By Akosua Adomako Ampofo, CIHA Co-Editor: After going through several readings, a bill known as the THE HUMAN SEXUAL RIGHTS AND FAMILY VALUES BILL was passed by the parliament of Ghana on February 28, 2024. It must now go on to the president and he must approve it before it can become law.
We can multiply this story across discourse on political systems, marriage and the family, Religion, and so forth. Let me use the example of the journey of a piece of legislation in Ghana as an example. There is a private members bill which has a long name Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill, for short the anti-gay bill, that has been traveling a journey since 2021. The official name of the bill is quite telling – and not just because it actually takes away “human sexual rights,” but because of the way it indeed promotes an imagined set of family values that however much the supporters claim, is not based on supposedly indigenous Ghanaian or African cultural ways of knowing and being, as we will shortly see.
Among many other things the bill seeks to criminalize a long list of queer identities, including being homosexual, lesbian, or trans. Reporting people suspected to be LGBTQ+ is also required, and allies (these could be parents, friends, employers, landlords, doctors, and counselors) can all be found guilty of ‘promoting’ LGBTQ+ identities. The bill, if it became law, would also require Ghanaians to report people who fall foul of the law. Without going into too much detail about this bill, one of the core contentious aspects of the bill has to do with what are considered to be cultural, or traditional values by the proponents of the bill. These individuals claim that same sex relationships are foreign to Africa. They offer no evidence of this. Nor do they distinguish between social, political physical, or intimate or romantic relationships. There are several problems with the fiction that same sex relations are foreign to Africa but one is that it does not rely on research. There are enough studies from across Africa that show that same sex relations existed–whether woman to woman marriage for political and economic reasons, or whether same-sex love and sex intimacy between especially male Royals and younger men whether captives or citizens. Scholars and human rights activists who have voiced their opposition to this bill, pointing out its unconstitutionality, human rights challenges, and failure to accept existing research on social and political life in African, including Ghanaian, societies, have been attacked personally and maligned by the bill’s proponents. The media have largely failed to call those issuing these attacks and insults. Thus Netright issued this statement to signal condemnation for these attacks, and calls for a civil and dispassionate discourse around issues that Ghanaians disagree on.
