Ashley Currier

Political Homophobia in Postcolonial Namibia

The South West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO) delivered Namibia from South African apartheid rule in 1990. Namibia’s democratic future began with the promise of equality. In 1995, however, SWAPO initiated a campaign of political homophobia. In this article, I make a case for viewing SWAPO leaders’ deployment of political homophobia as a gendered political strategy. I draw on a qualitative analysis of 194 articles from Namibian newspapers published between 1995 and 2006. My analysis illustrates two features of political homophobia. First, I demonstrate how political homophobia stifled political dissent and enhanced SWAPO leaders’ masculinist position and legacy as liberators. Second, I show how SWAPO leaders used political homophobia to expel gender and sexual dissidents from official accounts of history.

The Aftermath of Decolonization: Gender and Sexual Dissidence in Postindependence Namibia

Since the late 1990s, Namibian gender and sexual dissidents have publicly challenged homophobic statements made by leaders of the South West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO), the country’s ruling political party. In this article, I treat Namibian gender and sexual diversity organizing as a decolonization movement contesting SWAPO’s grip over the trajectory of decolonization. To illustrate how gender and sexuality movements operate as decolonization movements, I analyze how feminist and LGBT activists have responded to SWAPO leaders’ political homophobia since 1995. I draw on an analysis of twenty-eight in-person, qualitative interviews with Namibian LGBT activists and four months of ethnographic observation of the activities of Sister Namibia, a feminist organization, and The Rainbow Project, an LGBT movement organization, that I conducted in 2006. I also analyzed 338 Namibian newspaper articles published between 1995 and 2010 that mention homosexuality, antihomosexual sentiments, or LGBT activism.

Civil Society and Sexual Struggles in Africa

Questions of sexuality often remain peripheral to both the agendas of African civil society organizations (CSOs) and those who study civil society operations in different African nations. However, in the last two decades, political and religious leaders in a number of African nations have attacked sexual diversity. In response to the threats of state repression against gender and sexual minorities, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Africans have formed activist organizations to support LGBT constituents and to promote gender and sexual minority rights as human rights. This chapter explores the form and content of contemporary African “sexual diversity struggles,” a term that refers to efforts to defend gender and sexual dissidence and to promote laws and policies that affirm gender and sexual diversity. This chapter contextualizes the rise of sexual diversity struggles throughout Africa and profiles the involvement of different civil society actors such as LGBT movement organizations, HIV/AIDS nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), women’s rights NGOs, and faith-based NGOs, in these struggles. Different CSOs lobby lawmakers to decriminalize same-sex sexualities, shelter gender and sexual minorities from hostile opponents, and develop local and transnational networks of sympathetic bystanders, lawmakers, foreign donors, and diplomats. This chapter pays particular attention to the transnational dimensions of African sexual diversity struggles and how local CSOs navigate the tensions and rewards that accompany transnational advocacy around LGBT rights.

Decolonizing the law: LGBT organizing in Namibia and South Africa

This chapter considers how lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists in Namibia and South Africa appropriate discourses of decolonization associated with African national liberation movements. I examine the legal, cultural, and political possibilities associated with LGBT activists’ framing of law reform as a decolonization project. LGBT activists identified laws governing gender and sexual nonconformity as in particular need of reform. Using data from daily ethnographic observation of LGBT movement organizations, in-depth qualitative interviews with LGBT activists, and newspaper articles about political homophobia, I elucidate how Namibian and South African LGBT activists conceptualize movement challenges to antigay laws as decolonization.

Pursuing social justice through public health: gender and sexual diversity activism in Malawi

African lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) organizations face various strategic dilemmas in contexts characterized by political hostility to gender and sexual dissidents. In Malawi, we examine how an LGBTIQ social movement organization (SMO), the Centre for the Development of People, navigated one particular strategic dilemma – the dilemma of whether to adopt a less politicized public-health approach or a more nimble, grassroots-oriented, and social-justice approach to their advocacy work. We also examine the consequences of the organization’s strategic decisions. Scholars interpret these approaches as signifying differential political engagement among organizations, with the social-justice approach indicating political engagement and the public-health approach signalling political disengagement. This difference has led critics to argue that a public-health approach is poorly suited to generating social and legal reform because it depoliticizes LGBTIQ issues over time, while a social-justice approach exerts constant pressure on political and religious elites. Drawing on qualitative interview data with Malawian LGBTIQ activists and news media data reflecting public debate around homosexuality in the country, we illuminate how this SMO metamorphosed from an organization ostensibly focused only on public health and HIV/AIDS to one that advances social justice for gender and sexual dissidents. We argue for an understanding of the indigenous development of a hybrid strategy integrating the public-health and social-justice approaches.

When Rape Goes Unnamed

Abstract Marshalling research about male rape and unwanted sex in contemporary African contexts, this article explores how cultural definitions of sex and sexuality affect African sexual minority mens perceptions of rape, non-consensual sex and unwanted sex in Malawi, a country in which same-sex sexual practices are stigmatised and punished. We analyze two divergent accounts of unwanted sex offered by two gay Malawian men the first author interviewed in 2012. Feminist and queer theoretical insights about representing the agency of African gender and sexual minorities guide our inquiry. Our analysis shows how activist socialisation can intervene in and reshape how African sexual minority men perceive and name unwanted and/or coercive sex.

Understanding Same-Sex Marriage Debates in Malawi and South Africa

Using a discursive institutionalist approach, we examine the connection between discourses about same-sex sexualities and institutional outcomes around same-sex marriage in Malawi and South Africa. Beginning in the mid-2000s, politicians in Malawi began politicizing and deriding same-sex sexualities, but in South Africa, lawmakers, at the request of the judiciary, investigated legalizing same-sex marriage. Most Malawian political elites regard same-sex marriage negatively, but many South African political elites and activists favorably view same-sex marriage as a right in this postapartheid nation. In Malawi, elites’ “discursive anxiety” about same-sex marriage in the country conflated same-sex marriage with any lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) rights campaign. In South Africa, LGBTI activists strategically framed marriage in terms of human rights to satisfy Constitutional Court judges of its importance in building South Africa’s nascent democracy.

Overlapping publics and the negotiation of legitimacy in South African and Namibian sexual politics

ABSTRACT This article explores how and why social movement organizations negotiate their presence in, and demands on, multiple public spheres. We analyse the strategies of two social movement organizations, Free Gender in Cape Town, South Africa, and Sister Namibia in Windhoek, Namibia. Free Gender elected to withdraw participation from a governmental task team convened to address the issue of homophobic violence, despite the opportunity this offered the organization to participate in national politics. Sister Namibia, by contrast, decided to maintain its public presence despite experiencing political homophobia from the ruling party, the South West African People’s Organisation. We contribute to the literature on public spheres and social movements by demonstrating the need to consider the overlapping nature of public spheres in South Africa and Namibia at the local, national, and transnational levels to account for activists’ strategic decisions.

The politics of pre-emption: mobilisation against LGBT rights in Liberia

Abstract Research on political homophobia in contemporary African nations tends to focus on the legal, political and social consequences of such homophobia. However, this work remains limited in its treatment of the rise of political homophobia and mobilisation against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights. This article redirects such research by concentrating on the indigenous origins of mobilisation against LGBT rights in Liberia. Focusing on the efforts of the New Citizens Movement (NCM), an antigay movement organisation, we outline how NCM pursued a ‘politics of pre-emption’ to prevent pro-LGBT rights legislation and organisation from taking root in the country. By ‘politics of pre-emption’, we mean mobilisation intended to ensure that another movement’s imagined future does not materialise. The politics of pre-emption captures a little-understood feature of the dynamics of opposing movements: mobilisation to pre-empt the rise of another social movement. We analyse semi-structured interviews we conducted with 45 Liberians, including anti-LGBT activists and supporters and pro-LGBT activists and supporters and dozens of articles from Liberian newspapers to trace NCM’s politics of pre-emption as a strategy used by opposing movements.

Digital Strategies and African LGBTI Organizing

African lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) organizing has become transnational in scope, partly due to the efforts of activists who use digital strategies to bring international attention to LGBTI human rights violations and to generate wider visibility for their plans. These digital strategies have succeeded in eliciting international concern about political homophobia and anti-LGBTI discrimination and violence. However, international interest in African LGBTI organizing has generated unwanted consequences for activist organizations; these consequences include anti-LGBTI backlash and draconian anti-gay legislation. In other cases, using digital strategies has put some LGBTI activist organizations in positions that allow them to marshal international influence and to pressure government officials to capitulate to their demands. Scholars have raised ethical questions about the transnational dimensions of African LGBTI movements’ digital strategies. By publicizing local LGBTI human rights abuses, activist campaigns contribute to the image that African nations are by and large homophobic, a cause for concern. In addition, when activists in the global North become involved in transnational campaigns that draw attention to discrimination and violence against LGBTI people in different African countries, there is a risk that Northern activists can hijack online petitions and campaigns for their own ends (Gunkel 2013). In this chapter, we discuss the merits of and drawbacks to African LGBTI activists’ use of digital strategies and analyse how mobile technologies and digital tactics can betray activists’ intentions. We use several case studies to explain the contours of LGBTI movements’ deployment of digital strategies in different African countries.