The false notion that “being gay is un-African” is one of the most dangerous misconceptions driving violence, marginalisation and discrimination against people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, or hold other gender and sexual identities (LGBTQIA+) on our continent.
It is homophobia and queer-phobia which are un-African. They are Western, conservative missionary prejudices, imported to the continent alongside the colonial exploitation which followed rapidly in their wake.
Unfortunately, the malign influence of European and US evangelical Christian and ultraconservative groups did not release its hold on our continent with the waves of independence which began in the mid-20th century and culminated in the 1990s with the liberation of Africa’s last settler colonies — Namibia in 1990 and South Africa in 1994.
It continues to this day, powered by a combination of international dark money and anti-LGBTQIA+ disinformation, proliferated using the reach of social media technology.
It is this combination of forces which brought about the passage this week by Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni of the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2023 — one of the world’s harshest pieces of legislation criminalising homosexuality and making so-called “aggravated homosexuality” punishable by death.
The bill was signed into law a mere 12 days after the May 17 International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia — the date commemorating the World Health Organisation’s decision in 1990 to declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder.
It is possible to draw a line between the British anti-sodomy laws codified in Uganda through the Penal Code Act of 1950 and the passage of this draconian law in 2023: both constitute the legitimation of retrograde Western conservatism in Africa, with no deference towards or even cursory consideration of cultural or historical context.
Addressing the nation, Museveni professed a years-long interest in understanding LGBTQIA+ issues, which led him to conclude that "it's not genetic, it's not hormonal. It's because somebody, after some experience, hates the people he should love and then loves people he should not love.”
These years of study were funded, aided and abetted by a network of US ultraconservative white evangelical organisations, estimated to have spent in excess of $54m (about R1bn) on the fight against LGBTQIA+ rights, family planning support and sexual education in Africa since 2007.
At a two-day inter-parliamentary conference on “family values and sovereignty” over the weekend of March 31, Museveni declared that “Africa should provide the lead to save the world from this degeneration and decadence, which is really very dangerous for humanity. If people of opposite sex stop appreciating one another,” he added, “then how will the human race be propagated?”
The irony and the tragedy of Western Christian missionary organisations peddling homophobia and sexism under the guise of protecting Africa from a Western, imperialist 'gay agenda' is breathtaking
The conference was co-hosted by the US evangelical Christian organisation Family Watch International, which lobbies from within the UN and around the world for an ultraconservative anti-LGBTQIA+ and anti-feminist agenda.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a US civil rights organisation, has classified Family Watch International as a hate-group which promotes “anti-LGBT pseudoscience that includes the falsehood that homosexuality is a mental disorder derived from childhood trauma, and that so-called 'conversion therapy' can effectively eliminate same-sex attraction”.
Attendees of the conference included MPs and delegates from 22 African countries, alongside a group of unnamed British MPs, according to Uganda’s State House.
An October 2020 investigation by the UK independent media group openDemocracy identified a network of 28 US Christian organisations — many of which were linked to the administration of former president Donald Trump — which had spent more than $280m around the world funding campaigns and lobbying for legislation undermining women's and LGBTQIA+ rights.
openDemocracy also found that between 2008 and 2018, a secretive US religious group called The Fellowship Foundation drafted Uganda’s anti-gay legislation and spent $20m in the country working to get it passed into law.
Yet there appears to be no accountability in the US for these dangerous and unscrupulous organisations which, when they fail to achieve their extremist outcomes in their home country, interfere in the legislative agendas of sovereign nations to which they export their crude form of hatred and misogyny.
During her official visits to Ghana, Kenya and Zambia earlier this year, US vice-president Kamala Harris was quick to excoriate African states criminalising or considering the criminalisation of sexuality and gender identity.
While rightly expressing her lifelong commitment to “human rights issues and equality issues across the board including ... to the LGBTQ+ community”, Harris failed to mention the non-state US entities infiltrating diplomatic channels whose purview should be her government’s rather than those of a rogue group of religious extremists.
The irony and the tragedy of Western Christian missionary organisations peddling homophobia and sexism under the guise of protecting Africa from a Western, imperialist “gay agenda” is breathtaking, and a serious matter in need of attention and remedy from our continent’s political and government leaders.
And as the governments of the US and Europe traverse the continent in an effort to promote democratic governance and human rights, they should likewise turn their attention to holding accountable the homegrown extremists undermining their diplomatic agenda.
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