If I were writing this column in Ghana, I would be facing a prison sentence. That’s because, according to Ghanaian law, anyone who identifies as an “ally” of LGBTQ+ people is guilty of a crime. This is one of the provisos of the Human Sexual Rights & Family Values Bill (2025), a new bill criminalising homosexuality and the promotion of LGBTQ+ activities that was recently approved by the Ghanaian parliament.
Introduced by one Reverend John Ntim Fordjour, the bill applies to a comprehensive list of sinners. To quote the bill itself, these include “a person who holds out as a lesbian, a gay, a bisexual, a transgender, a transsexual, a queer, an ally, a pansexual, or a person of any other sexual orientation or in a sexual relationship that is contrary to the sociocultural relationship between a male and a female”.
In the bill, the acronym for all this is LGBTTQQIAAP+, which is as clunky as it looks. When the fact that you believe in human rights for all means you become part of an acronym, such as A for “ally” rather than H for human, there are some deeply weird things going on. It does seem, to the casual observer, that countries with anti-LGBTTQQIAAP+ laws are also the countries with anti-CWOFFP (Citizens We Oppress For Fun and Profit) laws and practices.
I’m also not sure what the merry bigots who wrote this bill mean by “a person who holds out as gay”. It sounds a little ominous, as if there’s the option to not stubbornly hold out and that you’re just being obstinate about switching back to being straight. A little conversion therapy and you’ll be right back to normal.
Uganda’s recent Anti-Homosexuality Bill (2023), for example, besides imposing strict penalties for those who “choose” to be LGBTQ+, including the death penalty or life imprisonment in certain cases, suggests that there should be facilities for the “rehabilitation of same-sex people who come ‘to seek help’, namely conversion therapy”. This, according to a Global Campus of Human Rights paper entitled “African LGBTQ+ communities battling harms of dangerous conversion therapy”.
It’s a terribly primitive idea, one that exists across the world. Just in case you thought South Africa was immune, the same report describes how “in 2013, a South African court heard how a teenage boy died from severe injuries sustained while allegedly being beaten, starved, and forced to eat his own faeces at a camp linked to conversion therapy”.
According to the European Parliamentary Research Service, 31 out of 54 African countries criminalise consensual same-sex relations between adults. “In addition, several African countries penalise the public expression of LGBTIQ+ identities or those who fight for LGBTIQ+ rights.”
A 2024 Afrobarometer poll across 39 African countries has some scary findings. For example, 74% of respondents would “dislike having homosexuals as neighbours”. And intolerance of homosexuals is a minority opinion in only six countries: Cabo Verde (18%), South Africa (23%), Seychelles (30%), Mauritius (34%), Mozambique (44%) and Namibia (49%).
At the 4th African regional inter-parliamentary conference on family values and sovereignty held in Ghana earlier this month, Ghana’s anti-LGBTQ+ stance moved towards becoming policy across much of Africa. The objective of the conference, attended by representatives from 20 countries, was to advance a draft African charter on family, sovereignty and values by garnering enough support to take it to the African Union general assembly next February, when it would be put to a vote.
According to The Guardian, the charter was drawn up by a core group of African lawmakers, led by Ugandan government ministers. It asserts that “African values and culture are under attack from ‘foreign ideologies’ and urges states to withdraw from any agreements that do not align with the principles of the charter, including the 2003 Maputo protocol, which promotes gender equality and protects the reproductive and health rights of women and girls.
“The charter is the first attempt to impose a continent-wide legal framework rooted in a moralistic rather than rights-based viewpoint. It claims that sexual and reproductive health and rights are an existential threat to the African family, and falsely states that policies based on these rights promote abortion on demand.”
As is often the case in these extreme denials of what some of us would think of as basic human rights, it’s all about religion and religion’s bitch, “culture”. The 2025 Ghanaian bill quotes a statement by Ghana’s national house of chiefs, which noted that “the house wants to state without equivocation that throughout history, nowhere does the Ghanaian culture subscribe to LGBTQI, which is a taboo, inhuman and alien to our society.
Anti-rights activity on the continent is simply an extension and expansion of the same colonial playbook: Africa serving as a battleground on which the West wages its ideological and economic wars
— Famia Nkansa
“In God’s wisdom, man and woman were created to fulfil the procreation of humans on earth to satisfy God’s will. The symbolism for sex [and] marriage was between man and woman, as such, the idea of man marrying man and woman marrying woman is an abomination to our tradition and culture as Ghanaians.”
There is, again, deep irony in the bit about “African values and culture” being under attack from “foreign ideologies”, given that the gimcrack religious viewpoints on which these values are based are themselves imported foreign ideologies. But more than that, as a report by the Initiative for Strategic Litigation in Africa, a pan-African feminist initiative, points out in The Guardian: “Legitimate concerns around sovereignty and colonialism are distorted. The terminology running through the charter exposes the strong influence of conservative Christian organisations from the US and Europe that oppose abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. Progressive policies are dismissed as neocolonialism or cultural imperialism.” Yes, it’s those fun-loving (where “fun” is short for fundamentalist) US religious nuts coming for us again.
Or as Famia Nkansa, communications lead at Sierra Leone’s Purposeful, an organisation focused on girls’ activism, put it: “Anti-rights activity on the continent is simply an extension and expansion of the same colonial playbook: Africa serving as a battleground on which the West wages its ideological and economic wars.”
There is some interesting language in the clauses that make up the Ghanaian bill. Clause six is a fun one. It “prohibits a person from keeping a movable asset, a room, a house or any other asset for purposes of a sexual activity prohibited under the Bill”. I’m not quite sure what these “moveable assets” are. Vibrators, perhaps? This is fairly plausible, given that the clause further prohibits the owner of a moveable asset from “inducing or knowingly allowing a person to be in or on the moveable asset for the purpose of engaging in or promoting sexual activity prohibited under the Bill”. You can get up to six years in jail if you allow someone to sit on your moveable asset.
There’s also the conflation of being gay with bestiality — that formulation so loved by the same sort of politicians and populists who thrive on othering migrants as subhumans. “A person commits an offence if the person engages in sexual intercourse between or among persons of the same sex or between a man and an animal or a woman and an animal.” You can also go to jail for “a public show of amorous relations between or among persons of the same sex” or for “the glamourisation of LGBTTQQIAAP+ lifestyle by the media and creative arts industry”.
The kindly folk implementing this bill have given gay people a way to redemption, though. In fact, this bill isn’t a way to discriminate against gay people; it’s for your own good. Clause 21 provides a “flexible sentencing regime”. As well as chucking you in jail, the court can also look after your welfare “if the convicted person openly recants and requests access to approved medical help or treatment and the court is satisfied that the request of the convicted person is genuine”.
We can be proud of the fact that South Africa is an outlier in this African mass of bigotry. Last week, we officially abstained from adopting the draft African Charter on Family, Sovereignty & Values. Though, perhaps voting against it would have sent a better message. Still, the old refrain of “Africa is not a country” holds true here, except in this case, it’s “Africa is not a culture”.
Thankfully, our constitution clearly defines who we are or, at least, who we aspire to be. It’s our bulwark against the attempts by foreign states, whether it’s Ghana, the US or Russia, to capture our states by the backdoor of allegedly universal values.
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