Africa’s gays are paying the price for the ideological and cultural battle between US liberals and Conservatives. Concepts such as same-sex marriage, the ordination of gay and women priests, contraception and sex before marriage, female emancipation and equality — the litmus tests of tolerance in the politically correct West — sit uneasily in deeply conservative and traditional societies in Africa.
Uneducated and poor populations consider such actions as the immoral products of Western-inspired decadence and the root cause for the demise of the family — the bedrock of African society.
However, Western liberals have — as they have always done in Africa — paid scant attention to such sensitivities. Arguing that human rights are universal they have pushed the liberal agenda on populations and governments struggling with far more basic concerns and always sensitive to perceived erosions of their own cultural identity.
Societies where feminism means the right not to be beaten or forcibly circumcised, and where polygamy is widely accepted, found the leap to modern-day Western concerns too great. Local populations, especially in rural areas, are simply not ready to accept these imported values.
By bringing the issue into the open and combining it with what is seen as patronising financial bullying, they have created the exact opposite of that which they wanted.
A sort of tolerance, albeit unspoken, existed in villages and cities across Africa. A blind eye was turned towards gays and other “misfits”, such as a boy who refused to hunt in a warrior society, so long as their actions took place away from public scrutiny.
Jonathan Clayton repeats an old script rebuking advocates of equality for disrupting the oppressive status quo; treating Africans solely as victims incapable of responsibility for their own choices and actions; and sneeringly dismissing fundamental human rights principles as “imported values.”