Can Africa survive the Western onslaught over gay rights?

When South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma ventured into Britain in March last year for a State visit, he was met with a torrent of virulent commentary from the rabid British press.

Reason? He had just acquired a comely young wife, Thobeka Mabhija – the fifth in his menagerie. In the West, polygamy is not only an obscene practice. It is a crime.

Tell that to Africa, where polygamy is as common as the common flu. When British Prime Minister David Cameron spoke recently at the Commonwealth summit about tying aid to tolerance for homosexuals, he was speaking as a Westerner who has been culturalised to look at gay lifestyles as normal.

The fury his comment has generated across Africa should also be looked at in its context – that of a continent that is historically culturalised to be homophobic.

Behind the Cameron-versus-Africa polemics over homosexuality is a simple truism – that of a deep-seated cultural miscomprehension. Was the premier within his rights to stand up for gay rights? Quite. Was it proper to lecture Africa to do the same? Maybe not.

This confusing chasm brings to mind the decade-old controversy within the Anglican Church over women clergy and – yes – homosexual ones. African branches of the church have severally threatened to break away from the Canterbury mother church over the twin issue.

When European and American Anglican congregations went ahead to ordain women and homosexual clergy, African branches of the church effected their threat and severed links with the particular offending dioceses.

No root name

It must be said that the African disapproval of women priests is only incidental to the Gospel injunction of a male-centric Apostolic See. It is actually an inheritance from traditional African religions of old where the spiritual intercessors or sages or shamans or whatever were invariably men. Across Africa, women hardly ever participated in high religious rites.

But the homosexual tolerance from Canterbury is, for African Anglicans, a step too far. There is in fact a gaping lesson Cameron could learn from this intra-Anglican rift. It so happens that plenty of the foreign largesse African Anglican churches receive does not come from the English mother church. It comes from the American dioceses which were the first to ordain gay clergy.

Their fellow African congregants – and financial supplicants as it were – were more than happy to forgo the monetary help if that meant having nothing to do with American homosexuals.

Former Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi once said something intriguing – that there is no African vernacular he was familiar with that has a root name for gays. Indeed, most East African ethnic communities have had to borrow the Swahili name for a homosexual – shoga.

The terminology of gay-ism gets more mixed up than that. Not even the Swahili word for a lesbian – msagaji – has managed to cross over into wider ethnic usage. Even the term ‘gay’ grates with old-style Africans. To them, it suggests a mood of gaiety. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe captures the homophobic African mindset perfectly in his preferred usage of the contemptuous term, ‘sodomist.’

To Cameron and his Western peers like Barack Obama, people like Moi and Mugabe are no different from dinosaurs who should be extinct. From the strictly political perspective, that could be right. But from a socio-cultural angle, Mugabe’s and Moi’s views on homosexuality are not something most of their countrymen would want to seriously pick a fight with them on.

Power dynamics

In the end, the issue is not a simple one of right versus wrong. It is much more than that. It is like arguing with a Muslim about the merits of Christianity. Or doing vice versa with a Christian about Islam. Who could possibly be right or wrong in this kind of argument? Uganda did not reverse its proposed controversial law of 2009 condemning gays to hang because the country came around to accepting the morality of homosexuality.

Neither did Malawi (in another highly publicised case last year) free two jailed homosexuals because Malawians suddenly agreed with Cameron’s credo that gay rights equate to human rights. All it took was intense pressure from the West.

The cultural gulf between the West and Africa when it comes to sexual roles can take interesting dimensions. In certain African cultures, a woman-to-woman marriage is allowed under conditions where the dominant partner cannot conceive a child. She therefore marries another woman to bear her children by proxy. But never, ever is this marital arrangement a lesbian thing.

Ultimately, the outcome of the gay debate and the acceptance of homosexuality in Africa will not be a question of which moral code is superior. It will be quite simply a matter of power dynamics. Make no mistake, this is a psychological war Africa is destined to lose in the long run, just as it lost the argument over multi-partyism in the early 1990s.

With the West’s unrivalled arsenal to indoctrinate that comes in the form of its popular culture, its films, its books and magazines and above all its media, we stand no chance. That is not to say Africa will be a better place for this.

gwarigi@ke.nationmedia.com