On August 10, 2021, I was part of a panel at the American Sociological Association where we discussed efforts to decolonize sexualities around the world. My comments emerged from a chapter in my forthcoming book, Afropolitan Projects, and my reflections on the bill under discussion in Ghana’s parliament. I am sharing my abridged remarks below. My hope is that this analysis will help inform some of the strategies activists are taking to counter the bill.
In 2019, the World Congress of Families, an anti-LGBTQ group designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) held a conference in Accra, Ghana. This would not be the U.S. based group’s first conference in an African country. They have previously set up shop in Nairobi Kenya in 2016, and Lilongwe, Malawi in 2017. In Ghana, they were hosted by the National Coalition for Proper Human Sexual Rights and Family Values, a group that has currently infiltrated the national parliament and proposed a similarly named anti-LGBTQ bill – the “Proper Human Sexual and Ghanaian Family Values Bill.” Henceforth, I will refer to it simply as The Bill.
In its preamble, the bill makes a case for “Ghanaian cultural values,” which the drafters claims are represented by “marriage between a man and a woman, each of whose gender is assigned at birth.” The bill articulates a position to protect the cultural and moral values of the nation despite “globalisation and its attendant acculturation.” Citing international law, the bill emphasizes states’ rights to self-determination, and therefore the power of the state to “make laws to protect their values and identity, providing that the laws do not infringe on fundamental human rights.”
The National Coalition for Proper Human Sexual Rights and Family Values parrots the WCF’s primary talking point in Africa. By positioning the bill as protection of national cultural values, the drafters position this anti-LGBTQ bill as a defense against colonial incursions. In fact, the drafters are so thorough, they actually prohibit the activities of LGBTTQQIAAP+.
The fashioning of the bill as anti-colonial technology plays on increasing resistance amongst Africans to present-day colonial imposition and seeks to coopt strategies to reclaim Africa for Africans.
In response to the idea that queer sexuality and advocacy for queer and trans rights are un-African, activists have sometimes responded by referring to anthropological studies (primarily) as counter evidence. These studies, while not pursued with the intention of demonstrating a queer African presence, offer important anti-colonial insights into the construction of gender (and to a limited extent sexuality) in various African countries. For example, sociologist Oyeronke Oyewumi’s important theorizing about Yoruba genders challenges the dominance of Western gender theories. In particular, Oyewumi teaches us that gender is not assigned at birth, but rather attained through the life course depending on different social needs. Likewise, the idea of conjugality, that is the monogamous heterosexual married couple, as the basis of society is unheard of in Oyo (Yoruba) culture. Similarly, Ifi Amadiume described a flexible gender system amongst the Igbo. In this system, social requirements permitted women to become husbands to other women, who would in turn, be their wives. (When we think about these issues, we also face the inutility of English to capture the full texture of some of these theories.)
Scholarship like the aforementioned can be useful in challenging some of the ideas articulated in the bill. For example, that marriage between a man and a woman whose genders are assigned at birth is a cultural norm. However, despite the flexibility of gender systems and expansive ideas about how gender is attained, scholars in this vein do not typically make room for queer sexuality. Instead, what we see from texts such as these is a glimmer into a universe of possibility, limited by colonized views of sexuality. In this case, that limitation is articulated as compulsory heterosexuality. In recent times, the work of folks like Hakima Abbas and Sokari Ekine, Sylvia Tamale, SN Nyeck, and others have offered us important interventions into this space.
Similarly, my research on gender and sexuality in Ghana offers a glimpse into how activists and ordinary citizens, including those who identify as queer or trans* and their allies, are navigating this terrain. This is a terrain where on the one hand, anti-colonial feminist scholars have historically maintained the notion of a heterosexual Africa, whilst on the other hand, neo-colonial patriarchs, in the guise of challenging colonialism, also insist on a heterosexual Africa. Mindful of this tension, we can begin to see how claims to “decolonize sexualities” are already being coopted to maintain inequalities in gender and sexuality.
I want to use a story about funding, conceptualized here as a form of relationship building, to illuminate this struggle. In this story, I highlight how anti-queer factions in Ghana use these relationships to dismiss indigenous organizers, and how certain modes of funding can help challenge these reactions.
Drama Queens and the difference feminist funding makes
Drama Queens is a pan-African feminist group that hosts sex education workshops in Ghanaian schools, organizes discussion workshops, and puts on plays. As a pan-African feminist group, Drama Queens is funded by similar networks as other queer organizers and in 2018, were arguably amongst the leading queer organizing groups in Ghana. That year, their theme developed out of Ghanaian photographer Eric Gyamfi’s Just Like Us series about queer life in the country. As such, Drama Queens’ programming focused on educating audiences about queer Ghanaian experiences and challenging homophobia in the public sphere.
In addition to queer organizing, as a feminist group, Drama Queens’ “consent workshops” teach school-aged Ghanaians about healthy sexuality, calling their attention to gender norms and how those play out in ideas about sex. Following a recent contest around restructuring the Ghana Education Services curriculum to include comprehensive sex education (CSE), I am curious to know more about how DQ’s consent workshops are going. The CSE proposal was loudly challenged by the National Coalition for Proper Human Sexual Rights and Family Values and other similar groups, who claimed that such reforms were a satanic attempt to promote LGBT values. Currently, the proposal is sitting somewhere awaiting efforts to procure additional community input.
One of the successes of Drama Queens is its cultural relevance. By adjusting their message to resonate with the diverse class and social contexts of the different Ghanaians audiences to which they speak, Drama Queens makes real efforts to maintain fidelity to normative ideas about what it means to be Ghanaian/African, whilst also challenging chauvinism in the forms of sexism, anti-Blackness, and homophobia. The intentionality behind a feminist group like Drama Queen’s queer organizing offers important lessons for navigating the postcolonial funding landscape that can reproduce colonial relationships. It matters that one of the main funders for this group is FRIDA, a feminist fund whose grant-making processes make room for anti-colonial approaches to organizing. Without access to funding streams such as these, queer rights organizations are put in a position where their strategies are indeed curbed by colonial impositions and limited by the agendas and assumptions of Western funding organizations. These limits also facilitate claims that their work is shaped by foreign agendas, despite organizations’ best efforts.
This important recent report gives us some idea of the constraints that justice organizations face, and the liberties that conservative groups experience in the funding landscape. Ghanaians do not typically have a clear idea of where MPs and organizations such as the National Coalition receive their funding from. And there is not as yet a critical response to the ways in which transnational relationships similarly shape pro- and anti-justice groups. I need to state unequivocally that I do not see an inherent problem with transnational collaboration and coordination. Indeed, conservative groups have been exploiting these relationships to mean ends while claiming that others are puppets of the West as it were. And yet it is only through strategic transnational alliances that we are able to successfully go up against anti-justice groups.
Sam George and what “foreign intervention” looks like amongst anti-justice groups
In February 2021, LGBT Rights Ghana’s newly opened offices were shut down by Accra police. Sam George, the lead MP who introduced the bill to parliament, threatened to beat up the Australian high commissioner in Ghana. He accused the High Commissioner, who along with other foreign dignitaries attended the center’s opening, of trying to impose an LGBT agenda on Ghanaians. In July of 2021, the French ambassador to Ghana hosted Sam George on her television show.
When MPs pursue relationships with outer national ambassadors, we, as a larger society, are asked to understand these relationships as sovereign relationship building. Likewise, when anti-queer organizations such as the National Coalition for Proper Human Sexual Rights and Family Values hosts and receives funding and training from known hate groups such as the World Congress of Families, there are no accusations of foreign intervention or pressure. Yet, when queer activists organize across transnational borders and similarly engage with foreign organizations and governments, these same actions are readily labeled as reproducing colonialist relationships. An imbalance of power shapes how queer and trans activists navigate the colonial / neo-colonial landscape on which they organize.
It is important to recognize how tactics that claim to decolonize sexuality are not inherently progressive. Instead, some of these efforts inadvertently reproduce colonial relationships, whilst others strategically align with colonial forces to maintain power within the postcolonial state.
Right now, activists are fighting against the bill and the dizzying range of violence meted against queer and trans* Ghanaians this year. As we do so, it is important to occasionally take a step back to more accurately assess the situation on the ground and navigate around these issues in ways that push our cause forward.