Namibia

The religious diversity of the southern African nation of Namibia, dominated since colonialism by Christianity, stems from centuries of cultural interaction. Before colonialism, the supreme deity, Kalunga, presided over the Bantu-speaking Ovambo. With their onganga ritual, experts regulated relations with ancestors and healed illness. Today, Herero flag associations, composed of Christian men, commemorate colonial-era heroes and ancestors by visiting their graves and asking for good health. European missionaries saw such ideas as both bridges and challenges to Christianity, but populations of African descent, which also include San, Khoi, Nama, and Damara, have struck a balance with the mainline Christian heritage of the “mixed-race” Baster and Colored populations, both of whom speak Afrikaans, and the country's small White minority.

The London Missionary Society began evangelizing the Nama in the early 1800s, translating the Bible into Nama. The Rhenish Mission Society of Germany (RMS) and the Finnish Missionary Society (FMS) followed. The RMS targeted the Herero, translating the Bible into Herero in the late 1800s, at a time when Herero and Nama were warring over grazing lands. RMS field reports strongly influenced German colonial perceptions of Africans as indolent, arrogant, and devious, helping justify the ruthless colonial repression of armed Herero and Nama anticolonial resistance and to incite the Herero genocide of 1904. Herero and Nama survivors were interned in concentration camps with some assistance from the RMS, whose members ministered to the refugees. Herero survivors converted to Christianity, in part to restructure their decimated society. But in 1955, they initiated the autonomous Oruano Church. Other African-initiated churches also emerged, including the FMS-derived Evangelical Lutheran Ovambo-Kavango Church.

During and after World War I, South Africa occupied Namibia, imposing its apartheid system of racial segregation. African-initiated churches and the Anglican, Lutheran, and Catholic Churches opposed South African rule before and during the long rebellion [Page 867]led by the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO). Then, after Namibia became independent in 1990, Christians sharpened their focus on issues related to gender and sexuality in the era of HIV/AIDS. In the 1990s, many pastors discouraged condom use, but the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) fought back, winning President Nujoma's backing in 1999 for the distribution of female condoms. But in 2001, he ordered the police to “arrest, deport, and imprison” lesbians and gays, invoking Christian rhetoric. And in 2003, the U.S.-PEPFAR (President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) initiative, influenced by conservative U.S. Christian groups, began funding AIDS treatment and programs promoting sexual abstinence over prevention education and harm reduction. In response, Namibian women have sustained their say in making sexual decisions with their partners, closed illicit bars known as places of sexual license, and worked to maintain the availability of female and male condoms in their country. Once again, Namibians have articulated their faiths amid global influences.