#MeToo Activism in Namibia: Sex-Positive Feminism and State Cooperation in the Fight to Stop Rape

#MeToo organizing has captivated the imagination of social-media-savvy feminist, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ), and sex worker rights activists who have mobilized against sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) throughout southern Africa (Ajayi 2018). In Namibia, the words "Me Too" have become much more than a hashtag on social media. They name a coalition that has formed to offer support to SGBV survivors, provide a platform for survivors to share their stories, and advocate for sex positivity. Unlike other national manifestations of #MeToo organizing (Fileborn and Loney-Howes 2019; Gieseler 2019), #MeTooNamibia organizing emerged from sex-positive protests of SGBV experienced by cisgender women and girls, LGBTQ people, and sex workers. This essay explores the genealogy of Namibian sex-positive feminist organizing that culminated in the #MeTooNamibia coalition.

To explore the dimensions of anti-SGBV and #MeToo organizing, we draw on analyses of Namibian newspaper reports about anti-SGBV organizing and more than forty interviews that the first author conducted with Namibian feminist, LGBTQ, prisoner's rights, and sex worker rights activists in 2019. We consider productive disruptions that #MeToo organizing against SGBV offer for Namibian feminist antirape organizing. By "productive disruptions," we mean the unsettling of anti-SGBV feminist activist spaces, strategies, and tactics in ways that cultivate new feminist activist constituencies and cooperation with different social actors. Inderpal Grewal and Srila Roy highlight how, as an issue, sexual violence is politically "productive" in that it affects so many people and saturates so many social institutions that the potential for feminist resistance continues to multiply (2017, 256). Following Roy and Grewal, we treat innovative, feminist antirape tactics as disruptions that are similarly productive. Productive disruptions include harnessing sex-positive messages to challenge structures and practices that reproduce sexual violence, mobilizing feminist, queer, and sex worker rights activists through online tactics, and collaborating with political leaders, such as First Lady of Namibia Monica Geingos. We argue that productive disruptions motivate the #MeToo movement in Namibia through advances in sex-positive feminist organizing against SGBV and cooperation with state leaders (Roy 2017; Tripp 2001).

Antirape Organizing in Namibia

Much feminist organizing in Namibia has remained autonomous from the state, allowing activists to maintain an "'outside' position" from which they can critique state actors' stances, inaction, or campaigns (Beckwith 2000, 442). Predating Namibia's independence from South African rule, which occurred in 1990, early antirape organizing diagnosed and criticized racial disparities in the state's handling of rape cases. Feminist activists launched Rape Crisis Namibia in 1989, after Rape Crisis, a South African feminist antirape organization and the Legal Assistance Centre in Namibia, hosted a workshop in Namibia about organizing against sexual violence (Namises and Feris 2016). Louisa, a Black woman, and feminist activist in her 60s, recalled how the context of "apartheid and colonialism" legitimized the state's racialized decision to prosecute Black men for rape and not to prosecute white men for raping Black women (interview with first author, June 20, 2019, Windhoek, Namibia). According to Louisa, a catalyst for feminist antirape organizing involved the "case of a Black man who raped a white woman, and he was to go to the gallows" if convicted. Louisa stated that Rape Crisis Namibia framed "rape as an act of power [by men] over women" to subdue women. Since independence, multiple feminist nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), such as Sister Namibia and Women's Solidarity Namibia, have tackled SGBV as NGOs autonomous from the state (Britton and Shook 2014; Hubbard and Solomon 1995). Feminist antirape activists offered two reasons for the persistence of SGBV in Namibia: the fact that perpetrators of wartime rape faced no "accountability" after the end of the struggle against South African apartheid rule and backlash against women's gains in human rights, equality, and employment such that one could interpret rape as men "violently putting women back in their place" (Britton and Shook 2014, 155).

Despite their autonomy from the state, feminist antirape activists in Namibia have continually turned to the state as the primary agent for redressing...