Africa’s Imaginary Gay Crisis

Another member of the Insider/Out list serv that I belong to shared a link to this op-ed column which appeared in The Guardian, a newspaper in Nigeria. The column looks at the manufactured "gay crisis" in Africa which is the handiwork of corrupt political regimes that want to blame a scapegoat for the declining economic conditions in their nations - which are generally the result of the politicians own misdeeds and incompetence - with the help of largely USA based Christianists. While extreme in some ways, the column also gives a glimpse of what the United States would look like as a nation should the Christianists ever succeed in imposing the form of theocratic government for which they yearn. As I continue to maintain, the Christianists and their flunkies in the GOP are a clear and present danger to constitutional government and freedom of religion for all citizens. Here are some column highlights:
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A SPECTRE is haunting Africa - the spectre of homosexuality. But it is an unusual spectre: it does not exist. It is a phantom. Over the past decade, a curious and totally unlikely coalition of religious leaders, the ruling class, and sections of the mainstream media, has launched a vigorous campaign against homosexuality and perceived homosexuals. Trading in the most spiteful rhetoric and symbols imaginable, members of this alliance have sung from the same hymn book, affirming, implausibly, that homosexuality is a recent import into Africa, and that homosexuals are responsible for the continent’s post-colonial throes. Not unpredictably, the alliance’s investment in hate has yielded bountiful dividends of violence and murder.
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I advance two preliminary explanations. The first is economic. It is hardly a coincidence that the two countries where anti-gay rhetoric has been most strident in Africa - Zimbabwe and Nigeria - are also two of the most economically destitute. In both countries, the percentage of the population ‘living’ on less than a dollar a day has risen steadily over the past two decades. Average life expectancy, according to the 2011 Failed States Index (where both are ranked 6th and 14th respectively) is 33.5 for Zimbabwe, and 48.3 for Nigeria. In both countries, a frustrated quest for a rational explanation for economic crisis has produced an implausible demonology in which gays, lesbians, and sexual deviants of all sorts apparently team up with sundry ‘demonic forces’ to ambush not just those countries’, but Africa’s economic progress (incidentally, South Africa, with the most liberal sexual laws in Africa, is also the continent’s most economically advanced country).
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The situation in both Zimbabwe and Nigeria seems to validate the link between material privation and political suggestibility. Where people are poor and poorly educated (or not at all), they are more susceptible to political manipulation by demagogues who parrot easy explanations for complex and fundamentally rational economic problems. In most of Africa today, the insidious fiction that the ‘gay next door’ bars the way to economic progress has been cue for a massive pink-hunt.
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None of this politico-economic explanation can be meaningful without a connection to the expanding influence of religion in Africa. This is my second explanation. Over the past three decades, much of the continent has fallen under the scourge of Pentecostal Christianity. As a social phenomenon, one with key transnational connections, Pentecostal Christianity in Africa has carried a moralist and doggedly anti-intellectual banner.
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As an anti-intellectual force, Pentecostalism in Africa is profoundly ahistorical in that it eschews human, especially political, agency in favour of pseudo-spiritual ‘explanations’.
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This is the overall anti-intellectual, anti-rationalist climate in which gays have become, quite literally, African societies’ whipping boys. I emphasize this climate in order to drive home an important point, to wit: given the atmosphere of pervasive irrationality, gays are only one among many other ‘enemies’. In Nigeria for instance, an ever growing list of ‘demonic forces’ has recently expanded to include so-called child ‘witches’ who are blamed for even economic problems that pre-date their conception. In the most tragic examples, brainwashed parents have colluded in the killing of their own children.
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With many evangelical upstarts naively promising salvation in exchange for gays’ renunciation of ‘sodomy’, the continent is once again chasing shadows at the expense of real solutions to its serious problems. Such problems may vary in manifestation and degree, but they are unified by their being traceable to a common set of factors, foremost among which are elite myopia and failure to invest in human capital and physical infrastructure. These problems require urgent attention, and as it is, African governments’ capacity to deal with them is hobbled by their failure to keep their young men and women at home. These are the things we should be obsessing about, not what the dude next door is up to when the lights go out.
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Ignorance, irrationality, and economic decline are the fruits of evangelical Christianity. Yet this is precisely what the political whores within the GOP are willing to unleash on the USA as they prostitute themselves to the Christian Right for short term political advantage.