Uganda’s war over homosexuality threatens to spread to other African
countries and has further damaged the increasingly strained relationship
between Africa and Western donors. For the donors it is a matter of
human rights for minorities – a corner stone of democracy. For Africa it
is part of the push back against the Western donors and the assertion
of an African agenda. In Africa’s very religious – Christian or Muslim –
societies, it is a matter of morality. At best it is a battle between
Western human rights and African morality but both suspect the other –
quite rightly – of more cynical agendas.
How did we get here? In the mid 1980s when Aids became front page
news it was at first an American story from San Francisco dubbed “The
Gay Plague”. Then there were the reports from Southern Uganda – the area
I had lived in more than a decade earlier. A particular hard-nosed news
editor asked me: “So are they all bumming each other in Africa?” My
reply was that in all the time I had been working in Africa I had never
come across homosexuality. That was true. Nobody talked about it.
In the United States Aids had begun to spread through the gay
community while in Africa it was spread through heterosexual
relationships, but my assertion that there was no gay sex in Africa was
absurd. In fact teaching in a Catholic school in Buganda it was staring
me in the face. The Uganda Martyrs, 22 young men executed by the Kabaka,
the Baganda king, Mutesa II in 1886 and canonised by Pope Paul VI in
1964, were burned to death because they refused to have sex with him.
But in the school, this was played down. We taught that they were
executed because they converted to Christianity. Homosexuality was not
talked about in Africa.
If it came up in conversation Ugandans and many other Africans would
tell you that homosexuality is not African. They say it was introduced
to Africa by the Arabs or the Europeans who forced Africans to do it –
all part of the imperial takeover of Africa. It is true that African
cultures tend to be very patriarchal and often macho. Part of that
culture is the refusal to accept that some people, male and female, are
gay and that they are just made that way.
Of course the mainstream religions (Christianity and Islam) which
have traditionally denounced homosexuality were mostly introduced to
Africa by Europeans and Arabs. Their new well-funded fundamentalist
counterparts – Wahabi Islam from Saudi Arabia and born again
Christianity funded by theologically primitive churches in America – are
killing off Africa’s traditional tolerance of otherness. There is much
evidence that historically many African societies tolerated
homosexuality and found ways of accommodating gay people.
If anything it was the Christian churches and Islamic preachers who
suppressed it. Many years after I left Uganda I heard that the head boy
of the school I taught in had committed suicide. He was a very sensible,
mild mannered boy who worked hard and never did anything wrong. The
girls loved him because he handsome and never hit on them – or hit them –
as other boys did. I learned that he had become a well-respected priest
but one day he had gone to the forest and hanged himself. I am now sure
he was gay and had become a priest in the belief that God would give
him the strength to resist these heinous feelings.
There was the bizarre case in 1997 of the first president of
Zimbabwe, the Reverend Canaan Sodindo Banana. His male bodyguard accused
him of forcing him to have sex. At first his denials were believed but
the case came to court and other victims came forward as witnesses.
Banana was convicted and served a prison sentence. When he died in 2003
he was not given a state funeral but Robert Mugabe called him “a rare
gift to the nation.”
Since then there have been other reports of gay groups throughout
Africa including at senior levels of the Nigerian army but until
recently not many Africans have admitted they are gay. It can be a death
sentence in some societies. I fear for Binyavanga Wainaina, the gay
Kenyan writer who movingly came out in public earlier this year. Since the new law in Uganda bans the promotion of gay literature, presumably his books are banned there now.
But wait a moment. There is another side to this apparently simple
story of backward primitive Africa confronting progressive Western
morality. I grew up in a world which was very similar to where Uganda is
at the moment. In the Catholic boarding school I went to homosexuality
was the worst crime in the book and boys were beaten for it. It was not
just a matter of school discipline. We were told we would definitely go
to hell for it too.
And that was pretty much the view of society too. Homosexuality was
illegal and gay people discriminated against in the UK until a series of
laws began to be passed in 1967. Even then it was tolerated as long as
it didn’t “frighten the horses” – cause a public problem. So people like
Oscar Wilde were destroyed by those laws and, in my lifetime, Alun
Turing, the man who broke the German enigma code in World II, committed
suicide after being convicted of homosexual acts. He was also forced to
have chemical hormone treatment to “cure” him. Until recently a
prominent psychiatrist I know believed it was a “disorder”.
The fact is that in Britain it has only been 30 years since being gay
has been OK thanks to a concentrated campaign to change the public
attitude. Africa may not have been exposed to that debate and even then
we must not assume its people will simply follow what Western
governments tell them to do. Why should we expect African countries to
automatically follow suit and change their minds and their laws, just
because we tell them to? That does sound like neo-imperialism to me.
With China and other countries now engaged in Africa, African people and
their rulers are becoming more self-confident and are able to push back
against the western agenda – including western liberal values.
It is tragic that this new self-confidence and ability to assert
African values has started with the issue of gay rights but we should be
neither surprised, nor smug about it.
SOURCE:www.africanarguements.org
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