Global Courant 2023-05-20 15:01:35
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Author of the article:
The Canadian Press
Dylan Robertson
Published on May 20, 2023 • Read for 5 minutes
Alex Kofi Donkor of Ghana poses for a photo in Ottawa on Friday, May 19, 2023. Photo by Sean Kilpatrick /The Canadian Press
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OTTAWA – LGBTQ activists say Canada should step up its aid in the fight against an organized movement that seeks to crack down on sexual and gender minorities in Africa, while being careful about raising issues in public.
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“We are being bullied into silence,” Alex Kofi Donkor, the founder of LGBT+ Rights Ghana, said during a visit to Ottawa.
“We always have a strategy and I hope you always listen to us.”
Ghana has banned homosexual acts since British rule, including on the grounds of an existing offense of “unnatural carnal knowledge”. Human Rights Watch says LGBTQ people in the country face a climate of fear and violence.
Donkor, 33, has tried to change that reality by starting a blog years ago to document human rights issues.
Eventually, the medical researcher founded an organization to inform media, preachers and politicians about LGBTQ issues. The group opened a physical office in January 2021, which police raided and ordered closed a month later.
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In August 2021, the country’s parliament debated a bill that would ban gender-affirming care and imprison people for up to ten years for allegedly promoting LGBTQ activities.
And yet Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made no mention of the bill in the public portion of his meeting with Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo two weeks ago on the sidelines of King Charles’ coronation in London.
That was the right move, Donkor said.
“There are times when we need that look and there are times when we don’t.”
Comments from foreign leaders can lend weight to the narrative that the West is trying to impose LBGTQ issues on Africa.
In March, Ghana’s presidential palace was lit up in the colors of the Ghanaian and American flags to mark the visit of Vice President Kamala Harris.
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The lights resembled a rainbow and sparked outrage from conservatives who claimed the US was trying to push its agenda.
Subsequently, at a joint press conference with Akufo-Addo, Harris was asked by an American journalist to comment on the bill, calling it a “human rights issue.”
Donkor said he was already taking interview requests about the projected rainbow lights, and the Harris exchange sparked more backlash.
“It created another wave, like ‘Oh, let’s hurry up and pass the bill. How dare Harris come and tell us who we are? We’re Africans, who have values blah, blah, blah.’ And then we have to come and defend that.”
Donkor spoke at an event in Ottawa this week about how countries with feminist foreign policies should address sexual orientation and gender identity.
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The panelists noted that some anti-LGBTQ groups actually receive Western funding.
A report by the left-wing think tank Political Research Associates found that evangelical groups in the US fund anti-gay organizations across Africa, and a study by the Institute for Journalism and Social Change that tracked US aid dollars funding anti-gay campaigns in Uganda.
Damjan Denkovski of the Center for Feminist Foreign Policy in Berlin said Russian laws against “homosexual propaganda” are being adopted in other countries and that Moscow is derailing United Nations human rights investigations in several countries by claiming the West is imposing local values.
“We cannot allow basic human rights and dignity to become an afterthought to geopolitics in this way.”
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Debbie Owusu-Akyeeah, head of the Ottawa-based Canadian Center for Gender and Sexual Diversity, said activists and governments must act.
“We are dealing with a well-resourced, well-coordinated transnational movement against the rights of 2SLGBTQ people, women and all other oppressed people, and it will take that level of coordination and funding to respond to it,” she said. told the panel.
Owusu-Akyeeah’s parents have emigrated from Ghana and she said the crackdown in that country has affected the diaspora abroad.
“It affects how our parents here and how our elders here see queer and trans rights, even though they live in Canada,” she said in an interview.
Owusu-Akyeeah said she interacts frequently with LGBTQ activists and Canadian diplomats in Ghana, and uses her previous experience as a Global Affairs Canada analyst to suggest ways to advance rights.
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“It’s not necessarily that we position ourselves as knowing what’s best, but it’s listening to the people who are directly affected and having their suggestions and recommendations as a basis for the decisions we make,” she said.
Still, Donkor said world leaders need to make a political and cultural calculation in deciding whether to bring up these issues when visiting other countries.
Last November, Trudeau took it upon himself to denounce Uganda’s “appalling and abhorrent” legislation that prescribes the death penalty for sex while HIV-positive, and life imprisonment for homosexual acts.
And on Friday, Trudeau called on the Italian government at a bilateral meeting with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni at the G7 Leaders’ Summit in Hiroshima, Japan.
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Meloni’s far-right government has taken steps to restrict recognition of parental rights to the biological parent in same-sex families. “It is clear that Canada is concerned about some of Italy’s positions on LGBT rights,” Trudeau told Meloni at the start of the meeting.
As for Donkor, he will return to Ghana on Saturday despite death threats and physical assaults that would likely give him a shot at a refugee claim in Canada. He hopes his country can embrace its past as a matriarchal society that welcomed diversity.
He said colonial churches enforced a gender binary, but there are still rural communities with people who “integrate between genders and are respected within society.”
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Donkor similarly blames colonial policies for the political instability that has led to coups and poverty, which he says drives many to a hard line of Christianity espoused by American missionaries in the 1980s.
The end result, he said, is a society where doctors read Bible passages to transgender people who visit a hospital for a stomach ailment, and nurses who refuse to treat homosexuals for fear of going to hell.
Donkor said Canadians can help, but only if they let Ghanaians take the lead.
“We have the answers because we are the ones facing it,” he said.
“We’ll tell you what to say and what will work.”
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on May 20, 2023.
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