Vast flows of money from Western anti-rights groups have been spent to eviscerate the rights of LGBTIQ people in Africa, setting the stage for much of the repressive and dehumanising anti-gay legislation on the continent today.
But while progressive allies in the West, and even Joe Biden’s US administration, may be acknowledging the havoc wreaked by these groups in Africa, they have remained both unwilling and unable to act decisively to stop them.
The World Congress of Families, Family Watch International, and the Fellowship Foundation are some of the US groups linked to the organising that set the stage for the 2014 and 2023 anti-LGBTIQ laws in Uganda; a similar bill underway in Ghana; and another feared to be on the verge of introduction in Kenya.
All three countries retain British colonial-era penal laws on homosexuality that criminalise sex “against the laws of nature”, but legislation within the past decade has prescribed extreme penalties, including death.
African rights campaigners have called for these groups to be sanctioned – but have been met with silence.
Ineffective responses
To have genuine and meaningful impact, the backing provided to African queer communities must be more than just finger-wagging at African homophobes. Rather, the West must finally listen to and act on more than 15 years of efforts by African queer organisers to bring to account US groups and citizens linked to the fashioning of repressive legislation on the continent, but this has not been the case.
In May, after Uganda’s Museveni signed the Anti-Homosexuality bill into law, US president Joe Biden issued a statement on the legislation’s implications on the relationship between the two countries, warning that the US government was “considering additional steps, including the application of sanctions and restriction of entry into the United States against anyone involved” in human rights abuses. The statement made no mention of the US citizens and groups who had rallied, sponsored and organised to see the passing of this law in 2023, as they did in 2014.
This stance mirrored the one in 2014, when the US government sanctioned Ugandans involved in the legislation and also cut off support, including health aid. Under the Biden administration, the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which gives Uganda about $400m in aid each year, was indefinitely deferred planning for activities in Uganda beyond 2023.
Under conservative regimes like Donald Trump’s, right-wing groups made massive headway in funding and strategy, while liberal ones under Obama and Biden continued to pay lip service to allyship or wield indiscriminate sanctions. The loser remains the queer African. Rights campaigners have highlighted the harmful side of America’s response towards queer rights in Africa.
These moves by Western governments are built to paint them as saviours of African queers who are being targeted by their fellow Africans and need to be whipped into line. Western donor states are quick to issue statements bursting with warnings of the consequences of bigotry, and reminders about the promises made by the signing of some international rights treaty, or the firm friendship of the two countries on the basis of shared values.
But Western intervention through threats and one-way sanctions only reinforces the homophobic narrative that the struggle for queer rights in Africa is a foreign one and feeds the notion that homosexuals wield outsized influence. It erases and diminishes the decades-long work of native campaigners not only to create safe communities for queer people on the continent but also to fight colonial-era homophobic laws, undo imperialistic framings of queer identities, and counter Western-exported homophobia and cultural wars.
The irony still of these threats and sanctions is that they are oxygen to the homophobic African political elite, a badge for them to flaunt as the last man standing against imperialism in defence of African values. These elites have learned to use both the anti-homosexuality laws and the expected responses of the West for political points and legitimacy. Sanctions against them often translate into political longevity at home. Nine years after the US government sanctioned former MP Bahati (now a state minister), he is a mainstay in Ugandan politics and was an inspiration for MP Asuman Basalirwa, who introduced the 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Law to Uganda’s parliament. The Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni is known to use homophobia as a “populist lever”.
Sounding the alarm since the mid-2000s
LGBTIQ activists in Africa have been sounding the alarm on Western anti-rights actors and their influence in Africa since at least the mid-2000s. Kapya Kaoma, a Zambian pro-queer rights activist and researcher, was one of the first voices to connect US evangelical groups to plans for maximal laws against LGBTIQ people in Africa, specifically in Uganda.
In 2007, Scott Lively, a US evangelical homophobe, started corresponding via email with Ugandans Martin Ssempa, an anti-gay pastor and campaigner, James Nsababuturo, then a member of the cabinet and Bahati, the MP who, in 2009, introduced the original Anti-Homosexuality Bill, dubbed the “kill the gays” law. The bill was passed in 2014 but was declared void by Uganda’s constitutional court on technical grounds of lack of quorum.
In 2009, Kaoma was one of the first people to warn Ugandan LGBTIQ activists about Lively and his strategy to spread anti-gay ideology in the African country to subvert the so-called “homosexual agenda”.
Three years later, the LGBTIQ organisation Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) tried to hold Lively accountable by bringing the matter to the attention of the Western legal apparatus. The organisation sued Lively in a federal court in Massachusetts, USA, accusing him of whipping up anti-gay hysteria and hate against the queer community in Uganda, in violation of international law.
The judgment came in 2017 with mixed results. The court agreed that Lively’s “actions in aiding and abetting efforts to demonise, intimidate, and injure LGBTI people in Uganda constitute violations of international law” – but SMUG lost the case on technical grounds. The court found that Lively’s actions on US soil were “not sufficient to give this court jurisdiction over [SMUG’s] claims”.
In an interview with openDemocracy in May, Frank Mugisha, executive director of SMUG, said that with the case against Lively, the US government had “turned a deaf ear” to their efforts.
The judgment foreshadowed what activists like Mugisha could best expect from the liberal West. An acknowledgement that right-wing anti-rights US citizens are spreading hateful propaganda in Africa, resulting in actual harm to queer Africans, but that their own governments cannot stop them.
Western imperialism positions white supremacist ideas as worthy of export, and enables white US citizens like Slater to wield the privilege of their passports to spread hateful and dangerous ideology in the Global South. These same systems protect other Global North citizens like Lively from accountability while making it easy to condemn and sanction their African collaborators.
But if Western allies are to extend effective solidarity to queer Africans, they must understand that queer and reproductive rights on the continent are neither a playground for Western anti-rights groups nor another opportunity for Western governments looking to score imperialistic points.
