On a sunny afternoon in early June, Daniel Digashu, Johann Potgieter and their son, Lucas, are preparing to welcome friends to their farm in the north of Namibia. Cold drinks and homemade biltong fill the fridge. The couple have spent days gearing up to celebrate not just Potgieter’s birthday but also a lifechanging victory in a six-year fight to keep their family together.
Two weeks before, on 16 May, Namibia’s supreme court issued a ruling recognising same-sex marriages contracted abroad between Namibian citizens and foreign spouses. South African Digashu and Namibian Potgieter, who wed in South Africa in 2015, were the litigants, along with a German-Namibian couple, Anita and Anette Seiler-Lilles. The verdict finally afforded Digashu and Seiler-Lilles the same rights to a spousal visa as heterosexual couples.
“We can stay here! I’m so happy!,” cheers Anita Seiler-Lilles, 62, laughing as she and her wife arrive at the farm for the celebrations. Digashu agrees: “For my family and myself, this ruling means absolutely everything: we can finally build our lives without the fear of losing it all.”
He hopes the verdict will serve as “a great tool” for Namibia’s LGBTQ+ community. “For Africa, I think this is a glimmer of light.”
More than 30 African countries have laws banning same-sex relationships. Namibia doesn’t explicitly outlaw homosexuality but a colonial-era “sodomy law” criminalises sex between men. While the 16 May ruling only applies to limited cases and does not legalise gay marriage, Digashu’s lawyer, Carli Schickerling, sees it as “the start of real change”.
By ruling that the litigants’ “rights to dignity and equality” were violated, the supreme court conceded “a major principle on which we will argue many cases in the future”, she says.
When the couple filed their case in 2017, after Digashu’s visa was denied, it was the first case in 17 years to be brought to the courts over LGBTQ+ issues, according to Schickerling. Eight other cases have since been filed on questions ranging from residency rights to the recognition of children of same-sex couples, and a challenge to the sodomy law by Friedel Dausab, a longtime activist.
Namibia’s gay community wasn’t always as forthright. In 2001, the country’s founding president, Sam Nujoma, called for homosexuals to be arrested, triggering a wave of attacks. “People were scared to death,” says Schickerling. The country’s first Pride parade was not held until 2013, in a township of the capital, Windhoek.
A 2019-2021 study by the Afrobarometer network has since ranked Namibia as the third most tolerant of homosexuality on the continent, after Cabo Verde and South Africa. Marches in support of the court cases and monthly drag shows have brought together an increasingly visible community. “They will never be able to push us back into the closet,” says Omar van Reenen, co-founder of LGBTQ+ group Equal Namibia.
Wearing pearl earrings and purple nail polish, the 26-year-old activist, who is non-binary and uses the pronouns they/them, sees the battle as “the civil rights issue of our generation”. Growing up in a family previously classified as “coloured” (mixed-race) under apartheid laws, van Reenen was told that their generation was “born free” (after Namibia gained independence in 1990). “But if I’m born free, I should be free to love who I want to love,” they say.
Van Reenen co-founded Equal Namibia in 2021, mobilising in support of a gay couple whose South African-born children were not allowed into the country. “By challenging the courts, we are strengthening the equality clause in our constitution – not just for queer people but for generations of Namibians to come,” they say.
Some disagree. While Digashu and Potgieter celebrate, a crowd of 150 people march in the country’s capital against the recognition of same-sex marriages. “We advocate for an enactment of an act of parliament to explicitly prohibit the practice of homosexuality in Namibia,” says the protest’s leader, Shirley Magazi, chair of the Christian Coalition of Churches.
The government says it is “conducting a legal assessment” of the ruling’s implications “before determining the appropriate course of action within the available constitutional parameters”. In WhatsApp groups with hundreds of members, including church leaders and high-profile politicians, angry members demanded the “beheading” of gay people, calling them “demons” and “un-African”.
The backlash came as a surprise for many, who thought Namibia more tolerant. It echoed rhetoric most recently heard in Uganda, where last month the president signed into law one of the harshest anti-gay bills in the world. “This isn’t the Namibia I thought we were,” says van Reenen.
But hopes are high for the movement’s next steps. Dausab’s challenge to the sodomy law will go to the high court in September. “Queer people are going to be the litmus test to how strong our constitution, our bill of rights, freedoms and liberties really are,” says van Reenen.
The young activist keeps a thick folder of every news story published on LGBTQ+ issues. “One day, we will establish a queer museum in Namibia,” they say, leafing through dozens of pages chronicling Pride parades, protests and court verdicts. “I want to ensure that history knows Namibia is more equal because queer people made sure of it.”
