Every June, the world erupts in rainbow colours. Corporate logos transform overnight. Development partners such as UN family and International Cooperations issue carefully worded statements about diversity and inclusion. Social media fills with declarations of allyship that, come July, quietly disappear.
Pride Month arrives dressed in celebration. But for many ordinary LGBTIQ people in Botswana, it arrives dressed in something far more complicated; a question we cannot stop asking ourselves:
What, exactly, are we celebrating?
I ask this not as an outsider looking in. I ask it as someone who stood at the heart of one of Botswana’s most defining moments in the struggle for queer rights, as one of the litigants in the landmark Thuto Rammoge case against the Government of Botswana, the case that compelled the state to legally recognise LEGABIBO after it had refused to do so simply because the organisation represented lesbian, gay and bisexual people.
I was in those courtrooms. I know what hope felt like in those rooms. And I know what it feels like now, over a decade after the Thuto Rammoge judgment, and years after the decriminalisation ruling, to still be waiting for that hope to reach the people it was supposed to free.
Botswana has, without question, made historic strides. Our courts have delivered progressive rulings that would be remarkable in any context on this continent. In 2019, the High Court decriminalised same-sex relations, striking down colonial-era provisions that criminalised intimacy between consenting adults. The Court of Appeal upheld that decision, affirming that human dignity cannot be selective. Our judiciary has shown genuine constitutional courage, repeatedly and publicly. These were not small victories. They were seismic. They changed the legal architecture of this country, and they deserve to be named as such.
But here is the uncomfortable truth that my extensive years of working with communities; in homes, in clinics, in community halls, in government offices and in international development agencies has taught me: a right that exists only on paper is not a right. It is a promise the state made and has not kept.
Today, many queer people are still navigating rejection at home. Many still fear violence. Many are still denied jobs and quality, non-discriminatory healthcare not because the law permits it but it does not but because no institution is actively ensuring the law is enforced. Many still sit silently at family gatherings where pastors and relatives casually preach hatred in the name of morality. Many still shrink themselves to survive workplaces, churches, schools and communities that remain hostile because nobody in authority has told those communities that the constitution applies here too.
The law decriminalised queer existence. But it did not and cannot on its own decriminalise queer people in the minds and hearts of society. That second transformation requires something the courts alone cannot deliver: intentional, sustained implementation.
And that is precisely what has been missing.
Decriminalisation without implementation is like building a road that leads nowhere. The infrastructure exists. But the people it was meant to serve cannot get through.
We know from decades of human rights practice across Africa and globally that legal reform is the beginning of the journey, not the destination. The moment a law changes, the harder work begins: training healthcare workers to treat queer patients with dignity; sensitising police officers who are often the first point of contact for queer people experiencing violence; ensuring schools have the frameworks to protect LGBTIQ learners; equipping civil society with resources to hold institutions accountable.
This is not abstract theory. This is the practical infrastructure of equality. And Botswana has not built it with any urgency.
Meanwhile, the opposition to queer inclusion is loud, organised and politically motivated. Religious leaders and conservative voices remain deeply invested in policing queer existence. Figures like former Cabinet Minister Biggie Butale have positioned opposition to LGBTIQ rights as a rallying cry. The commentary surrounding ongoing same-sex marriage debates has been deeply revealing, spend even a few minutes in those spaces online and you encounter levels of anger, disgust and obsession directed at queer people that are, candidly, frightening. And perhaps what is most painful is not simply the opposition itself, but the intensity of the hatred.
Which raises a question that I think we are often too polite to ask in public: what is the source of that pain?
Why does the existence of queer people provoke such emotional outrage? Why does another person’s identity feel like a personal attack on people who have never met them? Why do some people experience constitutional equality as though it were an act of aggression against themselves?
These are not legal questions. They are social, psychological and spiritual questions and they point to the reality that homophobia is rarely truly about queer people. It is about fear. Fear of difference. Fear of change. Fear generated by rigid, inherited frameworks of masculinity, gender and morality. It is often unresolved anxiety projected outward and it is consistently weaponised by those who find political or religious power in keeping communities divided.
Understanding this does not excuse it. But it is important, because it tells us that legal change alone was never going to be sufficient. You cannot litigate prejudice into extinction. You have to meet communities where they are, engage them honestly, and rebuild understanding from the ground up. That is the work. Long, slow, unglamorous work and it requires government, civil society, institutions and ordinary citizens to all be part of it.
True equality is not measured by what courts declare. It is measured by whether a queer child can grow up without shame.
I want to be honest about where I am sitting emotionally as I write this, because I think honesty is what this moment demands.
For the first time in a long time, I carry real hope. President Advocate Duma Boko has, throughout his public life, stood with minorities, defended constitutional freedoms and spoken about the dignity of all people including queer people. For many LGBTIQ persons in Botswana, this matters enormously. Leadership that recognises your humanity changes the emotional atmosphere of a country. It signals to institutions that they are expected to follow. It signals to communities that equality is not optional.
Perhaps, for the first time, many queer people in this country are beginning to imagine futures beyond mere survival. And that imagination and the ability to plan, to dream, to consider what a full life might look like is itself a kind of justice.
But hope is not a policy. And good intentions at the top do not automatically translate into changed conditions at the bottom. The gap between progressive leadership and transformed lived realities must be bridged deliberately, with resources, with accountability mechanisms, with a national plan that treats LGBTIQ inclusion not as a politically sensitive afterthought but as a constitutional obligation.
That plan does not yet exist. And so we must name that absence.
Botswana now stands at a crossroads that we have, frankly, been standing at for too long. We can continue congratulating ourselves for our progressive courts while doing nothing to translate those victories into changed conditions. Or we can begin the harder, more necessary work of changing institutions, building social support structures, funding community education and ensuring that every organ of the state understands that the constitution it swore to uphold applies to every single citizen, without exception.
Because this is what equality actually looks like in practice: a queer child in a rural village grows up without shame. A lesbian woman can rent a home without discrimination. A gay man can walk into a clinic without humiliation. A trans person can exist without becoming a spectacle. A queer couple can plan a future together without negotiating their own safety at every step.
That was the Botswana many of us were fighting for when we walked into those courtrooms. It is the Botswana my late Best friend and Comrade Thuto Rammoge was hoping and fighting for. It is the Botswana we have not yet built.
Pride is not simply a celebration. It is a reckoning. It is the refusal to pretend we have arrived when we clearly have not.
This is why Pride Month still matters , not because we have fully arrived, but precisely because we have not. It matters because visibility remains an act of courage in a country where queer people still navigate daily hostility. It matters because somewhere, a young person in a small village in Botswana needs to know they are not alone and that their country’s constitution says they deserve to be here just as fully as anyone else.
But Pride must also be a moment of unflinching honesty. Honest about the gap between our legal progress and the lives people are actually living. Honest about the work that has not been done. Honest about the fact that celebrating legal victories while people suffer is a form of dishonesty; comfortable for those of us who can afford to celebrate, but meaningless for those still waiting.
Botswana’s democracy has proven it can produce progressive law. The question this Pride Month is whether it is ready to do the harder thing: produce justice.
Not justice in theory. Justice in daily life. Justice you can feel.
That is what we were fighting for. And that fight is not over.