Meet the Born-Again Christian Who Brought Down Namibia’s Sodomy Laws

This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. This week features a guest interview by Sojourners magazine senior editor Rose Marie Berger. Subscribe here.

It took me some time to track down Namibian gay rights activist Friedel Dausab.

I was listening to BBC’s Focus on Africa this summer when I first heard Dausab interviewed about his role in the landmark court case to overturn Namibia’s anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. In a throw-away line, the host indicated that Dausab was a Christian — and Dausab didn’t equivocate.

“As a born-again Christian, I always go back to Jesus …,” Dausab told the host.

Who was this born-again Christian that brought down Namibia’s sodomy laws? I wanted to meet this guy.

I reached out to my friend and poet Joseph Ross. Joe and his husband Robert have worked with displaced LGBTQ+ Africans in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in northwest Kenya. He didn’t know Friedel, but he knew Pierre in Rwanda who does LGBTQ+ work across Africa. Pierre knew Linda in Windhoek, Namibia. Eventually, we found an email and a WhatsApp contact for Dausab. And he accepted my request for an interview.

He has worked for 25 years serving and advocating for those living with HIV/AIDS. His work culminated most recently in Namibia’s landmark legal decision in June to strike down the sodomy and unnatural sex act laws, inherited from the apartheid era. Dausab was the primary litigant. Following the ruling, Dausab was “evacuated to South Africa” for security reasons, which is where he was for our interview in July via Zoom.

As expected, on July 20, the Namibian government filed an appeal notice in the Supreme Court. The appeal will be heard in early 2025.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Rose Berger, Sojourners: How do you view your work on this landmark legal case as part of your Christian faith, your Christian mission?

Friedel Dausab: Let’s start at the beginning. That’s the best question because it has been on my mind a lot as a born-again Christian, coming from a very Christian background. But it’s also been one of the main contentious discussions in my family, especially with my mom when I made the decision to take the case forward. But it’s also very present in the aftermath of the case, when I speak to my family; and specifically, to my mom, who’s my sole and soul friend over this lifetime, in this journey. It puts into context why it had to be me carrying this case forward.

Let me start with my youth. I was Christian. I was on a farm 70 kilometers from the nearest town. I had just finished high school and arrived at university. I was at university and really just beginning to come out, finding out what it means to be gay, but having this terrible fear of this thing, “HIV,” that’s going around. If it’s linked to gay men, then what does it mean for me and my own sexuality?

I worked as a flight attendant after university. I was around 25 when it happened. I had one of the most terrible messages one can get from a doctor: I tested positive. I was living with HIV. I had to go on the drugs. It was in 1999. If you didn’t go on the regimen, then you had two years to live.

I was at a pivotal point in my career, but I left the airline industry. I just needed to root down.

So, I left Namibia and went on a two-year working holiday in the U.K. During that time, I learned about myself as a gay man and about my faith. It was an important, eye-opening time. I was with several Namibians, and we were quite adventurous! We saw an advertisement for work in a [men’s bath house] in London. We decided to work there.

Over several months, it became such a sobering experience. I began to see what being gay is like in the more-developed, northern part of the hemisphere. I began to feel even that some of that “gay scene” itself was the product of homophobia. Working there, I saw how lonely gay men were. The people from bars and clubs and entertainment venues, wearing designer clothes, who were uppity and thought they were “special,” came to the sauna. And I saw them stripped down to a towel. I could see how lonely they were. I went so far as to being a little bit unkempt, not wearing any fancy clothes, and not doing up my hair; this was a sort of a resistance toward this culture that was so artificial in many ways.

It sounds like a time of growth.

I think now that I was trying to find my way from a family that was scriptural or biblical Christians — which is really where my roots lie — to more spiritual kind of Christianity.

When I was a little boy, my mom had this book of Bible bedtime stories for children. But it was in Afrikaans. That was really my first meeting with Jesus. Reflecting back, I didn’t meet someone in those stories who was so “spiritual” or a “church leader” or a “pastor,” instead I met a human rights fighter and campaigner. I met one who looked after the marginalized; one who would come where disasters were and give peace of mind.

Did the reality of your diagnosis, of living as an HIV-positive gay man, begin to sink in?

It was my diagnosis that really laid the groundwork for taking this case to the courts and where I am now. After I’d been diagnosed, I moved to work in civil society. I started out with the IBIS/World University Service project. IBIS was quite important because they’d been looking after the liberation struggle and [South West Africa People’s Organization’s] continuing education in [refugee] camps in Zambia. After independence, IBIS moved on to work on forming school boards and setting up the educational system in Namibia.

Once the HIV epidemic hit, IBIS responded to it because there were so many teachers and learners dying from the epidemic. I started working with IBIS to implement a project on post-test services. Suddenly there was all this money in the country for testing. Many people were being tested … but there was no medication, no treatment.

We began by walking people through this highly medicalized language of HIV, but also quite discriminatory language. We introduced affirming language. For example, instead of saying someone is HIV “infected,” we would say “someone is living with HIV.” When the campaign would say “Let’s crush AIDS,” we’d ask if they meant crushing those people living with HIV, are they part of the collateral damage? So, we used language like “responding to the HIV epidemic.”

In the early years, I organized support groups and made sure people were getting the mental health support they needed. I also helped people understand what was going on in their bodies, in terms of the clinical nature of the disease’s evolution in their bodies. I don’t know if you remember, but there was such military language and pictures, like “soldiers coming into the body” and “defending” the body.

This was such important work in bringing down HIV rates, which at the time was the leading cause of death in Namibia.

Yes. Over time, I realized that we were making really good progress. We were getting antiretrovirals for mothers to stop medical transmission; expanding sensitive services with health care workers at the points of service; working with local councils to have community-based services available. But, although we were doing great work, I was not seeing the most marginalized people — people like me — getting equitable service at entry points.

So, the work changed again. We created what is now the Positive Vibes organization. I began speaking to some of the Dutch organizations, in particular COC Nederland [a Dutch LGBTQ+ rights group] and soon funding was made available. I then moved to working with a local LGBT organization called the Rainbow Project to start an LGBT health initiative with them.

At that time, the government did not even acknowledge that there were LGBT Namibians. They said, “We don’t have them. What are you talking about?” Even with me sitting there at the table.

So, first, we worked with John Hopkins University on a three-country study where we tested about 100 men in major cities in those countries. This gave us the first prevalence data [to measure the number of people in a population who have a risk factor during a given period].

We used that data to push for a national policy. It was quite successful. Today we have [recognized language] written into the national response, into the national strategic framework [a five-year HIV and AIDS policy document] of “men who have sex with men,” or “gay men and others who have sex with men,” “sex workers,” and more recently “people injecting drugs.”

Working with the Rainbow Project and directly with the LGBT community made me realize the kind of impact of the sodomy laws and the unnatural sexual offenses act had — both on curbing the epidemic of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, but also the impact they had on individual men.

People didn’t have a language to use with health care workers. Men would come to the clinic with an STI but tell the nurse or the doctor that they have a headache, hoping that the doctor would sort of prod them [to uncover the real reason for the visit].

We also knew that there were “forced marriages” or “pretend marriages” for gay men, where they would marry a woman to become more socially acceptable, to keep their status, or to progress in their careers. Conversely, lesbian and bisexual women were forced into marriages with men. Therefore, there was a much higher risk of HIV infection than what the scientific literature seemed to understand.

Did this lead to developing a national strategy?

I soon realized that these laws had to go. They shouldn’t have been there in the first place after independence [in 1990]. All of a sudden we were dealing with a different mission.

There is a clear history to these laws. They are some 491 years old! King Henry VIII, in his quest to usurp power from the Catholics in Rome, issued an edict that made “buggery” and “sodomy” a criminal offence. But it just so happens that in that edict, he also ensured that he could grab the property of the Catholic Church for himself. And then establish the Anglican Church. I guess these laws were a political tool from the start!

After [Namibia’s] independence, we could not continue with that same thinking. So, we attacked the laws by identifying them as colonial; as a useful tool for the apartheid state (from which we had just gotten independence); and finally, [laws that] created two societies. One of Untermenschen, the “subhumans” who are ignored and marginalized, against the “proper citizens.”

We soon realized to what extent the narrative of African Renaissance was confusing respect for diversity, for different sexual orientations, and gender identities which was found in pre-colonial Africa with the codified colonial laws and with understandings of sexuality according to some Christian religious interpretations and biblical proscriptions. That confusion persists up to today.

When I speak to pan-Africanists, I have this need to tell them that these 500-year-old laws come from the source that you are against. They call [LGBTQ+ Africans] puppets of the West and say we want to bring in Western values, but no. Homophobia, hatred of non-heterosexual people, and the thought that non-heterosexual people do not have a place in society comes from the colonial powers.

The colonial powers used these laws to get into our bedrooms, as Black and brown subjects. They used them to ensure that we didn’t intermarry, to ensure that they could burst down our doors and catch us in the most vulnerable moment so that they could hold power over us. If you hold power over someone’s sexuality and what they do in the privacy of their bedroom, then you have almost complete and total control over that person.

I also really take time to say that it’s not just what happened 491 years ago or during colonial times or apartheid times — it is what’s happening right now. There is a huge, both financial and Christian, resistance against the world being “too liberal.”

We see a lot of evangelists, especially right-wing conservative evangelists from the United States, funding African Christians. Through African Christians, they are accessing our politicians with [so called] “model laws” created in the U.S., which then get implemented in our Parliament. So, who actually is puppeteering for the Western power?

That’s how I got into this work, realized what the sodomy laws meant, and that they needed to go. For the last 20 years we’ve been sitting at the policy table, picketing, and pushing.

What was the legal process?

In 2021, we made formal submission to the government as part of the special project on “obsolete laws” linked to those inherited from apartheid. The government asked citizens to identify laws they disagreed with, for them to be scrapped. We put in our submission on these laws. But ours was isolated from the rest and shunted to a special select committee in parliament where it still languishes.

We decided that it was time to use strategic litigation, as one of the many tools in our toolkit — along with the engagement with government, communities, traditional leaders, religious leaders. But we saw that we had a potential opening in the courts, in the constitutional provision that we could challenge apartheid laws, that we can ask our courts whether these particular laws were in line with our new constitutional values after independence.

You mentioned the book your mom had of children’s Bible stories and you seeing Jesus as a human rights advocate. How has that image changed over time?

When I was first coming out, I went through several sessions of “pray the gay away.” I would be told that I needed to go see a certain priest, apostle, or prophet and that they would help pray over me, etc. It didn’t really turn out to be that great. Because one of the questions I always had was: Who do you want me to lie to? I know that this feeling in me — “feeling” was the best way to describe it back then — has been enduring. I was willing to go through the prayer, but if this doesn’t go away, who do you want me to lie to — God or you?

And that would usually end the [efforts to] “pray the gay away.” I would be told that I have too many demons.

My work with gay men and other minorities also made me realize to what extent people in our communities feel rejected by the church. Even feel assaulted by the church because the sermon would change when we walk into the church. Suddenly, the pastor would start teaching on Sodom and Gomorrah or Leviticus or one of the other “clobber” texts.

We became very concerned that young people rejected from church were placing themselves in danger zones. They would then hang out with other people who felt rejected. Namibia is very Christian in that sense. You’re either in or you’re out. You cannot push your way back in.

Outside the church there was this culture of drinking and drugs and sexual expression that was not so healthy. But because of the loss of familial support and other support systems, many young people were having what I would describe as “survival sex,” so that they had a place to sleep, food to eat, a community that protected them.

For me, this was a huge crime. I kept asking myself: What would Jesus do?

I ended up speaking to my mom a lot about it. She has had her own journey, alongside mine. First, I came out as a gay boy, then I told her I was HIV positive. It was the worst nightmare for a caring Christian woman who was a missionary for much of her life. She received her calling as a young girl. She worked for the Evangelical Lutheran Church on early childhood development centers, opening kindergartens, schools, and hospitals for the church.

At that moment, we both realized that people sometimes have to do unpleasant things in order to meet God, in order to be in [God’s] presence. We asked: To what extent is the legal, social, political environment forcing people to do things they don’t really want to in order to survive [or] in order to “come back to God.” And what role do we as Christians play to … make sure that people are feeling welcome even though the institutions and those powerful within the church would have rejected them? What can we do as fellow Christians to hold the space for people who want to return to God, to return to Christian service, return to Christ? That’s where my mother and I could really understand each other.

What did your mom think about you taking the case to the court?

When I decided to take this case to court, the question that my mom asked me was: Do you want to change God’s law or man’s law? So, we had to think through what that meant. What was God’s law versus what was man’s law? Of course, I had done more reading on contextual readings of the Bible on arsenokoitai [Greek word translated in some English Bibles as “homosexual”] and all of these words that are used to impute homosexuality in the Bible [but actually] mean something completely different. Or the Bible being used [to prevent] women from attaining higher levels of leadership within the church. We talked a lot about that.

We talked a lot about what this [sodomy] law specifically meant. To the point where my mom is actually one of my biggest supporters now. She went to court with me on that day. She stood at my side and spoke as a mother. Her way of understanding is a little bit different from mine. But she asked about what do we do in society when you have a child that is not “normal” in the sense that the world would have it be “normal”? Do you take the child and drop them at someone else’s house? Or do you take care, as she says it, of your own “problem”? She speaks to Christian women and Christian mothers on how we deal with children that may not be accepted by the world? Do we reject them and let them go on a rubbish heap? Or do we take them and take care of them because that is our spiritual duty?

How has your own spirituality developed over time? How do you practice it now?

I do a lot of breath work. I do a lot of meditation. I do a lot of prayer. I do go to church as well, intermittently. At the moment, I’ve got a really good church. I go to the home cell [small group], as well. It’s very biblical, and it helps to balance my overly spiritual nature, my natural spirituality, when we do Bible study and are really reading the Bible deeply.

I do the breath work because it dawned on me that that is the one gift that we got directly from our Creator in the process of our embodiment. I’ve seen its effects on my own health, my own mental stability, et cetera, that once I do breath work, I’m a lot more sociable, amicable, calmer.

I’m also doing an international course on intuition and healing,

My spirituality is not just with prayers and reading the Bible. Reconnecting with nature is so important in a spiritual journey. To be able to be barefoot on the ground, barefoot on the grass; able to go to an ocean or a sea, to hug a tree or sit next to a tree stump; to go out in the rain and feel the water on our skin. These simple things like breathing and eating.

What was it like sitting in the court room, your mom in the gallery and you sitting with the legal team, when the judge actually says the words that these laws are unconstitutional?

I couldn’t believe my ears at first. In the background, before we got into court, there were serious safety and security measures. There was a bodyguard that was looking after me and my mom. There was a feeling of distance between me and my community, between me and other people in court that day.

But also, the High Court judge was speaking so softly. I had to lean forward to hear what exactly he was saying. No one was sure if he would read the whole verdict or just the result. Everyone was quiet.

Then I realized I was hearing the words “unconstitutional and invalid, unconstitutional and invalid.” That’s when I realized it was done, that we had won. The law is no longer there. It will not be used any longer as a noose around the necks of gay men.

Now, even if it takes a bit of time, people will be more liberated to talk about their own sexuality and to deal with it. Not just gay men, but in general our society or even in our Christian communities, which have a lot of problems dealing with sexuality, and questions with their own personal sexuality, their sexual choices, to such an extent that we prefer “pretend holiness” around our sexuality and then judge others who may not deal with sexuality the way that we believe they should or the way that some believe the Bible prescribes. When I heard those words, it was just the moment of liberation.