Is Homosexuality an African or Un-African Human Rights Issue?

Critical African Studies, 2017

This special issue sheds lights on The Politics of Homosexuality in Africa through a series of in-depth analyses and ethnographic accounts that challenge existing essentialisms while bringing to bear a more complex and subtle representation of queer politics on the continent. In building, and yet departing from, the emerging scholarship on this topic, the contributions to this volume underline how the often-cited draconian legislations, the state-sponsored homophobic violence, and the heated public debates on homosexuality, should be seen not simply as the product of political chicanery and Pentecostal religious fervour, but as part of the (re)-emergence and (re)-articulation in postcolonial Africa of old and novel discourses on African independence and nation-building, of citizenship and human rights, and of morality and the place and recognition of Africa, and Africans, in the world. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21681392.2017.1282724

University of Illinois Press, 2017

This chapter focuses on an event in the history of sexuality, more specifically in the history of sexuality as a political issue. In recent years, vastly diverse movements around the politics of sexuality have embraced the notion of “sexual rights.” This concept developed rapidly especially since the UN Conference on Women in Beijing (1995) and in the wake of the global AIDS pandemic. More recently, rights specific to sexual orientation and gender identity have gained prominence, for instance with a 2011 Human Rights Council resolution on sexual orientation and gender identity, and a report to the UN General Assembly that analyzed in a preliminary way the universal human rights of LGBT persons. Issuance of this report and the resolution that commissioned it together signify a historical event in the politics of sexuality.

The recent emergence of homosexuality as a central issue in public debate in various parts of Africa has encouraged a stereotypical image of one homophobic Africa, often placed in opposition to a tolerant or depraved West. What is striking is that this image of Africa as homophobic is promoted by both traditionalists who insist that homosexuality is a Western intrusion and by the Western media that focus on homophobic statements from African political and religious leaders. What both neglect, however, is the existence of internal debate and disagreements among Africans on the subject of homosexuality. In this article we try to counter this image of a homophobic Africa with a more nuanced discussion, including a comparison of dif-African Studies Review, Volume 55, Number 3 (December 2012), pp. 145-68 Patrick Awondo is a researcher at IEDES Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne. His 2012 Ph.D. dissertation at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS-Paris) followed "sexual refugees" from Cameroon to Paris. He is the author of "The Politicisation of Sexuality and the Rise of Homosexual Mobilisation in Postcolonial Cameroun" (Review of African Political Economy 37 [2010]); "Médias, Politique et Homosexualité au Cameroun" (Politique Africaine 126 [2012]); and "On the Narratives of African Sexual Migrants in Paris" (Africa, forthcoming). At present he is working on a three-country project (Cameroon, Burkina Faso and Togo) about sexual workers and men who have sex with men (MSM) as part of a collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Résumé: L'émergence récente de l'homosexualité comme question centrale des débats publics dans plusieurs régions d'Afrique a encouragé l'émergence du stéréotype d'une Afrique homophobe, souvent placée en opposition à une culture occidentale soit tolérante soit dépravée. Il est marquant que cette représentation de l'Afrique comme homophobe est soutenue aussi bien par les traditionalistes, qui insistent que l'homosexualité est un phénomène importé de l'Occident, que par les médias occidentaux qui se concentrent sur des déclarations homophobes faites par des chefs politiques et religieux d'Afrique. Ces deux courants négligent d'admettre l'existence d'un débat interne et de désaccords parmi les Africains eux-mêmes sur le sujet de l'homosexualité. Dans cet article, nous tentons de contrer cette image homogène d'une Afrique homophobe avec une discussion plus nuancée en incluant une comparaison des différentes trajectoires dans l'émergence de l'homosexualité comme question publique dans quatre pays (Le Sénégal, le Cameroun, L'Ouganda, et l'Afrique du Sud). La comparaison met l'accent sur les variations considérables dans les manières dont la question de l'homosexualité s'est politisée. Par exemple, un monde sépare l'image de l'homosexuel comme un "Grand" (un homme riche et puissant) qui impose la pénétration anale comme une forme suprême de soumission (comme au Cameroun et au Gabon, où l'homosexualité est associée à la sorcellerie et autres forces occultes) et les personnes souvent marginales devenues victimes de persécution dans d'autres contextes. Une meilleure compréhension de ce qui est vaguement et incorrectement appelé "homophobie" sera utile pour rapprocher la logique des pressions internationales de décriminalisation et de protection de l'homosexualité avec les cultures locales. Il est indispensable d'obtenir le soutien d'activistes locaux pour contrer l'homophobie en Afrique.

Deborah P. Amory. (1997). “Homosexuality” in Africa: Issues and Debates. Issue: A Journal of Opinion, (15), 1. https://doi-org.library.esc.edu/10.2307/1166238 This literature review of homosexuality in Africa also includes a report on current research being conducted and presented at the African Studies Association annual meetings in the late 1990s.

Critical African studies, 2017

One of the most abiding accusations in the debate on homosexuality in Africa is that the whole enterprise is 'western' and that it lacks 'a true African flavour'. For some, the insistence on the human rights of homosexuals is a Euro-American imposition, while others contend that the whole raft of terms used in the discourse is foreign. Thus, terms such as 'queer' and 'LGBTI' (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex) are regarded as exogenous and as confirming the crisis which characterizes discourses on homosexuality in Africa. When this is added to the widely held perspective that homosexuality is 'of foreign origin', the contestation is deepened even further. Consequently, there have been efforts by some scholars and activists to Africanize the discourse on homosexuality in Africa. These have included the quest to use African terms for homosexuality and exhortations to deploy African epistemologies in discourses on homosexuality. This article seeks to examine the background issues and assess the gains and losses in the quest to Africanize homosexuality discourses. It analyses the politics of these discourses and highlights their underlying assumptions and tensions.

The politicisation of sexuality expressed especially in politically and religiously sanctioned homophobia in sub-Saharan Africa is a multi-faceted phenomenon that invites an interdisciplinary approach. This chapter contends that since sexual politics ‘easily traverse state’ boundaries (Weiss 2013, 166), Africa’s politicisation of sexuality should be understood from the perspective of globalisation on one hand, and Africa’s socio-political and religious realities on the other hand. Globalisation has compressed the world and widened transcontinental interactions, weakened cultural boundaries and broken up space and time in socio-political and economic collaborations. The establishment of competitive democracy in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, has opened up new political space as well as introduced global political players on the continent. But since globalisation does not erase the local identities, through glocalisation, that is ‘the process of domesticating the global in local contexts’ (Kalu 2008, 189), interest groups adapt external ideologies and tactics to negotiate and shape their local socio-political landscape. In addition to defining globalisation, and discussing religion’s influence on Africa’s perception of homosexuality, the chapter explores how homosexuality feeds into neo-colonial politics. It ends with a discussion of the implications of globalisation and globalised religion on African sexual politics.

East African Journal of Traditions, Culture and Religion

The issues of sexuality have been very contentious in Africa more so after the legalization of same-sex marriages by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2015 under the President Obama reign. Africans have resented the way sexuality is understood and practiced in the west and has termed it un-African. Some scholars and indeed African leaders have argued that the attitude towards sexuality is a modern practice which is being introduced and even forced to Africa by modernity and influenced greatly by the western worldview. In a modern setting, different sexual orientation has been accepted as a lifestyle and has been institutionalized. Although African does not refute the fact that there were and indeed still are people with different sexual orientation, they do not find it right to institutionalize it since according to African culture, this is an abnormality that needs to be corrected, sympathized with and tolerated. To that end, African peoples assisted those with a different sexual ori...