Ghana’s Crackdown on LGBTQ+ has a (Neo)Colonial and Christian Face
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Image Credit: @we.go.be.free
Recently, 21 activists and paralegals were arrested while holding a training seminar for human rights advocacy in Ho, southeastern Ghana. They had met, on May 20, 2021, to learn how to better document and report human rights violations against the LGBTQ+ community. Ghanaian journalists (yes, journalists) led the police to the conference room where the training was taking place. All 21 were immediately arrested for “unlawful assembly”.
Even though journalists have been victims of state repression and violence in Ghana, they have played a role in the persecution and opposition of LGBTQ+ people. The police, who claimed to be protecting the Ghanaian public, accused the activists of advocating LGBTQ+ activities through possession of educational brochures and books such as “Coming Out”. All 21 remained in police custody for almost three weeks – spread out across 4 different jails. The judge did not show up to their first court hearing at the Circuit court in Ho and they were denied bail. When the counsel for the accused appealed at the High Court in Accra, they were once again denied bail. They were finally released on June 11. A trial was however set for a future date, even though no evidence has been brought forward to corroborate charges.
Photo Credit: @tom_of_A_boy
It is important to keep in mind that the promotion of LGBTQ+ rights and the assembly of people are not illegal in Ghana. This series of events involving journalists, police, judges and government officials, speaks of the ongoing oppression of the LGBTQ+ community.
What has any of this got to do with evangelical Christianity? Well, a lot actually. In March 2021, different denominations of Christians (Pentecostal, Charismatic, Methodist, and Catholic) came together alongside Muslim and traditionalist leaders for a 'National Prayer Rally' entitled “Homosexuality: A Detestable Sin to God.” The event was described as a national prayer against the “LGTQI agenda” taking place in “a time of need.” Apostle Dr. Opoku Onyinah – former chairman of the Church of Pentecost (CoP) and chairman of an organization called The National Coalition for Proper Sexual Rights and Family Values – was a guest speaker at this prayer meeting hosted and financed by his church. Apostle Onyinah described LGBTQ+ advocacy as an “unfortunate development” in Ghana and “an affront to …long cherished religious values, customs and traditions as well as the law of the land… [including] the laws and principles of the Almighty God, especially concerning his plan of creation and the sanctity of marriage between man and woman.”
Apostle Onyinah thanked President Nana Akufo-Addo for having earlier declared that he will not allow the legalization of same-sex marriage in Ghana (something never requested by the LGBTQ+ community) and for shutting down the LGBTQ office in Accra on 24 February, 2021. He spoke resolutely against LGBTQ+ advocacy and used public health misinformation to point to the “destructive” practices of the queer movement – linking it to the future of the Ghanaian nation and describing it as a threat to the continued existence of ordinary Ghanaians. He called on policy makers, security agencies and parliamentarians to take immediate action, to make LGBTQ+ advocacy “a national security threat,” and to pass “non-ambiguous legislation” to prevent the community “from operating in the country”. The religious values being re-affirmed were Abrahamic and the law being enforced was a colonial one. Indeed, Section 104 of the State’s criminal code, which refers to ‘unnatural carnal knowledge,’ has been adopted from British law.
Another speaker at this event was Emmanuel Kwasi Bedzrah, a Member of Parliament (MP) who belonged to a group of MPs calling themselves “Believers Against LGBTQI+” (30 anti-LGBTQI MPs in Ghana's Parliament made up of Christians and Muslims). Bedzrah proudly shared with everyone how they had started preparing an anti-LGBTQI bill through the Private Members Bill and said that they hoped to get it passed before the end of 2021. This bill would explicitly criminalize LGBTQ+ activity and organization. These MPs (“Believers Against LGBTQI+”) later met at a breakfast meeting with leaders of the Christian clergy and the Speaker of Parliament Alban Bagbain in order to confirm their parliamentary position. It is important to point out that Bedzrah is the MP for the Ho West Constituency in the Volta Region – the city and the region where the 21 human rights activists were detained and imprisoned for more than 3 weeks.
This homophobic position from parliamentarians is not new. For instance, in a televised interview on Good Evening Ghana with Paul Odom-Otchere in 2018, former Speaker of the Parliament Aaron Mike Oquaye called “homosexuality…a very powerful international lobby” that was being “financed and supported, advocated, pushed” by the US and Western Europe. Calling Ghana a “Christian country” and drawing on the Bible, Google and his understanding of societal norms and science, he called homosexuality a “deviant conduct,” that “deformity takes many forms” and that queer people had a “deficiency”. Homosexuality had to be “treated” medically, psychologically and spiritually and could not be described as a “human right”. As Anima Adjepong writes, parliamentary talk leading up to the events happening now only reinforced the ongoing de-humanization of queer Ghanaians:
“[D]uring the hearing for the Gender Minister, MPs asked 'lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender [LGBT]…are they human? Should they enjoy human rights? Will you provide social protection?' The question of social protection doubled down on the assertion that LGBT Ghanaians are not entitled to fundamental human rights.”
The Colonial and Evangelical Roots of “Othering”
Dehumanization is a critical component for violence against those considered “Other.” Such speeches, prayer rallies and organized actions by Christian and other political leaders have harmful consequences for people who identify as LGBTQ+. In order to understand this reaction to same-sex relationships and the ongoing dehumanization of the queer community in Ghana, we have to first understand the long-lasting effects of British colonialism, missionary education and evangelism. It should be of little surprise that European colonialism introduced specific forms of patriarchal rigidity around how gender/sexuality would come to be imagined and regulated all over the African continent (and beyond). As Leah Buckle writes in a 2020 essay on “African sexuality and the legacy of imported homophobia”:
What many Ghanaians and other Africans find harder to accept is that pre-colonial African attitudes toward gender/sexuality were different and far more relaxed than those of their colonizers and that a history of gender fluidity among many Indigenous communities has been erased with colonialism. There are documented examples of female-husbandry in many parts of the African continent as well as of the colonial impact on gendered identity (see for instance Oyèrónké Oyèwumí on pre-colonial Yoruba culture). The continuing appeal to and the implementation of British colonial laws and of their conception of gender and sexuality is an important consideration in Ghana; one that shows how, despite being a country that has achieved legal and political emancipation, it has not yet been truly decolonized. We thus need to acknowledge the ongoing power of colonial European notions of intimacy. This includes their roots as a “regulating ideal through which colonial powers administered the enslaved and colonized and sought to indoctrinate the newly freed into forms of Christian marriage and family” (Lowe 2016: 30). Moving forward to the “postcolonial” present, we also ought to take into account that these historical residues are now entangled with ideological and financial influences coming from the conservative (White) US evangelical community in contemporary Ghana.
Speaking about same-sex relationships as a “foreign” idea, Onyinah failed to mention other transnational connections, such as how “evangelical churches, conservative groups and other actors based in the US have spent at least $280 million around the world to influence policies and public opinion against sexual and reproductive rights” (Okyere 2021) or how the coalition he chairs “echoes rhetoric used by American evangelicals and has been publicly supported by the likes of the US-based evangelical organisation World Congress of Families (WCF), which held an anti-queer African Family and Sustainable Development Summit in Accra in 2019” (Asamoah 2021).
The strong opinions held by Ghanaian politicians, pastors and the general public have strong entanglements with US conservative evangelicalism through financial and political infrastructures that stretch into Ghana. But before diving into this crucial topic, let us look at the origins of US evangelicalism.
In her book White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, Anthea Butler (2021: 138) describes US evangelicalism as “a nationalistic political movement whose purpose is to support the hegemony of white Christian men over and against the flourishing of others.” Butler (2021) describes how US evangelicalism was born in the context of slavery and, over the years, has been used to spread racism and patriarchal violence:
“From using the Bible to support slavery to opposing the civil rights movement, integration, and interracial marriage, evangelicals have long employed a presumed moral authority to hide their prejudices” (Butler 2021: 8)
US evangelicals have used their presumed moral authority to hide their prejudices, which include racism, homophobia and Islamophobia, as well as their support of acts of dehumanization. Topics such as race (racism), Islam (Islamophobia) and sexual orientation (homophobia) have been political tools of the US evangelical right (their “political operatives, lobbyists and a cable and radio media empire”) to build their political power (Butler 2021: 103). For many years now the US evangelical right and their churches have had close connections to several prominent Ghanaian evangelicals such as Archbishop Duncan Williams of Action Faith Chapel.
The March 2021 National Prayer Rally against the LGBTQ+ community was not the first time popular leaders of the Pentecostal and Charismatic community spoke about minority groups as threats to the nation. In March 2016, Archbishop Duncan-Williams, a man of political influence and an important symbol of Christian leadership in Ghana, found himself in the middle of a national controversy. In a YouTube post of a sermon that was circulated and widely commented upon by both Muslims and Christians, Duncan-Williams said:
“Muslims are not just praying; they are invoking all kinds of entities. They are dealing with all kinds of forces in Pleiades, in Orion, in Arcturus, in Mazzaroth – the Zodiacs, the powers of the underworld, the water kingdom. They are not just praying; they are dealing with white magic, black magic – different levels and dimensions of witchcraft – for total takeover of the world and of our nation.”
Duncan-Williams was referring to what he considered to be Islam’s theocratic and imperialist program for government. After all, Ghana was a Christian nation. The Coalition of Muslim organizations in Ghana (COMOG) condemned these statements. Soon after, Duncan-Williams visited COMOG and apologized for disrespecting Islam and asked for forgiveness “in the name of Allah, the most merciful and gracious One.” He promised to study the Quran before meeting with them again. It is rumoured that he was instructed by then Ghanaian President (John Mahama) to publicly apologize for his statements as Ghana could not afford inter-religious tensions in an election year.
Duncan Williams was scheduled to speak at the National Prayer Rally event against the “LGBTQ+ agenda”. Even though he did not make an appearance in the end, he is known as a man of political significance with whom every Ghanaian President from J.J. Rawlings to Nana Akufo-Addo have been aligned. In a 2019 interview with Paul Adom-Otchere on “Good Evening Ghana” Duncan-Williams said that “dealing with presidents or politicians is part of my calling.” He referred to US evangelist Billy Graham as one of his mentors and as someone who (like him) had close ties with many political leaders. Billy Graham was also someone who believed that it would take the second coming of Jesus before black and white children walked hand in hand together and warned that secularism was the fastest growing religion in the US (Butler 2021). And let us remember what Franklin Graham, eldest son of Billy Graham, called Islam in 2001, after the 9/11 attacks: “a very evil and wicked religion.”
Christian Nationalism in Ghana
In the 2019 interview, Duncan Williams re-emphasized the role of Christianity in providing political direction (“we should rule”), in influencing countries (“as the light of the world”) and in “leading the world.” He stated:
“Jesus categorically gave us the command to disciple nations and to win souls… so when it comes to governance, leadership, giving direction, it’s supposed to come from the church… We should rule in corporate, politics, the marketplace, everywhere.”
The exclusive “We” is not the inclusive or multiple “we”. Instead, it speaks to an evangelical “We,” an agenda that promotes a historical continuity between a Biblical past and a national present. As others have pointed out, the image that Ghana has historically maintained - as a religiously plural country - is changing. Ghana’s “Fourth Republic” (since 1992) – like Nigeria’s – is starting to resemble a “Pentecostal Republic” (Obadare 2019). Since the 1990’s, Ghanaian Pentecostals have influenced mainline Christianity, the public sphere and national politics, and they continue to see Ghana as a “Christian nation”. Christian, especially the Pentecostal-Charismatic, churches have become a powerful voting bloc and a political movement that has invested in infrastructural development through philantropical activities like the building of universities, secondary schools, hospitals, and even prisons.
Following his 2016 Presidential victory, Nana Akufo-Addo admitted that his election campaign was largely fought against unseen “powers and principalities” and, despite the spiritual battles against his campaign, that “the battle is the Lord’s”. In a speech he gave to CoP leaders on January 15th, 2017, Nana Akufo-Addo thanked them for their prayer and support. He said:
“I came to seek your prayers and blessings. I have no doubt that this wonderful thing (Presidency) that God has brought in my life has a lot to do with the prayers and blessings I received from you ... May the Lord continue to bless you.”
Nana Akufo-Addo reiterated that he had benefited from the public support of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians during the run up to national elections, and he used his victory to index God’s presence in his life and to differentiate himself from his political opponents.
After becoming President, Nana Akuffo-Addo announced his intentions to build a National Cathedral. It was a personal project as well as the fulfillment of a promise he made to God for helping him win the elections. The act of a secular country building a National Cathedral (like in the US) spoke of the close connections between Nana Akufo-Addo’s Ghana and the US evangelical right. If the Cathedral was to be a symbol of national unity, the country’s history was to be interpreted through the Bible and Ghana’s Christian majority became the measure of value for nation-building.
On February 8, 2019, Nana Akufo-Addo visited the “Museum of the Bible” (MOB) in Washington D.C., where he hosted a banquet to get the financial support of the Ghanaian Christian diaspora. Sitting next to Nana Akufo-Addo at the ceremony was Mr. Steven Green, the CEO of Hobby Lobby and Chairman of the MOB, someone who has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to make America a “Bible nation”. The promotion of a conservative evangelical understanding of the Bible seems to be the aim of the Museum of the Bible in Washington, even as it claims to be “non-sectarian”. Duncan Williams played an influential role in connecting Nana Akufo-Addo with MOB and in organizing the fundraiser. In his interview on “Good Evening Ghana,” Duncan Williams had spoken admiringly of the US, as a model for Ghana to emulate, since Biblical Christian values had guided its founding fathers and built the institutional structures that paved the way for its global success. He also said that the National Cathedral in Ghana would have its own Bible Museum (like the MOB in Washington) which would exhibit particular historical moments as depicted in the Bible. What he failed to mention was the controversy over Steve Green’s MOB and the numerous cases of smuggling and forgery it was involved in.
Reimagining Ghana’s history through the Bible can be interpreted as an attempt to bridge the cultural and temporal separation between the Biblical past and Ghana’s national present – the projection of a continuity of faith into the nation’s past. It also speaks to the transnational connections between US-Ghanaian evangelical leaders, the funding that these US evangelical churches provide, and their ability to influence public opinion in Ghana – especially with regard to promoting evangelical (and White patriarchal) concerns and values around topics like homosexuality and sex education (Butler 2021). This poses the question of how national “history-making” through the Bible will serve to “advance fundamentalism’s legitimacy in the public sphere” (Bielo 2018: 4)? And how hateful language and its affective registers are distributed across various figures and different bodies (Ahmed 2004).
The Active Silence of Civil Society in Ghana
In Ghana, where Islamophobia also raises its ugly head (see this story), homophobia has become another focus of attention for politicians and many Christian churches (including certain Muslim and traditionalist leaders). As a result, the queer community in Ghana has become a target. While many individuals have spoken up against the Ghanaian government’s lack of intervention and the methods in which the 21 activists were jailed, there has also been a deafening silence from prominent think tanks, civil society actors and journalists who are usually quick to decry “corruption”. For, as Sara Ahmed (2004: 156) writes, “queer lives have to be recognised as lives in order to be grieved”. For these activists and journalists who have largely remained silent, queer people are either potential criminals or metaphorical “weeds” in god’s garden. Take this public post (which has since been deleted) by Kofi Bentil of IMANI Center for Policy and Education, a libertarian think tank funded by the Atlas Network (Lee Fang, writing for The Intercept, has referred to the Atlas Network as a “quiet extension” of US foreign policy):
“We need to make the following clear. Imani is an intellectual Activist Think Tank which embraces wisdom from all faiths, but we are firmly rooted in Christian and Libertarian principles. Below is our answer on the LGBT issue:
No one knows who is good or bad. God made us all. He only determines who is good or bad and he will judge. We have nothing further to add beyond this parable from our Lord Jesus. We are not financed by anyone in LGBT community.
Matt 13:24 - The Parable of the Weeds
24 Jesus told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. 25 But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. 26 When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared.
27 “The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?’
28 “‘An enemy did this,’ he replied.
“The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’
29 “‘No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them.
30 Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time, I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn”
Such a parable drawn from the Bible not only further marginalizes the LGBT community in Ghana, but also suggests that during God’s final judgment people will be separated and that as “weeds” queer people will be “burned” (in Hell?), while the “wheat” (Christians?) will be saved.
Another response came from IMANI’s Founding President, Franklin Cudjoe, who explained why they were not engaging with the “LGBT situation” in Ghana. Cudjoe cited the lack of official data on the matter and argued that, unlike issues like corruption, it had no public policy implications. He was certainly right about one thing:
“Look around you, it is not just IMANI that is “quiet”. Every serious research-based organization has stayed out because the subject matter does not lend itself too well to their/our instruments.”
So, who has spoken out? The members of Silent Majority Ghana have asked Ghana’s State Attorney in charge of the case against the 21 to drop the charges and provide reparations for the abuse of justice incurred. Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD) also stand out as an exception, an example of a civil society organization which has publicly spoken out against the incarceration of the 21 and in defence of the LGBTQ+ community’s constitutional rights to assemble and “to advocate for better treatment under the law”. In a Citi TV interview, Prof. Gyimah Boadi (founder and former director of CDD) questioned the assumptions aimed at the criminalization of the LGBTQ+ community. Groups who have expressed ongoing concern and critiqued homophobia in Ghana include Silent Majority Ghana, Rightify Ghana, LGBT+ Rights Ghana, the Humanist Association of Ghana, Ghana Centre for Democratic Development. They also include concerned citizen activists and artists like Wanlov the Kubolor. All of them have spoken about these issues even as they faced backlash on social media.
Amidst all this homophobic hate you might ask: Where is the love?
Where is the Love?
Many Ghanaian Christians say that it is their love for their queer “brothers and sisters” that motivates them to help them see their errand ways and to cure them of their queerness. Some use the metaphor of Christian love: if Christianity is about love for all humanity, then Ghanaians love queer people too.
My problem with assuming that “love” will allow people to see both sides is that it is often “out of love that the group seeks to defend the nation against others, whose presence then becomes defined as the origin of hate” (Ahmed 2004: 122-3). For so many peoples and groups have historically claimed to be acting out of love when acting violently against others. Most definitions of love, like definitions of freedom, are circular in that they are rendered in opposition to something else. A defense of love also “confirms heterosexual love as an obligation to the nation” and which is also tied to colonial and evangelical histories in Ghana. This ideal of love occludes the colonial histories that have violently erased pre-existing forms of gender fluidity in the African continent and other parts of the colonized world. This projected solution therefore becomes about an assimilation to a Christian and colonial ideal that some will never be able to live up to.
Then again, perhaps love is not completely irrelevant. As Ghanaian singer-musician Wanlov the Kubolor said in an interview:
“Once we are able to reprogram our psyche to show love and equality and compassion to this marginalized group of human beings we will excel as a people, as a country”.
Maybe if we learn to decolonize love and to reprogram ourselves to love according to how people would like to be loved and not according to our narrow colonially inspired definitions of what love is – we might allow for a broader definition gender, of nation and of community. We also do not need to leave spirituality or religion aside.
I draw inspiration from the speakers of a panel I co-organized with Wunpini F. Mohammed on ‘Queer Feminist Organizing in Ghana and Beyond,’ who demonstrated how religion (Islam and Christianity specifically) and feminist and queer organizing can converge in productive ways through “spiritual activism”. Spiritual activism however can be met with its opposite, what panelist El-Farouk Khaki (who is also a practising Muslim) called “spiritual violence”, which he defines as the idea “that you’re not good enough, that you’re not human enough. If you’re female or assigned female at birth, you’re not human enough. If you are queer, you are not human enough. If you are trans, you are not human enough.”
This process of dehumanization has real effects on queer people and other minority groups who do not conform to a certain idea of a nation or religious collective. We need to tackle spiritual violence. We must also draw public attention to the dehumanizing effects such nationalistic and religious strategies have on human life, and ask how this violence becomes legislated and condoned by people in power. The legal system, the media and civil society in Ghana have provided a cover for encouraging discrimination against LGBTQ+ people. When they are not actively putting queer people in harm’s way, they have remained silent on matters of such violence. What can be done now is to expose this cover for what it is – expressions of religious and nationalist love that serve to dehumanize the other. We can also turn our minds and hearts to a more inclusive, love – one that does not discriminate or seek to exclude others based on violent ideological practices – that speaks of and creates a different, better, world. And this can only come from communities, activists, and policy makers, within the African continent. Maybe we can take a cue from another African country, Botswana, where in 2019 the High Court voted unanimously to overturn colonial-era laws criminalizing homosexuality. As Justice Michael Leburu then said “[a] democratic society is one that embraces tolerance, diversity and open-mindedness…[s]ocietal inclusion is central to ending poverty and fostering shared prosperity.”
Acknowledgements: I want to thank Wunpini F. Mohammed and Katherine Blouin for reading this post and for their generous comments and suggestions.