I. Sub-Saharan Africa

South Africa, in 1996, famously adopted the world’s first constitution to include express protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation. In 2005, a long series of legal gains culminated in the Constitutional Court’s extending marriage rights to same-sex couples (making South Africa the fifth national government in the world to do so). [2]

A few months later, Nigeria’s president introduced a bill—meant as an explicit answer to the South African “threat”—to ban not only same-sex marriage, but every kind of advocacy or public support for LGBT people’s rights. Even holding hands could earn five years in prison.[3]

There is no simple explanation for the contrast between different African countries. It has to do with domestic politics and regional resentments that extend beyond the issue of sexuality itself.

The paradoxes at work throughout the region were underscored in 2006-7, when a series of brutal murders of black lesbians shocked South Africa itself. Legal protections, of which many in the country were proud, proved unable to curtail lethal violence or address its causes.

Patterns of abuse

African activists cite the same abuses in country after country. A Burundian activist lists:

• Violence and blackmail by the police and others;
• Negative messages from religious leaders;
• Exclusion from schools because of sexual orientation.

Again and again, groups point to homelessness and loss of family ties: “Many [LGBT people] are sent away from home ... family violence is the key problem,” a Nigerian sexual-rights group said.

Family, religion, schools, and the police: these four institutions are critical elements of social protection on a continent where safety nets are nonexistent or have been stripped threadbare by economic policies in the last two decades. LGBT people are threatened in all four. Those stigmatized for their sexual orientation or gender identity in Africa risk losing almost every source of safety, support, or belonging.

In the vast majority of African countries, colonial-era laws still penalize (male and often female) homosexual conduct. Most groups lack the resources to document how the laws are enforced, or offer legal support. In some countries such as Cameroon, highly-publicized mass arrests of men and women have terrorized the community in recent years.

These laws publicly condemn a whole class of people. Privately, they promote endemic extortion, by the authorities and by individuals exploiting stigma and fear. Other, obscurer laws, most also colonial in origin, enforce dress codes or give police wide power to arrest and harass people.

Censorship stifles media discussions of sexuality and gender. In Uganda, for instance, a radio station was slapped with a substantial fine just for hosting LGBT activists on a program. Many LGBT organizations are unable to register legally or operate in the open.

“Discrimination in health services and medical maltreatment” is everywhere, says a group in Togo. A Nigerian organization states, “Currently the [health care] system has no provision for LGBT people; there is no accurate nor adequate information on the health of LGBT people.” Even in South Africa, a township-based youth support group says most of its clients “fail to go to health care services, because they are discriminated against when they get there.”

One fact is crucial: the ever-looming possibility of backlash. Almost every time LGBT activists in a country between the Limpopo and the Sahara have first gained public visibility, a crackdown followed. It happened:

• when Zimbabwean gays and lesbians dared to appear at a book fair in 1995;
• when a lone man came out in a newspaper interview in Zambia in 1998;
• when a small demonstration at a 2005 AIDS conference in Abuja urged African governments to take the health, social, and rights situations of men who have sex with men (MSM) seriously. (The Nigerian government used the demonstration to justify its repressive bill.) 

Virtually any move LGBT groups make, from renting an apartment to holding a press conference, can feed a violent moral panic, where media, religious figures, and government collude.  Courageously, LGBT activists in Africa continue to claim their rights. Their allies on the continent and outside, though, must ensure they do not encourage action without anticipating the risk, and:

• recognize the extreme danger in which the activists in Africa operate;
• ready them to protect themselves in the likely backlash to any publicity for their cause;
• make sure they have political tools to respond to a potentially violent backlash. 

Challenges and chances

State-sponsored homophobia has become a political staple in many African countries. Its roots arguably lie in the colonial period, when European rulers imported Victorian moral standards, as well as legal codes with criminal penalties for homosexual conduct.[4] However, in the 1990s, leaders began discovering the political advantages of promoting homophobia. Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe devoted whole speeches to denouncing homosexuals as “worse than dogs and pigs.” In Namibia, Zambia, and Botswana other politicians took up the theme. Currently, in Uganda, government officials regularly menace LGBT groups; and in Gambia, in 2008, the president vowed to “cut off the heads” of homosexuals.

South African AIDS and human rights activist Zackie Achmat offered one explanation for how state-sponsored homophobia began. “Many African politicians,”  he said in 1998, “want to blame the West for everything, homosexuality included”:

And they are right, the West is responsible for their rhetoric, but in a different way than they say. The West, the IMF, the World Bank, push structural adjustment plans on these countries. And they are starved and devastated by it. Food is unaffordable, health care unavailable; educations, opportunities, pensions are all gone. And the populations are enraged, rightly. ... And so these governments are precarious and terrified. The people are roused up against them, and there is no one to support them. Their only real hope is that people die of AIDS or hunger before they are angry enough to rebel. And what do [the governments] find? They say "homosexual" and two sorts come running to them: the Christian churches and the African traditionalists, two groups who usually won't even speak to one another, come flocking behind the government's banner. Suddenly they have support. It's a magic word.[5]

Religious fundamentalists, in most countries, imitated rather than drove the exploitation of homophobia. But they did so with a vengeance. Conservative evangelical movements are burgeoning in southern Africa, with heavy support from North American partners. (In 2009, for instance, US anti-gay minister Scott Lively campaigned in Uganda for new laws against homosexual conduct, while reportedly maintaining “it is good for the government of Uganda to criminalize homosexuality but the government should subject the criminals of homosexuality to a therapy rather than imprisoning them.”[6])Older denominations are on the defensive: some compete to show their traditionalist credentials. Sexuality is more than ever a war zone where religious forces strive for social and political power. The bid by Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola (a strong supporter of the 2006 bill) to split the Anglican Church in opposition to acceptance of gays and lesbians is only one symptom.

“Culture” —a supposedly monolithic realm of civilizational values—becomes the zone where political rhetoric and religious intolerance combine. Sexual or gender nonconformity is painted as “un-African,” its agents symbolically—and actually—expelled from the community. The appeal to culture brings violence in its wake. A sexual rights activist in Nigeria says that, since the 2006 bill was introduced, “We have observed constant harassment, arrest, exploitation, shaming, extortion of sexual minorities, and rape.”

HIV/AIDS impales LGBT communities on a paradox. Some blame them for the disease; others, including key policy-makers, refuse to admit they are vulnerable at all to an epidemic portrayed as mainly heterosexual LGBT groups are often excluded from HIV policy discussions or funding. One Kenyan MSM group says institutions “give the excuse of not wanting to partner with organizations whose activities are against the law.” Meanwhile, US-funded “abstinence-till-marriage” programs channel money to homophobic groups, while contributing to crippling silence around the sexualities of people who legally cannot marry the partners of their choice. [7]

South Africa remains a special case. Uniquely progressive laws and policies are not implemented in the communities where they are most needed. The lack of political will to enforce the laws  also has ripple effects across the continent. South Africa refuses to integrate human rights into its foreign policy. In the last decade, it has been unwilling to take the lead on sexual-rights issues in international fora.

At the same time, institutional change offers signs of hope. Some NGOs and national human rights institutions (NHRIs) have slowly moved to address issues of sexual orientation and gender identity. Independent rights groups in Kenya and members of the Kenyan National Human Rights Commission have spoken in defense of LGBT people there. Also promising is the slow integration, in a few countries such as Uganda, of sexuality and sexual-rights issues into legal education.

Cross-regional cooperation among LGBT groups, after false starts, has taken off.  Activists now have fora to share experiences directly relevant to them, and on-the-ground expertise that cannot come from outside. These opportunities are invaluable. So, too, has been the work of coalitions that have lobbied and raised awareness at the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights: a venue that gives them visibility in relative safety, and helps them forge alliances with non-LGBT human rights groups across Africa.

What are movements doing?

In Nigeria, given 48 hours to prepare for a legislative hearing on the repressive bill in 2007, LGBT activists mustered mainstream allies and rushed to Abuja, the capital, to lobby for their freedoms. Their unexpected appearance—and the support they received from the human rights community and a few religious figures—helped stall the bill in the Assembly, where it died. 

Victories are possible. The determination of scattered Nigerian LGBT groups “to push other NGOs towards mainstreaming LGBT issues into their work” paid off. Coalition-building made it easier to withstand threats and take a public and political stand.

Ugandan LGBT networks have also opted for public visibility and political protest. But the risks are real. Police arrested and tortured three Ugandan activists who staged a demonstration in mid-2008.

In other countries, groups are looking for lower-profile, local points to engage with powerful actors. These include: 

• Building networks of sympathetic health professionals.
• Finding and fostering sympathetic religious leaders. In countries like Botswana, liberal denominations have supported and defended LGBT activists. 
• Groups need lawyers—and money for lawyers—to document arrests and defend victims. This means not just locating sympathetic professionals, but ensuring they receive training in relevant national and international precedents.
• A Nigerian campaigner says, “An opportunity to dialogue with the police, if funded, would be one of the best options in dealing with homophobia.” In Cameroon, one organization has a long-term plan: training of police and local authorities on human rights would lead to arrests abating; this would create an opening for public HIV work in vulnerable communities; and that in turn would generate political possibilities to lobby for depenalizing homosexual conduct.
• From Cameroon to Zambia, media have promoted public hysteria about homosexuality. Trainings for reporters and editors on issues of human rights, homosexuality, confidentiality, and respect are underway in Nigeria and some other countries. 

Most groups cite the need to build community and identity, and to reach beyond the urban circles where they are now confined. A Kenyan activist writes, “The rural LGBTI people face exclusion and are left out ... There is a basic need for a toll-free hotline to ensure that even those in the rural areas can get access to counseling services.”

However, arguments that reach beyond identity are also needed. Much LGBT activism in Africa has pursued the paradigm of minority rights, perhaps because that framework has a long history on the continent. Yet some of the most effective recent alliances between LGBT groups and “mainstream” movements have been based not on minority claims, but on urgent issues that provide common ground: freedom of expression, and mobilization against torture and harassment of human rights defenders. 

“Homophobia” itself may be a limiting frame. Day by day, people are punished as much for their refusal to conform to norms for “masculine” and “feminine” as for their suspected sexual conduct. “Societal expectations of sex and gender are large barriers within South Africa,” says an intersex group there. Building common ground with women’s rights movements and other movements addressing gender across the continent will be critical.

Meanwhile, resources are a continual challenge. Indiscriminate funding has divided and destroyed some groups in recent years. However, amid economic meltdown, a Zimbabwean activist reports “the priorities of members shifting from fighting for their sexual rights to fighting for the next meal on the table, and forcing us to shift our focus in the services we provide.”