Early in March, Ghanaian lawmakers reintroduced an anti-queer bill titled the Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill. The Ghanaian parliament had passed the bill last year, but it was not signed into law by former President Nana Akufo Addo, whose party was later swept out of power in the general elections held last December. Same-sex relations are already criminalized in Ghana, but the bill seeks to impose harsher sentences for queer Ghanaians and anyone else who engages in the “willful promotion, sponsorship or support” of LGBTQ+ activities.

The bill is one of several that have been introduced across Africa in recent years. Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda have all seen similar bills proposed in their national parliaments in the past few years, with that of Uganda being signed into law in 2023. As in Ghana, homosexuality is already criminalized in these countries, underscoring that these bills serve a political purpose that goes beyond just the legislative.

The COVID-19 pandemic widened class inequalities across the globe. In West Africa, the number of people unable to meet their basic food needs rose to 25 million in 2021, a 34 percent year-on-year increase. Despite this, African governments have continued to enact neoliberal reforms at the behest of IMF and World Bank policymakers while cracking down on dissent. Particularly, youth-led protest movements have mobilized to force a change in government policy, if not a change in government itself.

It is in the context of these crises of political legitimacy that these anti-queer bills are being deployed to gin up a moral panic capable of realigning the African masses behind governments that they know don’t represent their interests. By painting queerness as a moral threat to the well-being of African society at large, Africa’s ruling elites coalesce conservative political, religious, and cultural organizations behind the state, and through them, mobilize political legitimacy for unpopular regimes, even as they continue to enact widely unpopular economic policies.

In her article “Postcolonial Discourses of Queer Activism and Class in Africa,” Kenyan feminist and political theorist Lyn Ossome describes how Africa’s ruling elites use state power to “isolate a minority elite class, identified by sexual orientation, which they falsely identify with global forces of oppression.” To achieve this end, gender and sexual diversity is framed as a foreign import introduced to African societies through Western political and cultural influence. Queerness, they argue, is alien to our African way of life, and efforts towards securing the rights and well-being of queer Africans are never a result of African queer agency, but rather, evidence of “sexual colonization” by the West.

This argument is bolstered by several factors, not least the coercive nature of Western foreign policy. The conditioning of development aid to force legal changes, along with the threat of Western sanctions, sidelines local queer resistance and focuses the West as an arbiter of the rights of African people. In addition to this, due to our colonial history and the impacts of globalization on queer politics on the continent, discourse on African queerness is constrained by the use of Western terms that don’t easily translate to the indigenous conceptions of queerness that existed pre-colonization. It is easier to dehumanize and criminalize queer Africans when these foreign terms take up all the oxygen in our public discourse about queerness. This is not to say that the language used to litigate queer rights is the main problem, but rather that it reinforces the otherness of queer Africans in the African public imagination. For instance, terms like “gay” and “queer” are not only foreign to every language local to Nigeria but also not interchangeable with local terms that describe gender and sexual variance, such as yan dauda.

Sexual and gender diversity has always been a known feature of African societies. Just as the efforts to stamp it out during colonization are well documented. But this fact is largely ignored by the fundamentalist forces here who receive financial backing from US evangelical groups that have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into pushing anti-queer attitudes and laws in Africa. Ironically, it is also the repressive state structures set up during the colonial era to crush African resistance to colonialism that are now being instrumentalized to oppress queer Africans.

Before colonial contact, African attitudes towards sexual and gender diversity ranged from disapproval to deification, but very few societies, if any, had the carceral infrastructure which the state now wields as a tool of cultural preservation. Institutions such as the police and the prison system that facilitate the state’s violence against queer Africans are the same ones deployed to crush political dissent. While it is not possible to understand African societies in essentialist terms such “African” vs. “un-African,” we can nevertheless look at the nature of queer repression on the continent, and ask, “Would it be possible to minoritize, other, and oppress queer Africans without relying on the same tools that facilitated and facilitate the subjugation of the Africa people?” The answer to that question is no.