This article originally appeared on The Kasama Project on 8 February 2014. Reposting here to preserve a broken link. It may also be accessed here.
“What Clinton and Obama have done is weaponize gay rights in the service of neocolonialism.”
By ISH
Gay people in African countries have long confronted existential
challenges. But now old laws that criminalize homosexual behavior are
being supplemented with harsh penalties and new laws designed to push
gay people back into the shadows. This massive wave of repression is
being led by local demagogues and visiting American missionaries. But
underneath it all, decades of neocolonial exploitation and blatant
imperialist hypocrisy have created a perfect storm of terror for gay
Africans.
We celebrate the fact that Uganda is a no go zone for the gay people. Let them die like
cockroaches and insects with no purpose. We praise the lord that our
leaders are put them in their places;- graveyards, cells, prisons and
out of Uganda. Yeessssssssssssssssssss this is it, we shall get them.” —a Ugandan supporter of anti-gay legislation, on Facebook
After being stalled for several years and having undergone various
revisions, Uganda's parliament made headlines in December by finally
passing a deeply repressive bill against gays and lesbians. While the
death penalty clause was removed from what was originally referred to as
the "Kill the Gays Bill," it sets penalties including life imprisonment
for “aggravated homosexuality,” and also criminalizes the failure to
turn in known homosexuals for their behavior. According to
the Guardian,
“Homosexuality was already illegal in Uganda under a colonial-era law
that criminalised sexual acts 'against the order of nature,' but the
Ugandan politician who wrote the new law argued that tough new
legislation was needed because gay people from the west threatened to
destroy Ugandan families and were allegedly 'recruiting' Ugandan
children into gay lifestyles.”
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has so far refused to sign the bill into law,
saying the bill
would not solve the problem of “abnormality.” But regardless of the
status of the bill, Ugandan gay people, referred to as “kuchus,” report a
sharp increase in anti-gay harassment and violence. Activist David Kato
was murdered in 2011, and Andrew Waiswa of the
Gender-Equality and Health Organisation of Uganda
(GEHO) was beaten by thugs in December requiring hospitalization.
Waiswa, now recuperating at home, reports that his friends are
threatened daily on the streets. Says Waiswa,
“So they want to
kill me for being me and trying to help fellow LGBTq brothers and
sisters??? Now that's madness!! I have survived many attempts and I know
some of us might lose our lives in this battle, but giving up the fight
is not an option....We are born this way!!! We are gay! We are here...
we can't hide anymore, we have nowhere to run...yes we are Ugandan
Kuchus!!”
A Worldwide Trend?
Unfortunately, Uganda is not the only country in Africa, or indeed
elsewhere in the world, where gay or queer people are now being
targeted. In January, Nigerian
president Goodluck Jonathan surprised observers by
signing a similarly repressive law that criminalizes gay marriages but
also criminalizes the ability of gays and lesbians to associate or to
form organizations. Immediately following the enactment of this law,
dozens of gay Nigerians were arrested,
according to human rights activists. In northern Nigeria where Muslim sharia law coexists with civil Nigerian law, the new law seems to have
fueled a wave of popular anti-gay protest demanding harsh penalties for those arrested.
Nigerian student
Udoka Okafor summarizes:
Openly LGBT persons in Nigeria are simply struggling
to survive a culture that is hostile to them because of their sexual
and gender orientation. The legal system criminalizes them, society
ostracizes them, and politicians spit out negative demagogueries about
them that further indoctrinate people into a culture of hostility
towards LGBT persons.”
Elsewhere, Gambia's president Yahya Jammeh used the occasion of
his September speech to the United Nations in New York to denounce homosexuals and their supporters:
"Those
who promote homosexuality want to put an end to human
existence...Homosexuality in all its forms and manifestations which,
though very evil, antihuman as well as anti-Allah, is being promoted as a
human right by some powers.”
A legislator in Liberia is promoting a law that would also criminalize gay marriage:
“[Homosexuality]
is a criminal offence. It is un-African...It is a problem in our
society. We consider deviant sexual behaviour criminal behaviour,” said the legislator, Jewel Howard-Taylor.
Back in 1995
President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe notoriously said,
“I
find it extremely outrageous and repugnant to my human conscience that
such immoral and repulsive organizations, like those of homosexuals, who
offend both against the law of nature and the morals of religious
beliefs espoused by our society, should have any advocates in our midst
and elsewhere in the world.” He has kept up this anti-gay
attitude ever since and non-sexual gay behavior was criminalized in
Zimbabwe in 2006. There are many other examples across sub-Saharan
Africa.
And of course there is the law in Russia, signed by President
Vladimir Putin last summer, that bans “propaganda of nontraditional
sexual relations to minors.”
This law effectively shoves
Russia's gay and lesbian community back into the closet, as any open
activity can now be cited as “gay propaganda” that might expose children
to homosexuality. While homosexuality itself remains decriminalized in
post-Soviet Russia (at least for now),
activists report
a disturbing increase in violence directed against the Russian gay
community. The Russian anti-gay law has been a focus of world-wide
activists seeking to use the winter Olympics in Sochi to publicize
what's happening there and punish the Olympics' supporters for enabling
repression by calling for protests and a boycott.
Finally, in December of last year, India's supreme court shocked the
world by reinstating a colonial-era law recriminalizing homosexuality.
The 1861 law had been struck down in 2009. In the new year, the supreme
court even rejected complaints by human rights activists and stood firm
on its decision to make homosexuality punishable by up to ten years in
jail.
Why Is this Happening?
Yet things look very different in the United States. While violence
against transgendered people remains at an unprecented high level, and
while a bill against workplace discrimination against LGBT people (
ENDA)
languishes in congress, the rapid increase in the number of states
legalizing same-sex marriage equality would suggest a rising tide of
acceptance toward gay people here at home. Despite the furious activity
of anti-gay hate groups and the
frothings
of fascist teapartiers on the American right, mostly the story in the
US has been one of rapid legal advance for gay civil rights. So why all
this backlash against gay people in so many places around the world?
Many of the African politicians behind these anti-gay laws claim that
homosexuality represents something un-African being imported into
Africa by criminal European or American gays for nefarious purposes like
child molestation. These politicians say there is no history of
homosexuality in Africa, despite the fact that this is
widely disputed by scholars. Ugandan pastor
Martin Ssempa, one of the architects of the Uganda bill, wrote,
“Homosexuality
is illegal, unnatural, ungodly and un-African: In Uganda as most of the
global South, homosexuality is an 'evil and repugnant sexual act' which
simultaneously breaks four established laws [including]
the law of our African tribal cultures which have been handed down to
us by our fathers from thousands of years of civilized traditions.”
It is true that a moden gay
identity owes much to the
evolution of gay consciousness in European and American culture, but gay
historians and anthropologists have documented same-gender sexuality
and gender-nonconforming behavior all over the world, including in many
traditional African cultures. It's ironic that what these politicians
are actually defending is a legal system and religious morality
established by the
British colonial masters, who introduced harsh
anti-gay codes at the point of bayonets to the indigenous populations
of the African regions they conquered in the 19th century.
And it's not as though there are no African gays standing up for
their own rights. There are LGBT organizations across Africa. The very
fact that African gays now have a roster of martyrs like
David Kato of Uganda, or
Roger Jean-Claude Mbede and
Eric Lembembe
of Cameroon, disproves this notion that gay people are outsiders. And
who can forget the heroic anti-apartheid activist turned HIV-activist
Simon Nkoli?
So what is really happening? Two
actual outside forces
are involved.
The Evangelical Link
Scott Lively is a right-wing American Christian fundamentalist activist who has devoted his career to attacking LGBT people. The author of
a slanderous book
that claims Nazi Germany was the product of a homosexual conspiracy, he
traveled to Uganda in 2009 to give a series of lectures warning of a
gay menace to Ugandan society. His message is not just one of religious
conservatism, but a call to political action. American evangelical
missionaries have been using allegedly charitable intentions to build
networks throughout Africa. Their ubiquitous presence in local relief
work, including massive involvement in HIV/AIDS charities, has given
them entry to local politics. Their work is not all about mere charity:
it comes with a heavy dose of social conservatism and politically
reactionary ideology. Their AIDS relief work, where they have become a
channel for US government funding, puts AIDS prevention in the context
of conservative religious practice and morality, focusing for instance,
on abstinence and marriage. Remember the abortive and bizarre
“Kony 2012”
campaign? The people behind that were part of the same community of
zealous missionaries working hard to capture the minds of communities
across central Africa.
Lively and others like him, apparently on the losing end of the
so-called culture wars in the United States, have found a receptive
audience in countries like Uganda. In the U.S., Lively's organizations
are derided as hate groups. In Uganda, in the midst of a massive
religious revival where antigay attitudes have become commonplace,
Lively's
political message has found fertile ground. Martin
Ssempa, already engaged in a campaign against sexual permissiveness in
AIDS prevention, became one of his chief local disciples. An American
journalist visiting Uganda in 2005
described Ssempa's message:
In his sermons, he condemns homosexuality,
pornography, condoms, Islam, Catholics, certain kinds of rock music, and
women’s rights activists, who he says promote lesbianism, abortion, and
the worship of female goddesses. He told me that Satan worshipers hold
meetings under Lake Victoria, where they are promised riches in exchange
for human blood, which they collect by staging car accidents and
kidnappings.”
Scott
Lively and the American evangelicals have become the catalyst for the
transformation of these reactionary ideas into political reality.
Although Lively claims to be against harsh punishment for homosexual
acts, it's clear that his pseudo-historical and pseudo-scientific
diatribes against gay people have sent anti-gay sentiment in Uganda over
the top. It's worth noting —and frightening — that Lively has lately
been making numerous appearances in Russia. (He's also being sued in the
state of Massachusetts for
“crimes against humanity” by a Ugandan LGBT group called
SMUG, Sexual Minorities of Uganda, backed by the Center for Constitutional Rights).
While Lively is the most prominent of the reactionary evangelical
leaders implicated in anti-gay legislation, there are religious
organizers across the region influencing popular attitudes and legal
processes. The Catholic Church, the conservative wing of the Anglican
church, numerous protestant denominations, and in the case of some
countries, Islamic fundamentalist movements like Nigeria's Boko Haram,
are all preaching intolerance toward gay people.
But it's a mistake to simply blame the new wave of anti-gay
repression on mere backward religious ideas. The real issue is power,
and this is revealed as we consider who is actually benefiting from this
repression.
The Weaponization of Gay Rights
There is a second outside force behind the wave of anti-gay reaction
in Africa and elsewhere, and it's actually the more sinister one.
Ironically, this force is dressed in pro-LGBT language and intent. This
force is the U.S. State Department.
Hillary Clinton, acting as President Obama's secretary of state,
made a speech at the UN offices in Geneva in 2011 in which she said,
"Some have suggested that gay rights and human rights are separate and distinct, but in fact they are one and the same.”
The speech was a sweeping condemnation of anti-gay repression
world-wide. Under her leadership, the State Department followed up the
speech with
broad policy statements that “
the United States would use all the tools of American diplomacy to promote LGBT rights around the world.”
American and international LGBT organizations widely welcomed
Clinton's remarks, hoping that the United States would use its
“leverage” to advocate for gay civil rights in places like Uganda. The
American LGBT population largely cheered Clinton and Obama, which was,
of course, part of the idea.
But here's the problem. The United States is not actually a force for
good in the world, and certainly not a force for good in Africa.
The real interest of the US in Africa is power; economic and
political power. In the fifty-plus years of the post-colonial era,
African countries have learned well and good what domination by the US
means. In countries like Congo, Rwanda, Liberia, and Angola, the US has
meant decades of genocidal civil strife and the looting of natural
resources. It has meant coup d'etats and rule by viciously corrupt
western puppets. It has meant poverty for the masses of people while a
select few at the top of African countries are blessed with untold
wealth and influence. It has meant crushing national debts and
environmental disaster. It has meant brute force against uprisings or
national attempts to break free of imperialist — of
neocolonial — domination. The United States and its corporations profit from African misfortune.
What Clinton and Obama did was
weaponize gay rights in the service of that neocolonialism.
It's
no accident that Clinton issued this statement when she did. Obama has
his eye fixed clearly on one of the main battlefields of neoliberal
globalization. American “advisers” and even armies have been dispatched
to central Africa. Drone bases have been set up in west Africa. US
military incursions and drone attacks continue in Somalia. And US
military aid and mercenary assistance (in concert with its junior
partner the Israeli military-industrial complex) is all over east
Africa. The radical-looking governments once supported by the Soviet
Union have mostly disappeared, but Chinese imperialism has replaced
Russia as an economic threat to the US in Africa. The US has used its
crocodile-tears version of “human rights” as a weapon before, but now
some symbolic concern for LGBT rights has been added to the American
armory. Let us be clear:
this is not a good thing for the gay, lesbian, transgender, or queer people of Africa.
US Africa policy is drenched in blood. Sure there's lots of money
going to famine relief, AIDS prevention, and resource exploration. But
each dollar is a strand from a spider's web. And how dare the United
States, prison capital of the world, lecture any other country about
civil repression?
The neocolonial domination of Africa looks different than the
colonial domination of Africa. It requires allowing national governments
the appearance of independence. The corrupt, anti-democratic rulers of
so many African countries understand this well too. What the
weaponization of gay rights allows them is a cheap form of utterly fake
anti-imperialism. It allows them to deflect actual criticism of their
repressive rule by blaming gay people as subversives and pointing to
their own opposition to imperialism by loudly resisting the bullying of
the State Department on gay-related social policy. The real fact that
the US government and multinational corporations are propping up
undemocratic regimes because it's strategically and economically
profitable to do so is consciously obscured. The millions of dollars
that fatten the accounts of local compradors from their collaboration
with imperialism are no longer the focus when these compradors turn
around and announce that they are standing up to unfair pressure from
the most powerful country on the planet.
Last July, Zimbabwe's
Mugabe commented after Obama's visit to a handful of African countries:
Then we have this American president, Obama, born of
an African father, who is saying we will not give you aid if you don’t
embrace homosexuality....We ask, was he born out of homosexuality? We
need continuity in our race, and that comes from the woman, and no to
homosexuality....we will cut their heads off.”
The anti-gay demogogues in Uganda and Nigeria are also clear on this,
finding great utility in the time-honored traditions of scapegoating
and showboating. One can see exactly what has now happened by examining
the Facebook page
“Nigerians Must Unite and Liberate Nigeria.”
A really interesting page, full of anti-imperialist content, it's the
site of daily postings against Nigerian government corruption, ethnic
and religious sectarianism, against corporate destruction of the
Nigerian environment, and plunder of Nigerian resources. But along came
the anti-gay marriage law, and now it is filled with posts and comments
praising President Jonathan.
“We are forever looking forward to the slightest opportunity to commend Goodluck Jonathan
the President of our nation, in the hope that he will do better. In
that spirit, my compliments, and in no small measure, go out to
President goodluck jonathan, for having the courage to stand up to
enormous American & European pressure, by signing into law, the
Anti-Gay bill and criminalizing same-sex marriage and public celebration
of gay love in Nigeria. Thumbs up on this one.” And,
“Good
News from Nigeria President Goodluck Jonathan has signed into law a
wide-ranging bill which not only criminalizes same sex marriage, but all
cohabitation, meetings, gatherings and advocacy by or on behalf of gay
people in the country: The signed bill says the gays, lesbians in
Nigeria will risk a 14-year jail term...Brave President Goodluck Ebele
Jonathan.” Pro-gay commenters were called CIA agents and banned.
So not only is bigotry triumphant, but the corrupt national
leaderships which actually profit from their relationship with
neocolonialism and the multi-national corporations are let completely
off the hook.
Against Homonationalism
The
reaction of the LGBT establishment
in the US has been predictable, lining up to demand that the US, the
EU and other governments increase their pressure on African governments.
The corporatist LGBT civil rights group Human Rights Campaign (HRC)
even traveled to Davos to present at the World Economic Forum vulture
nest:
"When countries like Russia or Nigeria pass laws that
threaten the human rights of LGBT people, world leaders must make it
clear that those actions have consequences,” said HRC head
Chad Griffin.
The HRC basically identifies with imperialism and calls for more misery
to be inflicted on Nigeria. Talk about not doing African gays any
favors. (For more information on how the HRC actually profits from
global exploitation check out these reports:
“HRC and the Vulture Fund” and
“HRC International Expansion Funded by the Worst Humans.”)
While the impulse toward solidarity with oppressed lesbian, gay and
transgender people in countries like Uganda and Nigeria is positive,
it's really impossible under the circumstances of US imperialist
hegemony to fail to contextualize what's going on in Africa, and to fail
to understand the hypocrisy of American intent. The liberation of
Africa's gay people may wind up looking different than the civil rights
trajectory in Europe and the United States. This is in no way to excuse
or mitigate the brutal repression being inflicted on gays in Uganda and
Nigeria; indeed it should be firmly and loudly condemned by communists,
as imperialism and the corrupt rule of the compradors should be equally
condemned.
But the liberation of Africa from neocolonialism, imperialism and
neoliberalism (including the liberation of African gay people) must be
the work of Africans themselves.
As in the Middle East, where apartheid Israel is using its supposed
acceptance of gays as a propaganda weapon in its war against the
Palestinians, the concept here of “homonationalism” is useful.
Writing in
Jadaliyya, Maya Mikdashi identifies homonationalism in the context of what Hillary Clinton's aggressive statement really meant:
“In
her speech Secretary Clinton was...reproducing this generative
alienation between political and human rights. She emphasized that
LGBTQs everywhere had the same rights to love and have sex with whomever
they choose as partners, and to do so safely. In making this statement,
she reiterated a central tenet of what Jasbir Puar names homonationalism: the idea that LGBTQs the world over experience, practice, and are motivated by the same desires... Secretary
Clinton suggested that queers everywhere, whether white or black, male
or female or transgendered, soldier or civilian, rich or poor,
Palestinian or Israeli, can be comprehended and interpolated through the
same rights framework. But the content of what she she calls 'gay
rights' is informed by the experiences and histories of (namely white
gay male) queers in the United States, and thus there is an emphasis on
visibility and identity politics and an elision of the class and
political struggles that animate the lives of the majority of the third
world's heterosexual and homosexual
populations. Thus detached from its locality, 'gay rights' can travel
internationally not only as a vehicle for normative homo-nationalism,
but as a vehicle for neoliberal ways of producing politics and subjects
more broadly.”
Thus, part of the problem is that the imposition of American will on
African countries is rightfully going to produce backlash, leaving the
actual lesbian, gay, transgender or queer Africans forced into making
false and dangerous choices. And it's fair to suggest that the active
embrace of US bullying by elements in the American gay community who
have embraced the agenda of the Obama State Department might mark a
transition from “homonationalism” to “homoimperialism.”
Mikdashi concludes with a warning, which is really important when
thinking about how to respond to calls for justice against the
oppression which is real and horrifying, coming from people and places
drenched in the bloody hypocrisy of empire:
We cannot 'choose'
to not be who we have become, but we must recognize how we have been
formed as neoliberal rights seeking and speaking bodies, and how this
formation is linked to a history of depoliticization and alienation. In
other words, we must be both tactical and skeptical when this language
reaches to embrace us, and when we, as activists and as academics, use
it ourselves. We must find ways to critically inhabit this homonational
world and try, always, to act within the uncomfortable and precarious
line between rights and justice.”
Lenin
famously said that communists should be “
tribune[s] of the people...able
to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter
where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it
affects.” And so we are called to speak out against the rise of
anti-gay repression in Africa, in Russia, in India, and to challenge
the credentials of those who claim they are somehow defending
African-ness by oppressing gay people. But for us, this work begins here
in the US: the State Department, the Clintons, the Obamas, the fascist
hate groups and the ilk of Scott Lively,
these mortal enemies are all here right at home.
As Andrew Waiswa of
GEHO says, evoking past liberation struggles in Africa,
“A luta continua!”
