On May 16 2023, in a ruling contrasting with the growing anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment across Africa, Namibia’s Supreme Court recognized same-sex marriages contracted abroad between Namibian citizens and foreign spouses. This ruling – the culmination of a harrowing six-year legal battle for the couples involved – was received as a significant victory for Namibia’s LGBTQ+ community, raising hopes for further steps towards full equality.
While Namibia doesn’t explicitly ban homosexuality, “sodomy” is criminalized under a colonial-era law. But the country’s LGBTQ+ community has become increasingly visible since 2019, when a series of court cases on queer people’s rights to marry, start a family, and live and work in the country freely came into the public light, challenging what campaigners call “State-sanctioned homophobia.”
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Public protests, court hearings, and Pride parades have encouraged the birth of a new generation of activists and campaigners who use visibility as one of their most powerful tools. Vibrant monthly drag nights have popped up in Windhoek, the capital, and young campaigners have stepped into the limelight at home and internationally to advocate for queer rights in Namibia and across the continent.
Omar van Reenen is one of them. The 26-year-old co-founder of EqualNamibia has been a central voice for the movement, even recently bringing its message to an audience of thousands at the Berlin Pride Parade.
Van Reenen grew up rarely seeing any stories about other queer people, but they tell LGBTQ Nation that, “If 6-year-old Omar opened a newspaper today, they would read about drag nights, drag queens taking up space, organizations fighting for intersectional visibility of queer women, lesbian voices… That empowers queer people to know that there’s nothing dehumanizing or undignified about you: that you belong in this country.”
South African Daniel Digashu, on the other hand, was pushed to become something of an “accidental activist” when the Namibian Ministry of Home Affairs and Immigration refused to grant him a spousal residency visa, despite his now eight-year marriage with Namibian Johann Potgieter. The couple’s case was filed in 2017 and, along with German-Namibian couple Anita and Anette Seiler-Lilles, ended with the victorious Supreme Court verdict in 2023. Seeing and experiencing firsthand the toll that the legal battles took on his own and other litigants’ mental health prompted Digashu to start studying psychology and dive deeper into LGBTQ+ rights in the region.
The ruling hasn’t come without backlash, however: Attacks on queer Namibians have risen, along with aggressive homophobic discourse. In July, the National Assembly passed a bill contradicting the Supreme Court decision and defining a spouse exclusively as “one half of a legal union between a genetically born man and a genetically born woman of the opposite sex”.
Photojournalist Chris de Beer-Procter has chronicled the evolution of Namibia’s LGBTQ+ movement since 2021, between protests, victories, losses and agonizing waits. This is an intimate look at the experiences of two activists fighting for their rights to live and love in Namibia.