Leaked emails reveal how Africa became ‘primary target’ of anti-LGBTIQ actors
US and European hate groups and conservatives used disinformation and lobbying to influence gender debate in Africa
When leading European and US anti-abortion activists and campaigners gathered in London in 2013, they planned to create a Europe-wide conservative think tank that would influence reproductive, LGBTIQ+ and gender rights across the region.
Within three years, the Agenda Europe network had decided to expand its work beyond Europe’s borders. It turned its attention to East Africa, where Uganda had already passed the 2014 anti-gay law that was soon after annulled by its constitutional court later that year.
The network’s plan? To expand its conservative agenda on sexual health and rights to Africa, impacting the lives and safety of queer people in the region.
openDemocracy has obtained thousands of emails that reveal how Agenda Europe members worked to achieve these aims by spreading disinformation, plotting campaigns and lobbying leaders across East Africa.
Their messages – sent between 2013 and 2019, when the network rebranded after having grown to 400 members – involved sensationalist content, seemingly intended to fan anti-queer sentiment among allies in Africa.
For instance, one such email sent on 23 February 2016 wrongly claimed Swedish politicians who were arguing for LGBTIQ+ rights were also seeking to legalise necrophilia and incest – describing this as “hair-raising”. This narrative that queer activism goes hand-in-hand with normalising criminal, non-consensual acts is offensive disinformation – but it was encouraged by the sender, Stefano Gennarini, who said it was “very helpful with Asians and Africans”.
Gennarini is the vice president for legal studies at the Centre for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam), a US organisation considered an anti-LGBTIQ+ “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC). C-Fam’s director, Austin Ruse, was also active in the Agenda Europe network, where he suggested in a separate email that Africa had become a “primary target” because right-wing backlash against queer communities was already in motion.
Africa, Ruse wrote, “is more sympathetic” to conservative values than Europe, which he described as “one of the perpetrators of this abominable [progressive] agenda”. He continued that “Europeans can take of themselves”, suggesting anti-gender activists increasingly believed Africa was the best place to exercise their influence. On another occasion, Ruse solicited Agenda Europe members for names of “friendly” African organisations, which he claimed he could help to access US federal funding.
Sian Norris
The emails confirm what African civil rights campaigners have known for some time. European and US neo-colonialist actors and attitudes continue to warp democracy in the Global South by finding common cause with anti-queer movements across the continent. At least 31 of 54 African countries still criminalise consensual same-sex activity, according to an Amnesty International briefing, with several countries adopting increasingly draconian anti-queer legislation that sits atop pre-independence colonial laws.
“The struggle for freedom and liberation as we know it did not end with independence; it is a continued struggle,” said Olabukunola Williams, the sexual and reproductive health and rights lead at Uganda-based feminist NGO Akina Mama wa Afrika (Mothers of Africa).
“Patriarchy requires imperialism, white supremacy and capitalism to survive, and the freedom of African countries requires dismantling these interconnected systems of oppression,” she told openDemocracy.
Agenda Africa
In its early years, Agenda Europe did not dedicate much time to discussing LGBTIQ+ rights in Africa. That changed in 2015, when Sharon Slater became more vocal within the network.
Slater is the founder of US organisation Family Watch International (FWI), a lobbying organisation that campaigns against comprehensive sexual education and for “family rights”. She soon became a regular contributor to the Agenda Europe email chain, where she was upfront about her focus on Uganda. In March 2016, she emailed the group claiming that her documentary, The War On Children, which falsely claims that sex education aims to “indoctrinate” and “sexualise” children, was “making a stir” in Uganda and “generating protest at the Ministry of Education”.
The year after the documentary’s release, emails seen by openDemocracy show Slater asked members of the Agenda Europe network for “suggestions … pictures and videos we should include” in a new film on “the sexual rights agenda”. It is not known if any members responded to her request.
The War On Children enjoyed a resurgence in Uganda in the early 2020s when it was shown on Code Green, a television show on Christian network Spirit TV. The show also hosted two local anti-rights campaigners: Pius Okiror, a lawyer at Agenda Europe member Human Life International Uganda, and Alex Bwesigye, an executive secretary at Life and Family Umbrella Uganda. Both presented Slater as an expert and lauded the documentary’s talking points about homosexuals targeting children.
There is no evidence that LGBTQ+ people “target” children, with research repeatedly showing that LGBTQ+ people do not abuse, groom or “target” children at higher rates than non-LGBTQ+ people. According to the American Psychological Association, children are not more likely to be molested by LGBTQ+ adults than by heterosexual adults, nor is there any evidence that gay people try to “recruit” children.
“These Western groups have radicalised Ugandans into hatred, and have influenced extreme conservative draconian legislations like the anti-gay laws,” Frank Mugisha, the executive director of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), told openDemocracy. SMUG is one of the queer organisations that has faced government suppression in recent years.
Soita Khatondi Wepukhulu
Slater has in the past had a well-documented relationship with Ugandan pastor Martin Ssempa, an enthusiastic supporter of the country’s 2014 so-called ‘Kill the Gays’ bill. (Uganda’s constitutional court declared the law “null and void” soon after it was introduced because there had not been enough MPs in Parliament when it was passed.) FWI’s website named Ssempa as its Africa coordinator until 2014 when both the organisation and Slater cut ties with him over his advocacy of the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality”, though he was still listed on the FWI website as a volunteer until 2015.
More recently, Slater attended the 2023 African Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Family Values and Sovereignty, where she urged Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni to add a clause to the AHA on “conversion therapy”, a discredited practice that attempts to change a person’s sexual orientation.
Weeks after the conference, Museveni wrote to Parliament saying he had supported this “rehabilitation” clause but was forced to reconsider due to the cost it would have inflicted on the government. FWl has since claimed to oppose the AHA, and its website says: “Mrs. Slater did not advocate for Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill then, or ever.”
Elsewhere in East Africa, both Tanzania and Burundi recently led a crackdown on the LGBTIQ+ community, including the 2018 creation of a surveillance squad in Tanzania dedicated to hunting down and arresting gay people.
“The majority of what we are seeing happen in Uganda, as regards to anti-LGBTQ+ campaigns, and in other parts of Africa is influenced by the West, especially from the United States,” said Frank Mugisha.
Exporting Homophobia
The leaked emails suggest Agenda Europe was given new momentum to target Africa by Donald Trump’s surprise presidential victory in the US in 2016.
Two days after the election, some of the network’s members discussed how best to leverage Trump’s win. Among them was Trump’s then-lawyer John Eastman, who has since been criminally indicted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.
The leaked emails show the group made plans to coordinate a letter from African leaders to Trump about the “impositions of the sexual left”. Brian Brown from the World Congress of Families – another US coalition that the SPLC designates a hate group – suggested his colleague Theresa Okafor “takes the lead” on this. Ruse of C-Fam boasted of his closeness to Trump advisers Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, assuring the group that “we can put [the letter] in the right hands”.
“This foreign influence demonstrates what we as Africans know to be true, that it's homophobia, transphobia that is un-African, not homosexuality,” said Clare Byarugaba, the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion officer at Chapter Four Uganda, an organisation furthering civil liberties and human rights in the country.
In response to openDemocracy’s request for comment, Brown said “we do not do interviews with paid Soros shills” and to “put that in your article.” Such claims that journalists or progressive causes are controlled by George Soros, whose philanthropic foundation is one of many funders of openDemocracy, are often linked to antisemitism and far-right conspiracy theories.
According to the emails reviewed by openDemocracy, Slater, Brown and Ruse were the most vocal members of Agenda Europe about Africa issues, along with the founder of Spanish anti-rights group CitizenGO, Ignacio Arsuaga.
CitizenGO has an office in Kenya, where it campaigns against abortion, LGBTIQ+ rights and sex education. In 2018, it took a bus decorated with the message that “you can’t change sex” to Nairobi. That same year, the city hosted Brown’s 2018 World Congress of Families annual conference.
In 2019, the Kenyan High Court reaffirmed the country’s anti-LGBTIQ+ laws. Last year, Kenyan MP Peter Kaluma sponsored a Family Protection Bill which would further stigmatise the community. CitizenGO, and its allies in Kenya, are supporting the move, including through disseminating online petitions urging for its passage into law.
Slater had sent an email to the group gushing about CitizenGO’s anti-gender bus on International Women’s Day the previous year, after it received media coverage during a PR journey to New York. She wrote that it was “so wonderful” that Arsuaga had brought attention to the “radical gender agenda”.
The emails reveal that two weeks later, Slater told members that a second film planned by FWI would include footage of “the anti-gender bus” and organised for Arsuaga to speak about “gender ideology and the gender bus” at a meeting for the UN Family Rights Caucus. The caucus is a coalition of anti-rights actors and lobbyists that Slater set up and chairs, whose stated aim is to “protect and promote the natural family”. The group has no affiliation with the United Nations, although FWI has consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations.
Agenda Europe disbanded in 2019, reforming as the Vision Network, due to “ongoing confusion about the relationship between the Agenda Europe Network and a blog/Twitter account with the same name”, according to a 2019 email sent by the email group administrator. The move also followed a report by Neil Datta, the director of the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, which exposed the network’s tactics in rolling back women’s and LGBTIQ rights.
The Vision Network’s website states that it operates in Africa.
US-based Agenda Europe member organisations Family Watch International, Alliance Defending Freedom, Human Life International, and World Youth Alliance all increased their budgets in Africa during the time Agenda Europe was active, and since, according to openDemocracy’s analysis of the organisations’ US tax returns between 2015 and 2022. We found that the groups spent a total of $2.9m in Africa during that time. Money is typically dispensed in near secrecy due to a lack of financial transparency laws, or their poor enforcement, in the countries in which they operate – making it difficult to accurately track the organisations’ spending.
Family Watch International and C-Fam did not respond to openDemocracy’s request for comment.
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