Being a Public Lesbian in Namibia: Reflections on Some Recently Experienced Absurdities
Liz FrankWhen in early October the Namibian Minister of Home Affairs, Jerry Ekandjo, urged 700 graduating police officers to arrest gay and lesbian people and "eliminate them from the face of Namibia," my lover and I did not hastily pack our bags and seek political asylum in another country, although as the publicly known couple "Liz and Elizabeth" we would not have been too hard to find and arrest. Indeed, our names and address were contained in my file at the Ministry of Home Affairs, where I had repeatedly applied for permanent residence in Namibia on the basis of my professional experience as well as our long-standing lesbian relationship.
We stayed put because one week after Ekandjo's outbursts, the Supreme Court of Namibia had to deal in detail with the question of my permanent residence. My application had been rejected twice by the Ministry of Home Affairs with no reasons given. With the assistance of the Legal Assistance Centre I then won a High Court judgement in June 1999 which ordered the Ministry to grant me permanent residence within 30 days, stating that my lesbian relationship was recognized by a court of law as a "universal partnership" (equal to that of an unmarried heterosexual couple) and should have been taken in my favour by the Ministry. The Ministry then appealed this High Court decision, and thus it came before the Supreme Court on 9 and 10 October this year.
It seems that Minister Jerry Ekandjo was not aware of this court case. When challenged by the BBC Radio about his homophobic remarks he claimed that he had not discriminated against Namibian gays and lesbians because there weren't any! He could have known from the court documents prepared by his own ministry that there is at least one Namibian lesbian – my partner.
Or had the Ministry of Home Affairs disqualified her from "Namibianness" because one of her great grandfathers was German? Was that perhaps even seen as the cause of her lesbianism? How many generations of pure Africanness must she prove to be an authentic Namibian lesbian? Or does her relationship with me, a foreigner, disqualify her altogether? Luckily she lays no claim on being an "authentic" anything but sees herself as a person who has fallen in love with another person who also happens to be a woman.
For me, coming from Germany, the discourse of lesbianism as a "foreign, unafrican" phenomenon needing to be "eliminated" or "uprooted" conjures up images of Nazism: German people being forced to prove their Aryan ancestry or face annihilation in the gas chambers as Jews. German homosexual people were also labeled a "foreign body" in society and met with the same fate as the Jews.
For my Namibian partner, memories arise of the South African/Namibian Immorality Act and its prohibition of love across racial boundaries. Both Jerry Ekandjo and the Minister of Women's Affairs and Child Welfare have recently called on Namibians to stop having relations with foreigners. (Considering the possibly quite widespread phenomenon of German or Afrikaaner great grandfathers, how many authentic Namibians do we actually have, and, given our small population, aren't they forced to sleep with non-authentic Namibian foreigners to avoid incest?) Presumably the Ministers had heterosexual couples in mind with this discourse. But where does this leave my lesbian lover and me?
Some of our political leaders seem to be embracing Apartheid after ten years of independence from the "old" South Africa. Their project of "nation building" is based on the principle of exclusion - the list of those positioned as "outside" the "Pan Africanist" nation is extended every time a new subject of critique or discontent emerges. But gay and lesbian people by now have a permanent place on that list.
In calling for the arrest and elimination of gay and lesbian people in Namibia, Jerry Ekandjo claimed that our rights are not protected by the Namibian Constitution. Other members of government and parliament hastily quashed an opposition-led motion of no confidence in the Minister and maintain a deafening silence on this issue up to today. What will the Supreme Court judges say?
They have the option of skirting the issue by dealing with my application for permanent residence on a purely administrative level, following the appeal of the Ministry of Home Affairs that lesbian relationships are not referred to in the Immigration Act (unlike in South Africa) and should thus be ignored.
Or they can take on the challenge of ruling on the constitutional rights of Namibian gay and lesbian people and their foreign partners, knowing that after the most recent Ekandjo outburst the whole world is watching. However, such a judgement does not look promising after witnessing the Supreme Court hearing two weeks ago.
The learned judges and the learned counsel for the government had difficulty finding a common language for their deliberations. One kept contrasting "heterogeneous" relationships with "self-sex" relationships. Another kept referring to "this gender thing". A telling moment arrived when the government counsel quoted the Bill of Rights of the South African Constitution, which prohibits discrimination inter alia on the grounds of "sex and gender". "What is gender?" interrupted one of the judges. "I don't know," admitted the government attorney." "I don't know either!" stated the judge in a tone that implied there was no difference and that the mothers and fathers of the South African Constitution were fundamentally misled to think otherwise.
While rolling my eyes in shared horror with other observers in the public gallery, I felt instant empathy for our Minster of Women's Affairs and Child Welfare, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah. How hard has she and her staff struggled to "mainstream gender" in all government departments over the past how many years? Where have these judges and this lawyer been?
But my empathy for the Women's Minister galled as I recalled her oft-repeated definition of gender, which according to her was crafted in preparation for the Beijing World Conference on Women to ensure that the issue of lesbian women's rights was kept out of the Beijing Platform for Action and any future documents on women and gender equality.
In 1999 for example, the Minister launched an attack on the Namibian Women's Manifesto for including the issue of lesbian rights. "Notably, the Beijing Platform for Action has defined gender to mean men and women. Such a definition has become necessary … as some opportunists attempted to introduce issues that were not and still are not gender-related, to satisfy their individual needs. The code word used was sexual orientation; that means gays and lesbians. Such an element was totally rejected and the word sexual orientation does not appear anywhere in the Beijing Platform for Action." (Address by Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah to the Elected Women's Forum, Windhoek, 8 October 1999)
A few points shall be made here then to assist our learned judges and our Minister of Women's Affairs and Child Welfare to broaden their understanding of "gender."
Firstly, the Beijing Platform for Action does not define gender, it seemingly states that "the word 'gender' as used in the Platform for Action was intended to be interpreted and understood as it was in ordinary, generally accepted usage …" (Annex IV to the UN Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing Platform for Action: "Statement by the President for the Conference in the Commonly Understood Meaning of the term Gender.") So this does not help us any further.
Secondly, while not referring explicitly to sexual orientation, the Beijing Platform for Action states that "The human rights of women include their right to have control over and decide freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, discrimination and violence." (Article 96) Lesbian and bisexual women are not specifically excluded from this right.
Thirdly, let's take a closer look at the Minister's definition of "gender as men and women" and as having nothing to do with sexual orientation. In fact the gender regime of our society makes heterosexuality the normative sexual orientation. Children are expected to grow up into women and men who are different but complementary along gender lines. Girls and women who do not conform to culturally accepted norms of femininity are labeled as butch or lesbian; boys and men who do not conform to culturally accepted norms of masculinity are derided as "moffies."
In many societies lesbian girls and women are physically attacked, raped, murdered, forced into pregnancy, locked up in mental hospitals or given electro-shock "treatment" to cure them of their non-conformity to the gender regime. The oppression of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people is thus an integral part of keeping the current gender regime in place, in which men are "masculine" and women are "feminine" and heterosexuality is the only legally and socially sanctioned sexual orientation.
Unfortunately for the homophobes amongst us, this does not make lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Namibians disappear. Trying to erase us from UN documents or Women's Manifestos does not eliminate us in real life. For that the Minister of Women's Affairs will need the Minister of Home Affairs' police.
But let the Ministers, like the Supreme Court judges, be aware that the whole world is watching.
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Vol 7, December 2000 |
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