Namibia's Rainbow Project by Robert Lorway

Author:Robert Lorway [Lorway, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, LGBTQ+ Studies, Gay Studies, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9780253015273
Google: O9wMBQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2014-11-28T03:29:08+00:00

They are so brave. I have never been to TRP yet, but someday I want to go there to attend their sexuality workshops. But I am just not ready for that. I am too afraid of what people will think of me around here if they know I am a lesbian. Maybe people will stop coming to buy food from me if they find out.

Monica, who turned twenty-one years old that day, recounted her early experiences of sexual coercion:

When I was eleven, if a man tried to touch me, I always had a fist for him. If a woman did, that was a different thing [smiles]. A friend of my family, he came and told me I must do it [have sex]…. I was fifteen. I didn’t want to. He forced me, and that day I was pregnant. That was the only time I had ever had sex with a man. That day I also became HIV positive.

Over the course of a few months, as I came to know her better, Monica admitted that she occasionally had sex with some of her clients for money: “I just don’t make enough selling fish, you know. I have to pay school fees for [my child] and my younger brother and sister. I am the eldest daughter.” Eventually Monica attended a few of TRP’s special events with Hanna and told me she had started to feel more confident about herself. However, she still continued to have sex with men in exchange for money not only to help support family members but also to afford the foods required to be taken with the antiretroviral drugs that had been prescribed for her when her CD4 cell count dropped significantly in 2005.

Later that year Hanna finally decided to get tested for HIV and wanted me to join her. As we arrived at the steps leading up to the New Start HIV Testing and Treatment Centre, Hanna’s elder Wayne was just leaving with some nutritional supplements and a package of oatmeal that he needed to take with his HIV antiretroviral medications. Once inside the reception area, Hanna asked if I would remain in the waiting room until she received her diagnosis. When she came out of the office, she was overjoyed and began to cry with relief: “I can’t believe it, I’m going to live!”

Toward the end of August 2005, Hanna met and fell in love with an older European lesbian woman, Georgina, whom she met at a social gathering organized by TRP. Georgina, who had just arrived in Namibia, was eager to begin her feminist development work, which was, she explained quite confidently to me, “to teach Namibians that they cannot be so violent!” I was somewhat surprised by Hanna’s choice of new sexual partner, as Georgina presented herself in a masculine way in her attire and comportment—not the usual feminine object of Hanna’s desires. Hanna explained to me, however, that she was excited to be in this relationship, because she was finally in a relationship that was fifty-fifty.

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