Africa Is a Country

Joyce Banda and Gay Rights

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Joyce Banda and Gay Rights

By
Travis Ferland

Is Banda serious about repealing Malawi's anti-gay laws? Is she just cynical so as to secure donor cash? And, what about Malawian public opinion?

Erik Törner via Flickr CC.

Malawi’s new president, Joyce Banda, has said that she will push for the repeal of her country’s anti-homosexuality laws. Of course this depends on her ability to secure popular support for her reforms in parliament. But then, even if the laws are repealed, will public animosity towards gays and lesbians change? Will protective laws be created in their place? Will life be any different for Malawi’s sexual minorities?

In October of 2011, David Cameron proposed cutting aid to countries that discriminate against gays and lesbians. Just a couple months later, Hillary Clinton made a statement on “gay rights as human rights” in anticipation of International Human Rights Day. She explained that US foreign policy would take each country’s treatment of LGBT persons into consideration. Ban Ki-Moon also threw his weight behind gay rights. Most recently, Barack Obama has declared that he backs same-sex marriage in the United States. None of these statements were well received on the African continent, and even African LGBT activists said that such grandstanding could lead to a backlash against Africa’s sexual minorities. However, Ms. Banda’s decision shows that the Cameron-Clinton approach might hold weight.

Ms. Banda has been clear about her desire to appeal to Western donors in order to improve Malawi’s economy. Some of Africa’s more economically powerful countries (Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Senegal to name a few) might reject Western pressure, but is it still possible for the aid card to work in smaller or poorer countries? Will other countries follow Malawi’s lead, or is Joyce Banda simply an exception to the norm?

Further Reading

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.