In Namibia's Rainbow Project, Robert Lorway provides an ethnographic study of a Namibian LGBT organization in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Like other countries in southern Africa, Namibia has a history of state-sponsored homophobia in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with SWAPO politicians calling for the arrest, detention and deportation of LGBT citizens. LGBT Namibians founded the Rainbow Project (TRP) in 1997 to combat this persecution. From its Windhoek-based office, TRP also aimed to persuade the government to supply full equal rights to LGBT Namibians, despite the government's rhetoric that they were immoral, un-African and outside the bounds of the morality of the nation state. Lorway details for readers the experiences of a group of young people (whom he calls the Rainbow Youth) – men and women in their late teens and early twenties who lived in townships, attended TRP workshops and classes, and cooperated with advocacy and political organizing to combat state-sponsored and local homophobia.
Much of the text addresses the intended and unintended effects and consequences of TRP's rhetoric and practices on how the Rainbow Youth learned to see themselves, experience their gender and sexual identities, and relate to other LGBT people, their family, neighbours, communities, and the nation state. TRP taught attendees at their workshops how to get in touch with their desires – both for intimate and sexual relationships and also for affect and self-presentations. TRP encouraged youth to be out and proud about their gender and sexual identities and to celebrate sexual differences and diversity. However, there were limitations to how TRP intervened in the lives of this group of young people. At the same time that youth were encouraged to embrace themselves, their bodies and their desires, the organization was silent about other aspects of their lives. In particular, Lorway draws attention to the way in which TRP largely ignored the effects of neoliberalism and structural violence – in employment, gendered violence, inequalities and high HIV/AIDS rates. Despite youths’ calls for help with material inequalities, TRP focused almost exclusively on the LGBT Namibians’ need for equal human rights. As a man named Tuli eloquently puts it in the book: ‘Most of us do not need our rights to be fought for. Right now we need to be socially and economically emancipated!’ (p. 2).
Lorway also draws attention to a disconnect in the lives of the Rainbow Youth. While they often demanded equality in their public lives and from the state, reporting homophobia and homophobic violence to TRP, they were also very likely to be involved in violent interpersonal relationships that they did not see as requiring intervention or politicization. TRP was also largely silent on this type of abuse in the Rainbow Youths’ lives. As Lorway so aptly states: ‘The journey toward “freeing” their desires often plays into other forms of subjugation’ (p. 105).
A strength of the book is its rich ethnography. The reader gleans a strong sense of Lorway's main informants’ lives, how they change over time, and the positive and negative impacts of their involvement in TRP. Lorway also clearly depicts how violence operates, both structurally and personally, for LGBT people in Namibia. Although it is not his main project, it would have been compelling to hear more about how Namibia's LGBT politics are situated in relation to other countries in southern Africa and what commonalities and differences we can see between places such as Zimbabwe and South Africa and Namibia. Overall, Lorway convincingly illustrates that the refiguring of identity categories and subjectivities by Western aid organizations is not the solution to Africa's problems with homophobia or to the violent dilemmas faced by so many LGBT Africans. As in many other circumstances involving Western aid, it often does more harm than good.
