African lawmakers push for tougher anti-LGBT laws

Lawmakers from more than a dozen African countries have pledged to push new Bills restricting LGBT rights, after a conference in Ghana that brought together self-described ‘pro-family’ activists from ​across Africa and Europe, reports africanews. The African Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Family Values and Sovereignty was held in Accra, a week after Ghana's Parliament passed one ‌of the continent's toughest anti-LGBT measures, a Bill criminalising LGBT promotion. The gathering reflects a broader shift toward more restrictive laws targeting LGBT people in parts of Africa that participants said was being encouraged by conservative figures in the US and Europe, and has gained new momentum since President Donald Trump returned to the White House. Some attendees said they saw an opportunity to promote their agendas under Trump, whose administration – unlike those of Barack Obama and Joe Biden – does not promote ​LGBT rights as part of its foreign policy. ‘When you return to your respective capitals, let the resolutions we adopt here not gather dust in the archives of our secretariats. Let ​them be translated into active Bills, robust budgetary allocations, and rigorous oversight,’ Ghana Parliament Speaker Alban Bagbin said in his opening remarks. ‘Go home and tell ⁠your people that their representatives have resolved to protect the sanctuaries of their homes, the heritage of their ancestors, and the sovereignty of their nations.’

More than half of Africa's 54 countries criminalise same-sex ​sexual acts. Several countries, including Uganda and Senegal, have recently gone a step further, adopting laws that criminalise LGBT ‘promotion’. Organisers said lawmakers from 20 countries ​attended the conference. It was unclear how many intend to introduce new legislation based on the discussions, notes africanews. Reuters spoke to five participants and reviewed more than 100 pages of presentations given at the conference. It could not determine the role of foreign activists in shaping the agenda, nor find evidence of foreign funding. Speakers included Henk Jan van Schothorst, the Dutch executive director of the advocacy group Christian Council International. He urged African governments to resist ​pressure to ban so-called conversion therapy, which aims to make gay people straight. ‘These policies are not only reserved for the Netherlands and for Europe. They are coming to Africa,’ he said of the bans, describing them as ‘ideological ‌colonisation’ by Western ⁠powers. In another presentation, Kenyan doctor Wahome Ngare defined homosexual as ‘the young man sexually molested by the father’ and transgender as ‘the young lady sexually molested by strangers’. The conference concluded with lawmakers approving an ‘African Charter on Family, Sovereignty and Values’, drafted at earlier meetings in Uganda. The 32-page document urges governments to withdraw from treaties or agreements – including at the UN and with foreign donors – seen as promoting ‘the LGBT agenda’, abortion or sex education that is not abstinence-focused. The charter also says signatories should work to enact national laws that ‘safeguard African culture and cultural values’. Lawmakers from 18 of the 20 represented countries approved the ​charter. Ghana's Bill is awaiting sign-off by President John Dramani Mahama, who has previously said he would sign such a measure into law but recently said there were procedural issues. A coalition of more ⁠than 100 ​African civil society groups has urged Mahama to reject the Bill, saying the government risked allowing ‘external actors with resources and ​reach to shape its domestic legislation’.

The influence of US evangelical christianity on anti-LGBTQ legislation across Africa has been extensively documented over the past two decades, writes Caleb Okereke, founder and editor of Minority Africa, in the New Humanitarian. ‘In 2023, I wrote about US architectural influence on Uganda's anti-homosexuality law, which passed weeks before the first African Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Family and Sovereignty held in Entebbe, Uganda. My goal now, though, is to examine something that has received far less scrutiny: the cross confessional coalition that makes these movements possible. By that, I mean the deliberate alliance between Christian, Muslim and even traditional religious institutions – groups with largely incompatible theologies – that has been made politically operational in Africa through deliberately secularising language of “family values”.’ According to Okereke the ‘family values’ conference is not incidental. ‘It is, in many ways, one such African laboratory where the cross-religious model was first formalised and tested. In 2013, Ghanaian lawyer and anti-LGBTQ activist Moses Foh-Amoaning founded the National Coalition for Proper Human Sexual Rights and Family Values as a deliberately tripartite body. It unites the Christian Council, the Catholic Bishops' Conference, the Pentecostal-Charismatic Council, Muslim organisations, and the National House of Chiefs under a single structure.

Ghana, he says, is thus an early proof of concept for how Christian, Muslim and traditional institutions could be assembled into a single political constituency through the language of ‘family values’. ‘It is crucial to poke at this coalition and understand its mechanisms because we can then start to see connections between what’s happened in Ghana and Uganda – which are majority Christian – to places like Senegal, which also recently passed a new anti-LGBTQ law, Burkina Faso, which passed a law last year, and Mali, which criminalised homosexuality in 2024 – all majority-Muslim countries.’ Okereke points out in the New Humanitarian analysis that in 2023, when Uganda's Inter-Religious Council held a press conference demanding the return of the anti-homosexuality Bill, the Mufti of Uganda sat alongside the Archbishop of the Church of Uganda, a Catholic bishop, and leaders of the Born Again and Seventh Day Adventist churches. ‘Weeks later, the Bill – which recommended the death penalty for homosexuality – was introduced in Parliament, sponsored by a Muslim MP, Asuman Basalirwa. ‘…I would argue that these collaborations mark the beginning points of a movement in which Islamic institutions in Africa have evolved from passive instruments in a US Christian nationalist strategy to active co-architects of it.’ He says the vehicle for this evolution is the ‘family values’ framework, a phrase that functions as a translation protocol, allowing groups with many incompatible theologies to interoperate politically. ‘It succeeds as a binding agent because it does not require theological agreement. It allows Christianity, Islam, and traditional African religions to each be positioned as vehicles of indigenous cultural defence against secular liberal globalism.’ It seems evident that as the US Christian right carried out its anti-homosexuality campaign in majority-Christian countries in the mid-2000s, it became clear that Christianity alone as a moral claim against LGBTQ rights could not achieve continental reach. The “family values” container thus does that work of inclusion precisely by being theologically empty: It is a secular shell around a Christian right project that needs Muslim (and other) bodies in the room to claim continental legitimacy. ‘