“You can’t just impose Western values on people in Ghana,” a family member said to me recently.
We were talking about how Ghana’s parliament passed a brutal anti-LGBTQ+ bill late last month. Gay sex is already illegal in Ghana, but this bill threatens to be one of the most draconian on the African continent. Under the proposed Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Act, people who engage in public displays of affection with people of the same sex and promote LGBTQ+ activities could face more than a decade in prison. Ghana’s president, Nana Akufo-Addo, has said he will not sign the bill into law until the Supreme Court rules on its constitutionality.
Ghana has long prided itself on being the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to gain its independence, in 1957. The current government, under Akufo-Addo, has tried to fashion Ghana as a Black Zion of sorts, a refuge for Black people — in the West in particular — to escape racism and state brutality.
So the question remains: What values are being embraced here? Leaders say the anti-gay bill is intended to protect African tradition, but it embraces the worst of Western, colonial-era values. It weaponizes Western religion to justify the use of state brutality to punish minorities, and it expands penal codes and prison systems.
Under the proposed law, every citizen is deputized to “promote and protect … human sexual rights and family values.” And the bill specifically singles out parents, teachers, religious leaders, the media and creative artists. People, including foreigners, would be banned from adopting Ghanaian children if they are LGBTQ+. Anyone who engages in any sort of activity aimed at “changing public opinion towards an act prohibited under this Act” could be sent to jail for up to 10 years. Use of internet, radio, film, a “technological account” or “any other device capable of electronic storage or transmission” to support LGBTQ+ people would also be punishable by up to 10 years in jail.
I could be thrown in jail for up to 10 years in my father’s home country just for writing this column.
The truth is, the bill has a lot of support among Ghanaians. Advocates have long said being LGBTQ+ is “not African,” but much has been written about the introduction of homophobic laws under British colonialism. Perhaps it is fitting that this bill was passed a few weeks before the 75th observance of Commonwealth Day.
To be gay? Jail. To be an ally of LGBTQ+ people? Jail. Cross-dressing or showing same-sex affection? Jail. Why is Ghana, which had the world’s worst-performing currency a year and a half ago, proposing to spend more money on policing and jail, when the money could be spent on improving the economy, investing in education and creating more jobs?
As documented in historian Florence Bernault’s book “A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa, ” a number of scholars have revealed how the penitentiary systems imposed by European colonial systems replaced African mechanisms of social control, such as offender reparations and banishment. And just like in America, there were critics of colonial prisons who maintained such measures were ineffective.
None of this means that LGBTQ+ people in Ghana should be subjected to pre-colonial forms of punishment, but rather to consider the harmful “western values” that still remain in Ghana’s laws. For years, human rights activists have decried malicious American evangelical influence on the increase of homophobic legislation in former British colonies such as Uganda and Nigeria. I talked to Ayodele Sogunro, a sexual rights lawyer at the Initiative for Strategic Litigation in Africa, about whoever might have had a hand in drafting such a bill, which draws on intersectionality theory and quite advanced ideas about gender and sex. “The bill is trying to counter progressive ideas by engaging the same tools and institutions that progressives use,” he said, adding that this gives credence to the idea of the influence of global anti-rights actors. “The British-colonized countries are really going all the way out. This bill is going to give countries like Nigeria fresher ideas — homophobia is the tree that can keep giving so that they don’t have to address leadership failures.”
As Ghana’s economy sputters and inflation soars, the country is littered with leadership failures. At the same time, Ghana offers itself — to us in the diaspora at least — as some beacon of Black safety. But all of us yearn to be safe, including those who are LGBTQ+. Ghana cannot claim to be a progressive Pan-African refuge if it is still operating under the homophobic bidding of Western missionary groups.
Upholding punitive practices from British colonial rule is the ultimate imposition of the worst of Western values. If Ghana passes this law, it will be a huge setback for human rights everywhere, and a reminder that the Black Star of Africa is in a sad nadir.
