Celebrating a Win, Preparing for the Next Fight: LGBTI+ Rights in Namibia

In June 2024 the High Court in Namibia issued an historic ruling overturning the country’s colonial era sodomy law. For the first time since the country achieved independence in 1990, LGBTI+ people weren’t living in fear of prosecution for having consensual relationships. The plaintiff in the legal challenge which led to the overthrow of this discriminatory law was Friedel Dausab, a Namibian LGBTI+ and HIV rights campaigner who we celebrated with our lifetime achievement award last year. 

A year after the High Court verdict Friedel told us about LGBTI+ life in Namibia, how he decided to challenge the sodomy law and what has changed since the verdict.

What’s life like for LGBTI+ people in Namibia?

Namibia is a country with a very small population, 3 million in total, in a country that is three times the size of Germany. You have to drive for at least an hour to get from one town to the other, and most of the towns are small. 

To find community, most people find a way to the bigger cities once they come out. Windhoek is our capital city and that’s where many LGBTI+ people move to, so it’s also where much of the LGBTI+ organising takes place. But we also have vibrant LGBTI+ communities in the coastal towns of Walvis Bay and Swakopmund, which is where I live.

Why did you decide to challenge the sodomy law?

I’ve been an LGBTI+ and HIV rights activist for over twenty years and one of the real barriers I’ve repeatedly come up against in that activism is the anti-sodomy law. The law criminalised consensual sex between men and obviously if you have the threat of potentially being prosecuted hanging over you it’s going to be difficult for you to come out, but also for you to find community, to access the healthcare you need, really just to live your life freely.

It was not an individual decision to challenge the sodomy law. Back in 2017 a group of LGBTI+ and human rights activists in Namibia got together to discuss whether we thought the time was right to mount a legal challenge. We decided that, yes, we could challenge the law, but we knew that we would need someone to be the plaintiff in the case. A legal challenge had to be brought in the name of an individual who could show that their human rights were impacted by the discriminatory laws.

That person would need to be prepared for the fact that their face was going to become very known within Namibia, they would be the gay man. We knew the case would take years, so they would need to be OK with that.

For quite a while we were looking for this person to challenge the law. I literally had a list of names of people who we were approaching! And then one day someone said, look, couldn’t you be the litigant? So that’s when I realised that maybe I could. I got involved in LGBTI+ organising from public health organising as a young HIV positive person, because I realised that the law was having a really negative impact on the fight against HIV. And so in some ways this was the culmination of what I’d been working for.

How did the court case happen?

Of course, it all took time. We first started talking about challenging the sodomy law in 2017, we filed the official challenge to the law in 2022. We provided our evidence and I was very visible, standing up in court to explain how the law impacted me and breached my human rights. That did make me a bit of a target and there were quite a lot of threats made towards me.  

It wasn’t until June last year that we got the ruling we’d been waiting for: the laws which criminalised consensual sex between men had been ruled unconstitutional by our High Court. Finally, it was no longer illegal to be gay in Namibia.

What have you seen happen since the court ruling?

The overturn of the sodomy law was a really important moment for the LGBTI+ rights movement in Namibia and I’d love to say that it’s all been sunshine and roses since then, but actually, it’s a mixed bag of things that have happened.

Before the ruling in my case, there was an earlier court ruling on recognising same-sex marriages conducted abroad, after which we saw lots of organising by groups who are opposed to LGBTI+ rights. By the time my victory came in court, there were already anti-LGBTI+ private member’s bills presented to our cabinet, and debates in parliament with the regular tropes against the LGBTI+ community: that we are Satanists, that we are after going after children… all of them that you can imagine were mentioned.

When those sort of things are being said publicly there’s always an effect. We’ve really seen a rise in violence. Between March last year and March 2025 there were at least seven homophobic or transphobic murders of LGBTI+ people. The last one was a really brutal murder of a trans woman, which actually caused a national outcry from all sectors, including the church.

Early this year, in January 2025, our government proclaimed an amendment to the marriage law, explicitly outlawing same-sex marriage. At the same time, they also passed an amended birth and death registration bill that outlawed legal gender recognition, which was previously possible. And so we are now in a situation where we don’t know what happens to couples that were already married overseas and are living as families in Namibia, or with trans individuals who had legal gender recognition. 

What this all demonstrates is that we need to celebrate our victories, but we also need to understand that these victories most likely will come with a backlash, and so we need to prepare for both. 

How has your life changed since the court case?

My role has changed from working on HIV response and community building to being the safety and security focal person. We’ve had to put in place a safety and security infrastructure in the country that would take care of any backlash, because we need to keep our community safe and over the last year we’ve been helping so many people who were turned on by their families, people who were evicted from their homes, people who were brutally attacked.

We’ve seen the rise of the anti-gender movement in the media, and money for anti-rights groups is flooding into the country as a result of our victories. And the Government is appealing the verdict of the High Court to try to reinstate the sodomy law, so at some point there will be a Supreme Court hearing on the case. 

I’ve really learned the importance of having a strong support system around me. What sustains me is my family, particularly my mum, but also my brothers and sisters. Also the support of my rainbow family, my LGBTI+ family, who give me a shoulder to cry on and then pick me up to give me the strength to continue to fight. 

What’s next for LGBTI+ rights in Namibia?

We know that legal cases are just one part of the fight for LGBTI+ rights. We are also working to engage with the Government, to engage with the media, to engage just with ordinary Namibians to change hearts and minds. Kaleidoscope Trust has been supporting the Diversity Alliance of Namibia for over seven years now. It’s that kind of long-term support which allows us to strategise and to fight for freedom and equality. 

The struggle for LGBTI+ rights is a long one, and freedom is not achieved in one court ruling, important though that may be. 

In December 2024 Friedel Dausab received the Kaleidoscope Trust Lifetime Achievement Award, in recognition of his decades-long commitment to LGBTI+ activism in Namibia. In June this year he was named as the inaugural commissioner for the Global LGBTI+ Commission.

Find out more about our support for the Diversity Alliance of Namibia here.