition as something that is essentially African”.

Namibia's justice minister recently argued that equal rights for queer Namibians "is just a policy of a few nations who want to impose it on others", that in the African context, the practice "has been intolerable since time immemorial”.

The vast archives of research say otherwise.

It’s also worth remembering that homophobia, racism and apartheid are linked through their shared foundation in systems of oppression and dehumanising rhetoric. The colonial attitudes Namibia clings to are not tradition. They are the imposition of brutal systems of oppression.

Namibia's queer citizens deserve equal rights and dignity in law and daily life.