As we embark upon another Pride season, I’m reminded of the smells of gasoline and rain that surrounded me in the summer of 2017 as I weaved through the crowded streets of Lagos, Nigeria. The child of Nigerian immigrants, I was no stranger to traveling to my parents’ homeland. There is a feeling of peace that accompanies these trips—immersed in a sea of Black faces like mine, steeped in ancestral culture, an ocean away from my house and yet still at home.
But unlike prior trips to Nigeria, this holiday was tinged with an air of unease as someone who had come out as nonbinary just a few months prior. In 2013, Nigeria passed the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act, a law that imposes carceral penalties on aiding, abetting, or participating in a same-sex marriage, engaging in public displays of homosexuality, and even supporting LGBTQIA+ groups and advocacy. Months after the act went into effect in 2014, community members beat 14 gay Nigerian men. Four of the men were then taken to a local police station and further assaulted by law enforcement. Violent homophobia is tragically common in a country where only 7% of residents believe society should be accepting of homosexuality.
The creation and persistence of homophobia across the majority of Africa has its roots in the source of many of Africa’s modern ills: colonialism and its current-day imperialist remnants.
Pre-colonial Africa was rich with queerness and gender-expansive culture. In the 17th century, Njinga Mbandi came to power over the Mbundu people in present-day Angola; she would dress as a man, sleep with both men and women, and preferred to be referred to as “King.” Among tribes like the Kongo, Bafia, and Basotho, homosexuality was commonly practiced and sometimes even encouraged as part of sexual development.
But with European colonizers came European Christianity and laws—including a penal code imposed on colonies that criminalized homosexuality. The pervasiveness of homosexuality in pre-colonial Africa was proof to Europeans that Africans were uncivilized and inferior, setting the stage for decades of brutal colonialism. Africans subjugated under the British Empire were particularly affected, as demonstrated by current data. Sixty-six percent of former British colonies in Africa criminalize homosexuality today, compared to just 33% of former French African colonies.
While Africa is no longer under the direct political control of the Global North today, countries like the U.S. continue to export homophobia to the continent. Far-right American Evangelicals are largely responsible for the increase in Christian religiosity in sub-Saharan Africa. In 1900, only 7 million sub-Saharan Africans were Christian, compared to 470 million today. While LGBTQIA+ rights gained steam in the U.S. throughout the 2000s, social conservatives turned their attention to the Global South—and especially Africa. Between 2007 and 2020, American Evangelicals spent more than $54 million in the region to promote anti-LGBTQIA+ and anti-abortion legislation, among other socially regressive views.
American groups like Focus on the Family (considered one of the main drivers of anti-LGBTQIA+ efforts in the religious right) and the secretive conservative religious organization Fellowship Foundation have each poured millions into sub-Saharan Africa. These and other entities use conservative Christianity and financial influence to exert control over the sociopolitical culture in Africa via communication networks with African religious figures, educational materials, and social welfare projects. In 2019, the U.S.-based coalition of religious right-wing organizations known as the World Congress of Families held a conference on “family values” in Accra, Ghana. Much of the conference was spent fearmongering on the supposed harms of the LGBTQIA+ acceptance movement. This kind of sustained and manufactured “mass hysteria around homosexuality” has resulted in homophobia flourishing across a continent, primed by years of colonialism and a recent ramp-up in religiosity.
Take, for example, the influence of someone like American evangelical preacher Scott Lively, infamous for his book “The Pink Swastika,” which alleges “brutal and savage” homosexuals were behind the Nazi Party and the Holocaust. In 2009, Lively spoke in Uganda to denounce the “gay agenda” coming to Africa. Just five years later, Uganda passed the Anti-Homosexuality Act that criminalizes same-sex intimacy in large part because of Western influences.
The rhetoric of Americans like Lively who claim children are being “recruited into homosexuality” remains pervasive across the U.S. and the Global South. While Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act was eventually struck down by the Supreme Court of Uganda, the country later enacted the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2023, which imposed the death penalty for same-sex intimacy in some instances. In the years between these two pieces of legislation, propaganda demonizing the LGBTQIA+ community ran rampant throughout Uganda, with scarce positive representation of the community to counter harmful narratives.
As the anti-LGBTQIA+ movement only grows more powerful in the U.S., we are once again hearing these social regressives accuse queer and trans communities of grooming or pedophilia. These refrains have remained common in African pews, classrooms, and pulpits for decades. The Alliance Defending Freedom, for example, is responsible for a litany of anti-LGBTQIA+ cases before the Supreme Court that mirror its anti-LGBTQIA+ investments and advocacy in sub-Saharan Africa. Americans and Africans suffer from the American religious right’s unfettered growth in the Global South.
African leaders are often quick to dismiss any LGBTQIA+ rights advocacy on the continent as imports from the West. But queerness is as African as fufu and palm wine. It is homophobia that is informed by the machinations of religious conservatives from the U.S.
As I plan my return to Nigeria, I refuse to subscribe to the supposed dichotomy of my queer identities and my Nigerian heritage. I have the privilege to be loudly and proudly queer and nonbinary Nigerian American. I believe in the inevitable liberation of LGBTQIA+ people across the globe. But if we want to fight and win against anti-LGBTQIA+ rhetoric and legislation that target our communities in the U.S., it would serve the American LGBTQIA+ movement to more closely follow the conservative Christian cultural exchange of homophobia and transphobia that continues to ping pong across the Atlantic Ocean.
