Activist Rita Nketiah prepared thoroughly to attend the World Congress of Families (WCF) that took place in 2019 in Accra, the capital of Ghana. She knew that the event—organized by an alliance of ultraconservative entities in the United States—would be an anti-LGTBI coven. A tribute to
hetero
pride in which her usual appearance would provoke suspicion.
Nketiah, who identifies as
queer
and refuses to be classified by her sexual practices or her gender, received a safety course run by DemocracyAbierta, the independent journalism platform that had convinced her to infiltrate the lion's den. She braved it and threw herself into a role opposite to her identity. Through videoconference, she narrates that that day she dressed “like a middle-class Christian Ghanaian, very normative.” She says that she stayed in a discreet background, hardly speaking to anyone, taking notes and holding on stoically.
“It looked like a congregation with everyone preaching,” Nketiah continues. High-level politicians and renowned academics attended. There were religious songs and patriotic exaltation. Among delusions “of pseudoscientific moral panic,” Nketiah found a common thread: “The idea was to link LGTBI rights with a worse development of the country, even with its destruction, basically because according to them, they denigrate the traditional family, which is the axis of our society.” The theme of the congress summed up this idea:
The African family and sustainable development: strong families, strong nations
.
Attending to the Regional World Congress of Families, Accra Ghana 2019. Theme: The African Family and sustainable Development. @UCU_APC @UCUniversity @DrLawry @BarashaOfficial pic.twitter.com/jfq8AjLsdx
— Thee Michael Clement (@MCNamawa) October 31, 2019
As a local partner, the WCF counted on a Ghanaian organization with a cryptic name for its congress in Accra: National Coalition for Appropriate Human Sexual Rights and Family Values. It is an amalgamation of evangelicals, Muslims and
chiefs
(traditional religious leaders) led by Moses Foh-Amoaning, a lawyer who openly defends conversion therapies to
cure
homosexuals. Or that he calls for reappropriating—through convoluted biblical quotes—the rainbow in order to
purify it
of its gay symbolism. Or that he shouts from the rooftops about the harm to health (in addition to its demonic essence) of anal sex. Along with politicians such as Sam George (current leader of the opposition), Foh-Amoaning has been the main spokesperson for the homophobic campaign in Ghana, which has led to the recent approval - in the absence of the signature of the Ghanaian president, Nana Akufo Addo - of a law that severely criminalizes sexual minorities. The text voted in Parliament includes, in its very title, the expression “adequate human sexual rights.” George and Foh-Amoaning frequently cross the Atlantic to fraternize with the hardliners of the American Christian right.
An anti-gay milestone
At the 2019 congress, well-known faces from the American Christian right intervened, such as Brian Brown, president of the International Organization for the Family, or Sharon Slater, founder of Family Watch International (FWI), very belligerent in Uganda, where last year it was approved one of the most aggressive anti-gay laws in the world. This same Wednesday, the Constitutional Court rejected a petition to veto it.
Sharon Slater, leader of the conservative organization Family Watch International, speaks at a conference on families in Uganda in April 2023. THE GUARDIAN
A report by the reproductive justice network Ipas in 2023 dissected foreign influence in the crystallization of a homophobic front in Ghana. Its authors describe a network of personal ties between notable figures of the Ghanaian anti-LGTBI campaign and Western ultra-conservatism. They also explain how foreign digital activism has helped intolerance against sexual diversity to germinate there. And they claim, citing sources who attended the WCF, that Brown himself called in his welcome speech to “criminalize homosexual practices.” This newspaper has tried to contact the promoters of the WCF on numerous occasions, without receiving a response.
Nketiah maintains that the 2019 WCF marked a milestone in the quest to institutionalize anti-gay sentiment in Ghana. It was, he explains, the definitive boost to move from vague intentions to decisive action. “Before there was harassment, even people who advocated putting us in jail,” he admits, “but no one took them very seriously and we felt more or less safe.” The event, this activist estimates, marked the transition between sporadic attacks and “structural homophobia orchestrated by the State itself.” According to information from CNN that appeared in 2021, several attendees urged those days to activate legal machinery that would put a stop to LGTBI rights.
Kwaku Adomako, anthropologist and researcher at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland), subscribes that “the influence of the WCF [the event itself, but also the underground work of the actors who promoted it] has been immense” in the design and promotion of the law. Furthermore, Adomako continues, the “hate speech” propagated by the WCF has contributed to making rabid homophobia the hegemonic opinion in Ghana, almost the only possible one.
A white crusade
Anti-LGBT activist Brian S. Brown in an image of his foundation, called International Organization for the Family.
According to Nketiah and organizations such as
the Human Rights Campaign
, Brown and Slater lead the white crusade in Africa against an alleged global agenda that seeks, with dark motivations, to spread homosexuality throughout the planet. In 2022, Ghanaian MP Sam George traveled to Utah (USA) to speak at a conference on “policies for the African family” sponsored by FWI. On Facebook, George boasted that the draft law had been “very well received by participants.”
Also attending the 2019 WCF was Ann Kioko, Africa director of CitizenGO, the initiative created in 2013 by the Spanish Ignacio Arsuaga with the purpose of joining forces between HazteOir – the ultra-Catholic movement he founded in 2001 – and radical Christian groups from other countries.
In a 2022 report,
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
detailed the activities in Ghana and Kenya of CitizenGO, which it accused of harassing LGBTI activists or sympathizers through viral campaigns. Just a few months after the 2019 WCF, Arsuaga's organization—also contacted without response for this report—put its particular stake in Flanders in Ghana. Working with a local group calling itself Lawyers for Christ, he collected signatures urging authorities to ban a pan-African LGBTI conference that was to take place in Accra. The call was cancelled, officially due to covid-19.
Money and dialectic
In Ghana and throughout sub-Saharan Africa, the Western homophobic wave is based, experts agree, on two pillars. On the one hand, money and logistics. “How is the Foh-Amoaning coalition financed?” asks Nketiah. An article from DemocracyAbierta confirmed that 20 ultra-conservative groups in the United States had allocated around 50 million euros to the continent. Above all, for anti-abortion actions and in defense of the traditional family.
The second column of the Western fight against homosexuality in Africa is dialectical and has been weaving, with nebulous arguments, a story that mixes neocolonialist twists and theoretical divine designs. First, Nketiah points out, “it is insisted that LGTBI rights are a foreign, anti-African construct.” Another imposition of the former oppressor, who, after leaving Africa during decolonization, returns to the fray to reconquer consciences.
How is this paradox resolved? During the WCF in Accra, Nketiah heard the solution to the riddle. “Americans repeatedly repeated that family values had been abandoned in their country. And that, luckily, Africa was reminding them.” A system of beliefs around sexuality, Adomako recalls, typical of “the dogmatic Christianity that the European powers brought to their colonies.” Ignoring this evidence, the WCF proclamations, Nketiah relates, followed the same pattern: “Apparently, no one was persuading the Africans of anything. Quite the contrary. As if, after losing their way, the poor whites were in search of spiritual guidance. The audience bought it, they applauded with delight.”
When a white pastor came to preach, he always said the same thing: “You are the chosen people! Christ trusts in you! “The West is lost and now the responsibility falls on your shoulders!”
Ballet Djedjé, Ivorian researcher and author of 'How to Love Yourself as a Gay in Africa'
Ballet Djedjé, an Ivorian researcher and author of
How to Love Yourself When Gay in Africa
, finds these types of discourses familiar. He remembers that, as a child, he used to go with his parents to an evangelical church. “When a white pastor came to preach, he always said the same thing: 'You are the chosen people! Christ trusts in you! The West is lost and now the responsibility falls on your shoulders!'” According to Djedjé, “this feeling of superiority, believing oneself to be better than whites in the moral field, has been taking shape until it has become very powerful throughout Africa.” Adomako confirms that in Ghana there is what he calls “a curious form of empowerment: thinking that they are more Christian than Westerners.”
After observing what happened in several former British colonies (Uganda and Ghana, but also Kenya and Nigeria), Djedjé fears that the anti-LGTBI legislative rigor will now extend to French-speaking Africa. He is concerned about a meeting that will take place this summer in Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast. It is the Strengthening the Family Conference (CFF) that is hosted by a different African country every year. It is driven by the couple Stanley and Wendy Nielsen, prominent members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, based in Salt Lake City (Utah, USA), the Mormon epicenter.
In 2019, the same year that the WCF was held in Accra, the Ghanaian capital also hosted the first CFF held on the continent. The first lady, Rebecca Akufo-Adoo, and Freda Prempeh, from the Ministry of Gender and Children, were there, who assured that her Government was opening the doors "to continue collaborating" with the Nielsens "on the sustainability of family ties." Last 2023, during a training course in Kasoa (Ghana), the couple confessed to feeling “among living miracles.”
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