Photograph by Campbell Addy / Trunk Archive
Words by Nelson C.J.
When Dr Rita Nketiah arrived at the Ghana Shippers Assembly for a two-day conference organized by the World Congress of Families—a Christian values group founded by Alan C. Carlson in 1997—she did not know what to expect. The year was 2019 and Nketiah, a then graduate student and queer activist living in Ghana, had been commissioned by an organization tracking transnational anti-gender and anti-women’s rights movements to attend the conference, observe, and document whatever she saw and heard.
The summit had been advertised as a gathering of religious bodies in the interest of families across the country. Still, the underlying reason soon became clear shortly after Nketiah settled into the auditorium.
The lineup of speakers at the conference hailed from different parts of the continent, including Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya, where conservative religious groups from the United States have been known to maintain a presence. Ghanaian lawyer and anti-LGBTQIA+ rights activist Moses Foh-Amoaning was present, as was Catherine Emmanuel Onwioduokit—founder of Family Renaissance International, a group that has been linked to homophobic advocacy. Sharon Slater, the founder of Family Watch International, a Christian lobbying organization based in the U.S., was also in attendance and gave a speech at the event. Slater’s organization has been classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group, for its promotion of “ 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.”
The speakers at the event cast LGBTQIA+ people as agents sent to stymie population growth and wreck the traditional Christian family as we know it. They decried the concept of family planning and deliberated on ways to stop the emergence of sex education in schools.
“I had to numb myself to be in that space,” Nketiah recalls. “It was practically like a church service, there were morning prayers, and then we sang the Ghanaian national anthem. I had to write and document as much as I could without thinking about what any of it meant, [otherwise] I would have had an emotional reaction.”
At the end of the conference, the group agreed on a few agendas and action points to put their deliberations in motion. As Nketiah details in a report based on her experience at the summit, some of the agendas included “establishing new organizing structures for the movement across the continent, with competent and efficient legal teams to focus on court cases and constitutional challenges.” The group also agreed to “testing ‘holistic sexual therapy systems to bring healing and comfort to Africans and other persons with LGBTQI disorders.’”
Nearly four years on from the conference, many of the plans and mandates agreed upon at the Ghana Shippers Assembly have been taking root.
In 2021, the Ghanaian parliament introduced an anti-queer bill that in its most recent form proposes jail terms of up to 10 years for persons found producing or distributing materials that promote “LGBT activities.” The bill, which has been called “draconian” and widely condemned for its brutal and grossly unjust provisions, includes a ban on healthcare for trans people, jail terms for public display of affection between people of the same sex, prohibitions on same-sex marriage, on supporting or funding LGBTQIA+ groups, as well as restrictions on adopting children as LGBTQIA+ parents. Only one section of the bill ascribes a “six months to three years” jail term for people found harassing people accused of being LGBTQIA+.
“I had to numb myself to be in that space. I had to write and document as much as I could without thinking about what any of it meant, otherwise I would have had an emotional reaction.”
In February 2024, the bill passed its third reading in parliament and while it awaits final approval from the President, two constitutional cases have been brought against the bill at the Supreme Court, with two others levied at the High Court. People familiar with the cases say the Ghanaian President, whose term in office will come to an end in December, privately spearheaded the blockade to avoid assenting or rejecting the bill, leaving the responsibility to the next administration and avoiding a potential stain on his already contentious political legacy.
For many queer Ghanaians in Ghana, the bill has brought an extra level of scrutiny and increased violence towards members of the LGBTQIA+ community. “Those of us who have not been abused yet, live in constant fear of what happens when the bill gets passed,” Awo Dufie, a Ghanaian human rights activist, tells Atmos.
Nketiah says that the bill has also emboldened homophobes in perpetuating socio-economic abuse on people perceived to be queer. “People have [already] been evicted from their family homes and their rented homes. When landlords find out that [their tenants are] queer, now this bill has been passed, they will evict you,” she says. “I think it’s also affected people psychologically in their relationships. There was a period, particularly after the bill was passed, that everybody was just on edge. We saw an increase of violence in [queer] relationships because people had internalized [that justified fear], and then projected that violence onto their partners.”
While the faces of the anti-queer legislation on the continent may be African, reports and investigations have linked the activities of conservative groups in the United States and Russia to the rise in anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation on the continent. Organizations like Family Watch International and World Congress of Families have been accused of lobbying for and sometimes orchestrating the introduction and eventual passage of a range of anti-queer bills in many of the countries they’ve been to.
Their mode of operation typically involves setting up conferences under the guise of promoting family values. They also typically meet with high-ranking officials on the continent who have been known to use the passage of anti-LGBTQIA+ laws as a means to score favor amongst conservative citizens, and distract them from the urgent issues plaguing their countries. Family Watch’s Slater, for instance, has had audiences with the President and First Lady of Uganda and has been granted interviews on Ghanaian television. Meanwhile, Sam George, the Ghanaian lawmaker who spearheaded the anti-LGBTQIA+ bill in the country, has openly discussed attending a Family Watch International event in Utah. This is despite his repeated insistence that Ghana will not bow to pressure from the United States to reconsider its harsh bill. “Ghana is not the 51st State of the United States or any other Western state,” the lawmaker recently declared in an interview.
Yet, nearly $54 million have been poured by over 20 conservative U.S. groups into fighting LGBTQIA+ rights and access to safe abortion and contraceptives across the African continent since 2007, according to a 2020 OpenDemocracy report. Groups like Family Watch International and The Fellowship Foundation were included in the list, with the former having spent $36,919 in Africa, and the latter over $34.5 million across the continent. The Fellowship Foundation’s Ugandan associate, David Bahati, wrote the “Kill the Gays” bill that makes it illegal to identify as LGBTQIA+, and recommends a death sentence for “aggravated homosexuality.”
“Those of us who have not been abused yet, live in constant fear of what happens when the bill gets passed.”
The rise of conservative lobby groups across the continent has been met with fierce resistance by local activist organizations. Still, advocates also say that support from the countries where these groups originate hasn’t been sufficient in that sanctions and public statements haven’t stopped these homophobic laws from going forward. In 2012, a Ugandan LGBTQIA+ rights group sued Scott Lively, an American evangelist, for inciting persecution and violence against queer Ugandans. Lively wasn’t found guilty, and the activities of conservative groups continued. Groups like Family Watch International have also been able to repeatedly deny allegations of furthering anti-LGBTQIA+ movements even when the evidence is stacked against them.
According to Dr Sylvia Bawa, an associate professor of Sociology at York University and the director of its Resource Centre for Public Sociology, the activities of these groups echo colonial history. “We’ve always had the history of, especially Christian missionaries, telling us how we should live our lives, dictating morality to us on the basis of the understanding of what our morality should be and what purposes that serves,” she says.
For Bawa, the post-colonial left-overs of Abrahamic religions make the work of these conservative groups easy as nearly a billion people on the continent are either Christians or Muslims. “If you think about the way in which these kinds of bills are introduced to the public—or this kind of advocacy introduced to the public—they are usually introduced in a sort of populist way,” says Bawa. “They are introduced using a lot of tactics that sit largely in Abrahamic religious principles.”
This is why, despite the immense danger their activities pose to the advancement of equality and progressive reproductive rights on a continent where unsafe abortions are commonplace, these groups have found fertile ground for their ideologies using their religious fundamentalist tactics.
In a place like Uganda, the activities of these groups have delivered harsh anti-queer laws that threaten the very existence of queer Ugandans. Uganda’s anti-LGBTQIA+ bill was passed on March 21, 2023, after years of deliberation and resistance from local LGBTQIA+ groups to overwhelming support from parliament, alongside its harsh death penalty, gave express permission to police authorities to target gay Ugandans.
Bana Mwesige, a human rights activist in Uganda, tells Atmos that before the bill was passed, life in Uganda for queer people was not ideal, but it was safer. “Queer people had a semblance of security and could be themselves online and offline. Society mostly either ignored them or, for the unfortunate few, incidents of homophobia were fewer and far between,” he says.
That reality vastly contrasts with the current state of fear and restlessness queer Ugandans now find themselves in. “For older queer people, they have been through this before and have somehow adapted to hiding and keeping a low profile,” he says “Younger folks like me who are more visible often find themselves outed, doxxed and harassed online and in person.”
“We’ve always had the history of, especially Christian missionaries, telling us how we should live our lives, dictating morality to us.”
Some of these conservative U.S. groups have a longstanding presence on the continent that is firmly baked into religious institutions. Mwesige says he only became aware of the impact of these groups through churches when he stopped going to church in 2018. Mwesige, who has gone through conversion therapy, realized that his conversion therapy had been made possible by “a group called House of Prayer Ministries that directly facilitated conversation therapy at the church I was attending,” he says. “Also with further research and my experience in church, I realized the talking points and misinformation that was used against queer folk like me.”
Another huge part of the influence of these groups in anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation is in the language used, according to experts and advocates who have studied the movement. “A lot of those pushing for the anti-gay law keep mentioning transitioning and transgender children,” says Mwesige. “That rarely happens in Uganda. It’s a purely U.S. Conservative obsession.”
Some people have called for the United States government to stifle the funding from these organizations as a way to limit their economic influence. Although the technicality of that remains complex, it appears to be one of the most direct ways to limit their impact. But though the United States has typically threatened to issue sanctions on countries like Uganda and Ghana, it hasn’t had much impact on whether these anti-LGBTQIA+ laws are passed or not.
“Politicians and lawmakers who are a part of Family Watch International like to sell the Family Watch as advocates for African family and moral values,” Dufie says. “I believe these institutions provide members opportunities to network and money in hopes of furthering their political careers. Otherwise, I do not see how two white people can be leading the charge to ‘restore’ African values.”
There are, of course, African countries like Botswana that have recently decriminalized homosexuality by getting rid of its colonial laws and recognizing homophobia as a Western import. And yet, these conservative groups and their African counterparts insist on queerness going against the morals of African society. But history tells a very different story. Africans across the continent have long taken a fluid and open approach to matters of gender and sexuality; examples can be found in Igbo, Yoruba, and Dagaaba cultures among many others.
While anti-LGBTQIA+ law poses immense risk to the lives of queer Ghanaians, Ugandans, Nigerians, and others who are affected by them, queer voices and advocates have also remained strong in their resistance.
“I’ve been happy to see how our movement ecosystem has developed as a response to this bill and the increasing criminalization of our communities,” Nketiah says. “We’re seeing more people speak out. We’re seeing newer organizations being formed. And I think we’re also seeing activists becoming more educated and building their capacity around how to tackle anti-gender actors.”
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Why U.S. Religious Groups Are Driving Homophobic Laws Across Africa
