A New Scramble for Africa: Foreign Actors and Fake De-Colonization
(…)In all the events undermining the human rights, dignity, and access to healthcare of Africans described above, there is a foreign footprint, or rather, multiple foreign footprints. The most widely reported has been the footprint of the US Christian Right, specifically Sharon Slater of Family Watch International (FWI), who was famously in a bilateral meeting with Madame Kagame in March 2023, appearing to take over where Scott Lively had left off in providing external validation for a cruel piece of legislation targeting an already marginalized group (…)
Written by Neil Datta, executive director at the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights. The Hirschfeld-Eddy Foundation would like to thank Neil Datta for the kind permission to publish this text.
An Episode in Kigali
In Kigali, Rwanda, in July 2023, to the surprise and consternation of many delegates, President Katalin Novak of Hungary headlined the opening panel of the global Women Deliver Conference. This event gathered over 7,000 women’s and rights advocates from Africa and around the world for the first edition of this important event for women’s human rights on the African continent. President Novak spoke to the mainly African crowds about the challenges she faced as a woman and a mother in balancing work and personal and professional life. She stated that women should have as many children as they would like and enigmatically referred to the ‘disappearance’ of some nations through low birthrates.
Very shortly after the President’s intervention, a number of the delegates realized that Women Deliver, long held as a bastion for women’s rights, including sexual and reproductive rights, able to gather the main global players such as UN Women, UNFPA, CRR, IPPF, IPAS, ILGA, and the Gates Foundation, had been infiltrated by a leader in the modern anti-gender movement in the person of President Katalin Novak. President Novak not only championed policies against human rights in her home country, such as promoting a traditional view of women, discriminating based on sexual orientation, and enacting policies to prevent persons of different racial and religious origins from settling in the country, but she had also been the leader of a political network with the same values called the Political Network for Values (PNfV) immediately prior to assuming the presidency of the Hungarian Republic. The PNfV, which Novak presided over, is among the leading global platforms strategically attempting to halt human rights for sexual minorities, defund access to contraception, undermine evidence-based abortion laws, and erect freedom of religion as a ’super-human’ right above others, such as the right to health or non-discrimination. While the Women Deliver delegates fumed and complained, President Novak continued unphased and signed several cooperation agreements with President Kaga me, while the Women Deliver leadership scrambled to explain and later apologize for this historic blunder.
A New Era: Enter the Anti-Gender Actors
This episode with President Novak as a headline speaker at Women Deliver highlighted the arrival of the modern, global anti-gender and anti-rights movement in Africa. While Africa has known contestation on sexual and reproductive rights for many years (for example, abortion and LGBTQI rights are very limited across the continent), what happened in Kigali in July 2023 signaled that a new era had begun, aiming to weaponize the pre-existing social, cultural, and religious conservatism towards political ends. Scholars describe anti-gender activism as a new type of religious extremist activism with several novel characteristics. First, unlike grassroots social and religious conservatism, anti-gender activism is a well-organized and professional movement which understands how power and influence work as well as the most astute human rights lawyer and is able to deploy these skills at all levels of decision-making, from the community level to national and regional levels, such as the European Union or Africa Union, and even the global level, such as the United Nations or Women Deliver. A second feature is their expansion of target areas from their traditional anti-abortion or homophobic positions to contest five inter-related areas: SRHR, LGBTQI, children’s rights, gender, and freedom of religion. Third, they have been able to renew their generations — it is no longer just older white men from the global North, or mainly the United States, who champion such repressive positions. Rather, an army of younger advocates, many of them well-educated women, and others with local connections in the country concerned, are now the main voice for rolling back human rights. These anti-gender actors, who have normative ambitions of re-engineering society along religious doctrine, do not hesitate to form alliances with authoritarian leaders in other parts of the world who cynically use social conservatism to justify non-respect for human rights, eroding democracy, and even presenting geopolitical threats. Europe started experiencing this 15 years ago; now the anti-gender/anti-rights movement is making a play for Africa.
An Anti-Gender Agenda for Africa
Despite President Novak’s high-profile visit to Rwanda in 2023, she was not the first to try her luck in Africa. As far back as the early 2010s, the US group Abiding Truth Ministries, led by Scott Lively, had been active in Uganda spreading disinformation and showing explicit images, which contributed to the adoption of the Anti-Homosexuality Act 2014, popularly known as the “Kill the Gays Bill”, which sought to criminalize same-sex sexual activity, in some cases providing the death penalty. Eventually rejected by Uganda’s Constitutional Court in 2014, this was not the end of foreign attempts to gain traction in Africa. In November 2019, the global gathering of religious extremists at the World Congress of Families held a regional meeting in Accra, Ghana. Shortly after, Ghanaian parliamentarians, with the support of a local civil society platform, championed a new bill to limit LGBTQI rights. In March 2023, members of parliament from over twenty African countries gathered in Kampala for the “1st African Inter- Parliamentary Conference on African Sovereignty, Culture and Family Values” Conference. Present at the conference were also a handful of anti-gender and far-right activists and politicians from the United States and Europe. These policymakers were gathered to give a final push to a renewed effort to pass the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda, and to strategize means of bringing similar laws penalizing sexual minorities, as well as to roll back access to women’s health care across the sub-Saharan African region. Within a few months, Kenyan lawmakers were discussing a bill to limit LGBTQI rights, the Zambian Ministry of Health had sent instructions to subordinate officials barring the use of the expression “sexual and reproductive health and rights”, and a coalition of African parliamentarians and other leaders were actively lobbying US Members of Congress in Washington D.C. against the millions of aid dollars for Africa to combat the HIV/AIDS pandemic under the PEPFAR program because of false allegations that it supported abortion advocacy.
A New Scramble for Africa: Foreign Actors and Fake De-Colonization
In all the events undermining the human rights, dignity, and access to healthcare of Africans described above, there is a foreign footprint, or rather, multiple foreign footprints. The most widely reported has been the footprint of the US Christian Right, specifically Sharon Slater of Family Watch International (FWI), who was famously in a bilateral meeting with Madame Kagame in March 2023, appearing to take over where Scott Lively had left off in providing external validation for a cruel piece of legislation targeting an already marginalized group. Another is Valerie Huber, an ambassador at large for the anti-abortion document entitled the Geneva Consensus Declaration (GCD) and its implementation mechanism called Protego, which was recently presented in Uganda and Burkina Faso. However, actors from other regions were also present. For example, Margarita Pisa Carrion of Spain’s far-right and xenophobic Vox party in the European Parliament was also a participant in this first Inter-parliamentary meeting. In addition, a Putchman, Jenk van Schothorst of Christian Council International, a Dutch-American anti-rights NGO made up of former diplomats, was also at the conference and in the meeting with Madame Kagame. The CCI, for its part, has been traveling the world to African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries to lobby against ratification of the Samoa Trade Agreement between the EU and ACP countries because it includes references to gender and sexual and reproductive health and rights, ‘arguing that this would undermine the sovereignty of ACP countries by imposing human rights and gender equality on traditional societies. Ordo Iuris, the Polish legal think tank and pseudo-Catholic cult-like religious network which spearheaded the abortion ban, LGBT-free zones, and criminalization of sexual education in Poland, ran an online campaign -“Stop Ideological Neocolonialism” against the same EC-ACP treaty. Another actor is the Northern Irish Core Issues Trust, which launched a project at the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) in April 2023 in Kigali to bring gay conversion therapy to the African continent.
Some foreign anti-gender organizations took a liking to Africa and established permanent presence. This is the case with the East African Center for Law and Justice (EACLJ), the Nairobi satellite office of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), one of the most influential US organizations on the US Christian, MAGA-affiliated right, with its head, Jay Sekulow, serving as President Trump’s lawyer during his first impeachment trial. This US-funded, but Nairobi-based, EACU was active in lobbying against abortion in discussions around Kenya’s Constitution. Another organization with a branch in Nairobi is CitizenGO, originally headquartered in Madrid, Spain, which runs ultra-conservative, and conspiracy- inspired, online petitions in multiple languages. Some of these petitions led to the temporary closure of family planning clinics in several African countries based on disinformation. The US far-right group Human Life International even established a network of locally-run affiliates spanning five East and Southern African countries.
Finally, not to be underestimated is the Russian footprint on the African continent. In addition to the Russian private mercenary company Wagner being instrumental in the recent coup d´etats in several Sahelian countries, Russian state-aligned media proactively use gender-based disinformation in a range of their target markets such as East and West Europe, Central ‘Asia, the Caucasus, and West Africa. Russian gender-related disinformation efforts concentrate on several pillars, such as trolling Western leaders by questioning their sexuality, suggesting that LGBTQI rights and gender equality are foreign intrusions on traditional values, or alleging that Western-supported school and health programs are designed to undermine traditional African societies and families by targeting children with age- inappropriate sexual education and even encouraging homosexuality. While the US Christian Right is the most visible, anti-gender/anti-rights actors from other parts of the world are numerous, diverse, and well-organized in this new scramble for Africa’s soul.
Local African Anti-Gender Allies and Their International Friends
The anti-gender/anti-rights agenda in Africa, as elsewhere, has found willing allies among local actors. The National Coalition for Proper Human Sexual Rights and Family Values, led by Moses Foh-Amoaning, a Ghanaian lawyer, academic, and former spokesperson for the Ghana FA, led the charge for Ghana’s new anti-LGBTQI law. Thä Jamra ONG Islamique, led by Mame Matar Gueye, has been an effective local anti-gender advocate in Senegal for many years and was a vocal proponent of harsher criminal penalties against sexual minorities. In Kenya, the leading anti-gekler actors are the Kenyan Conference of Catholic Bishops (KCCB) and the Kenya Christian Professionals Forum (KCPF), which have close links to the PNfV. The Africa Christian Professionals Forum (ACPF), which is the African affiliate of the PNfV, held the March 2023 meeting in Kampala in partnership with the Kenyan-based East Africa Family Life Federation (EAFLE), which itself is affiliated with the US anti-rights group Human Life International (HU). Prominent local figures, such as the Nigerian Obianuju Ekeocha of Culture of Life Africa and the Nigerian Dr. Theresa Okafor, now a member of the Vatican’s Dicastery on the Family, were vocal participants in the March 2023 Kampala conference. Both women appear frequently at anti-gender events around the world and are held up as role models of the values of resisting modern human rights and gender equality as foreign impositions. Despite a strong African anti-gender/anti-rights alliance, some of these local actors are supported by Western funding streams, and financial transparency on funding sources and streams is an important area of further investigation.
Way Forward: Clarity and Rigor
The events in Kigali at the Women Deliver Conference in July 2023 were a watershed moment for the African continent, for the anti-gender/anti-rights actors as well as for African proponents of human rights, gender equality, and women’s health. A clearer understanding of how anti-gender/anti-rights actors use the rhetoric of de-colonization to maintain colonial-era moral codes and behaviours is an important first step in an adequate response. Western supporters of human rights and gender equality must also be sensitive to how their actions will be Perceived in an era when fears of ideological neo-colonialism are widespread. To counter this highly sophisticated anti-gender/anti-rights movement, a three-pronged approach is necessary. First, better information is required on how anti-gender actors are structured, function, and influence decision-makers and the media. The presentation of evidence of how they are captured by extremist, authoritarian, and populist actors will be crucial. Second, removing them from positions of influence, even if they hold positions of public trust in government or public office, as Civil servants, in national human rights institutions, in academia, or in the media, will be important. Financial transparency will also be crucial to investigate who is funding the anti- gender/anti-rights agenda at national, regional, and international levels. Third, once evidence is collected and analysed, it will be necessary to defend progressive actors and their voices and to ensure that legal norms and structures, which provide the foundations for human rights, gender equality, and health, are not repealed or undone.
Neil Datta, executive director at European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights
The Hirschfeld-Eddy Foundation is grateful to Neil Datta for the kind permission to publish this text.
This publication is part of the project “Cultures and Colonialism ‒ The struggle for LGBTIQ+ human rights in light of the decolonization debate” from the Hirschfeld-Eddy Foundation.
