Africa and homosexuality

E. Ablorh-Odjidja, Ghanadot

March 04, 2014

The West is aiming to impose homosexuality on Africa, ready or not.

The rush to accept new ideas that are foreign to Africa’s cultural underpinnings has been a key to undermining the continent’s progress. The West thinks that sex is a right. We get it. But who is to say exactly what it is and what acts are excluded or included?

Or is this a right for all forms of sex?

Since the Homosexual Bill in Uganda was signed, there has been a blowback from the West in an attempt to have it rescinded.

The West claims the law is morally offensive and abusive of human rights of homosexual citizens of Uganda. In general, it is also an attempt to force the rest of Africa into compliance and acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle.

For this reason, Western nations have threatened to pull back foreign aids from Uganda and The World Bank has warned that it would suspend an already approved loan if the Bill were enforced.

All this is directed at a country in Africa; a country where gays are treated no less humanely than they are in many parts of the world. But we are being forced to believe otherwise.

Meanwhile, anti-gay laws, with death penalties, are prevalent in the Middle East and some Islamic countries. Yet there is no negative scrutiny on these countries. The blatant double standard is enough to tell you what the West thinks of Africa.

A South African university professor, Dr. Achille Mbembe once argued that, “Africa serves as a metaphor through which the West develops and publicly accounts for its own self-image.”

So once the West arrives at a notion of the “good,” that notion is automatically exercised on Africa, regardless of whether Africa is ready for it or not. This is the case against the Bill in Uganda.

In many African cultures the homosexual behavior is taboo. This attempt to make right a behavior type that is prohibited is, therefore, regarded as an unwarranted intrusion.

Underneath this cultural assumption, which Africa is entitled to, is also the belief that allowance of homosexuality has the potential to generate other problems that could be worse than the purported abuses in the anti-homosexual Bill.

The assumption comes with good reason. A continent that has had its development truncated by many foreign, wrong ideas should have reason to worry. Especially, when that idea could cause confusion in the lifestyle of its people and a change in behavior that might lead to the sexual exploitation of the innocent; more so than it would help to protect gays.

Recently, three gays from Africa, said to be fleeing persecution, sought asylum in Netherland. They were refused.

Netherland, a country among those using economic leverage to civilize Uganda on homosexual issues, refused the three gays on the grounds that they couldn’t use “self-declaration of homosexuality” as the excuse for asylum.

Hidden in Netherland's refusal could be the thought that saw the application as a ruse based on the need to flee economic hardship on the continent and not necessarily persecution at home.

Pity, Netherland couldn’t observe that legalization of homosexuality, in the context of the same economic hardships, could open another front for prostitution in Africa.

The test for the West self-declared moral superiority would have been to provide open amnesty programs for gays in Europe or America. Africa would then have time to sort out its “ill-considered taboo” on a behavior that the West supports and Africans consider improper.

But the above is not the situation now; at least not what happened in Netherland.

Some 200 years ago, Jeremy Bentham, an English gay writer, proposed that homosexuality was a right - an act that “delivered pleasure without the risk of pain, at least in so far as it ran no risk of adding to surplus population,” he said.

That was back when Europe was already over-populated and Africa was open and under-populated. Africa, the second largest continent, to this day, has less population (1033 billion) than India (1237 billion)!

Africans need to reproduce to fill the vast spaces that others covet. Homosexuality isn’t going to help in this area. Africa has long known that the behavior does not work for population growth.

Some have snidely offered that when the colonials came to Africa, they enacted “sodomy laws.” These folks mistakenly thought homosexuality was allowed and that the new laws were the proof . On the contrary, the law had a different intent. It It was to rope in White behavior in Africa,.

It has to be remembered at this point that colonialism is over. And that Africa has many developmental problems to worry about, of which homosexuality is not the most pressing issue in the overall scheme of things. So why the pressure and the rush from the West?

President Museveni of Uganda has described this pressure as "social imperialism” under the guise of human rights.

Still the West has been adamant. It has refused to accept that some ideas have negative consequences; in the short and even long run. Or that they may be poison pills deliberately delivered to upset the rhythm of development on the continent.

In the 60s in America, the idea surfaced that absence of fathers in households did not lead to broken homes. That a man’s income was all that was needed to stem deficiencies in a broken home. The welfare check quickly replaced fathers in many black homes.

Dr. Walter E. Williams, a prominent economist, surmised that ”since the 60s, the two-parent family has been replaced by single-parent” and “anti-social behavior, manifested by high crime rate, is now” the mark within black communities.

The degrading of the black family is further described in a recent CDC report:

“In Mississippi, 72% of babies aborted are Black. “ And that although Whites outnumber Blacks in Mississippi by nearly 2-to-1, white babies are only 26.6% of the aborted.

Even slavery did not kill this many black babies. But the impact of a strange and tortuous idea has. Degrading fatherhood has ended up destroying a positive social norm of a people.

Outrage about homosexuality is not the issue here. The rush to normalize a behavior that is foreign to African culture is. It took years for the West to accept gays. Now they want the behavior to be established today.

This time, Africa must have the priority to decide when or whether to accept the gay lifestyle or not, without pressure from the West. Africa should do so in consideration with all other problems vexing the continent.

Those who ask for open acceptance of homosexuality in Africa now should accept the possibility that economic disparity coupled with the legalization of the act could turn Africa into an open market for homosexual tourism – for the benefit of gays from the West.

Uganda and all Africa should rework the Bill to read that Westerners caught in homosexual acts would face the ire of this new law. And they should call it the “anti-sodomy” law.

This way, we can keep the act safe in the West and for the West to enjoy for the meantime.

E. Ablorh-Odjidja,Publisher www.ghanadot.com, Washington, DC, March 04, 2014.

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