Contrary to homophobes’ claims of support, Ghana is divided on anti-LGBTQ bill

Relevance: LGBTQ rights, social progress

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Summary: The article presents the statistic that about 1/3rd of Ghanaians opposed the 2024 version of the anti-gay bill, and there was one region of the country where a majority opposed it. This is in contrast to the rhetoric of anti-gay campaigners, who argue that the bill represents the will of 90% of the population.

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Take / Relevance:

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Liberals believe in gradual social progress, driven by change in institutions and laws by social activists, and that our values are universal in the sense that people from any culture, racial group, geographic region etc can see them, independently invent them and recognise their value. True liberals do not believe that these values belong to one continent, nor that they are even new and modern. You can see proto-liberalisms throughout the history of the world.

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I grew up listening to liberals in the West, and especially Barack Obama, deploy these ideas in the context of the struggle for gay marriage. Society and its political leaders would "evolve" over time. Activism would change hearts and minds. Laws would protect simple rights which would eventually snowball into a general and pervasive freedom. Amd sometimes change would come via the law first, and then that would drive change in people, certainly in successive generations. But you had to be patient, take it slow, and take one win at a time. And you had to organise.

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However, when it comes to African countries, this is not the tone that many people online adopt. Homophobic legislation doesn't represent a victory by better organised conservative Christian or conservative Muslim forces, but instead it reflects the fundamentally homophobic nature of African societies. Waves of criminalisation in one part of the continent are generalised to the entire continent ("in Africa"), while waves of decriminalisation and improving rights in Southern Africa are discussed as barely interesting, isolated cases. There is no notion of tactics, no sense of a struggle. Most commentators are less interested in figuring out what we have to do to move another step forward. Indeed, many seem to take pride in the idea that gay rights is intrinsically "Western" and unAfrican – endorsing the core idea that African homophobes use to defend their cruel actions.

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These ideas are factually wrong. Just as bad – they discourage mobilization and solidarity. The homophobes are extremely well organised. American and African conservative Christians, and African and Middle Eastern conservative Muslims, are frequently working together and coordinating because they see themselves as one big family. It is ironic that we – supposedly universalist and individualist liberals – don't do that. The conservatives and the leftists believe in internationalism far more than we do. Some people in one half of our family (Westerners) are obsessed with essentialising homophobia into their image of what it is to be African in order to make themselves feel good about being Western, despite evidence to the contrary.

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This is why it matters that 1/3rd of Ghanaians rejected the 2024 bill, and that there is regional variation in support. If it were a Western country, we would seize on this and invoke the idea of gradual, persistent efforts at change built on international solidarity and appeals to the inherent legal irrationality of most homophobic laws. 30% becomes 40%, regional safe zones are created, and then 40% becomes a majority that scraps the law. So we must do the same for those African countries where the homophobes are presently winning.