JAMIL F. KHAN | The contradictions of Pan-Africanism, homophobia and misogyny

Since the military coup that installed Ibrahim Traoré as the interim president of Burkina Faso, there has been great excitement across Africa for his potential to start a wave of anti-colonial change for Africans.

According to Wikipedia, his mission is: “Nationalist, Pan-Africanist, anti-Western and anti-Imperialistic” – envisioning the way to a truly prosperous, united Africa free of Western interference. Those who experience his leadership personally have described him as charismatic and appealing to young people. He is the second youngest head of state in the world, and at 37 years old, he is a symbol of the transformative power of a rising tide of youth, ushering in a new world order.

On the continent, this new world order is inspired by a legacy of unrealised revolutions led by Pan-African, anti-Imperial leaders assassinated throughout the twentieth century for refusing the powers of the West.

Among the measures he has taken since coming into power are nationalising the production of the country’s natural resources, expelling French forces, and removing French as an official language.

These measures set him apart from many current African leaders who have been identified as puppets of Western powers, allowing exploitation of their citizens and resources for presidential comforts. In his rejection of Western imperialism, Traoré, like many of the African leaders he sprints ahead of, has also criminalised homosexuality, which is viewed as a Western perversion that has no place in “African Values”.

The African values referred to when denouncing homosexuality, as many African leaders do, suppose that there is a set of values that all Africans are defined, and commanded by. These values, which exclude homosexuality, curiously always include religions that are clearly documented to have arrived here through colonial missions aimed at “civilising” Africans, even at the cost of brutal violence leading to the death of millions.

Somehow, for those who champion the preservation of African values, which denounce Western ways of being, the oldest colonial tool of control has been approved as suitable for inclusion in African values, which are quite literallybeing co-authored by evangelical Christian fundamentalists whose ideologies form the bedrock of most Western empires, returning to the fascism that that decimated African values in the first place.

The ideal of pan-Africanism, which aspires to a united, prosperous Africa thriving on its own wealth and resources, free from Western interference is sold to us as an economic and cultural utopia. The leadership that brings us to this revolutionary future is imagined to comprise a majority of, if not exclusively, cisheterosexual men. Another African value, meant to remain unquestioned, is the submission to male leadership, which is considered a part of the natural order of things.

This natural order is also inherited from religious colonisation by European nations that enforced foreign notions of heterosexist gender normativity on societieswith diverse understandings of gender and sexuality. Misogyny and homophobia, which are sibling ideologies, are the two values, most pan-African thinkers are willing to cooperate on with the Western powers they detest.

It remains astounding that despite the severe dehumanisation of African people at the hands of European and American colonial powers, in our attempts to reconstruct a collective humanity, we still cling to the ever-narrowing structures of hierarchy that violently enforce conformity.

This is always the price women and queer people pay for pan-Africanism in the grand vision for a prosperous Africa. The insistence on homophobia and misogyny while denouncing Western imperialism reveals that our current leaders still have not been able to see a way into truly equal societies that don’t reinscribe oppressive systems that thrive through taxing the humanity of those it refuses full humanity.

When prosperity comes at a profound human cost, it is a false god masquerading as a liberator. The difference between our current pan-African visionaries and their predecessors is the belief in the fact that none of us are free, until we are all free. If the freedom Africa is pursuing comes at the expense of Africans, no matter how few, then it is not freedom it seeks, but power.

To challenge homophobes and misogynists often feels futile because these hateful ideologies are so deeply embedded in their worldviews, which truly have warped their vision. Despite the evidence of queerness having existed with Africans for centuries prior to colonisation, it is irrelevant to the point that homophobia and misogyny are barbaric practices.

If the issue of the matter is morality, as religious arguments go, it is equally irrelevant when we face that oppression can never be justified. To punish people for deviating from a norm constructed in service to a small minority, is also barbarism.

To distance oneself so thoroughly from the humanity of people, like you, is a devastatingindictment on the probability of our full recovery from colonial violence.

When looking at the excitement about Ibrahim Traoré, while I agree with many of his anti-colonial decisions, to overlook such a glaring human rights violation, amongst others, reveals that sacrificing women and queer people is a price many are willing to live with in their vision of a prosperous Africa. We are currently seeing what extreme expressions of hatred can cause, with the most extreme form being genocide.

When we allow our inherited disdain for people who are different to us to go unchecked, while repeating languages of alienation, criminalisation and dehumanisation, eventually it escalates to mass murder with the aim of exterminating an entire group of people.

If these are the possibilities that a new pan-Africanism is willing to flirt with, as victims of multiple genocides across centuries, then our biggest crisis may not be the influence of the colonial West, but our willingness to succumb to atred.

Queer people have existed across time and space, in every society, including Africa. They have survived through mass atrocities and will continue to exist. Whether we accept or resist that truth, it comes down to a simple choice: to resist or accept the suffering of people like you. If we truly want a united Africa, we must be willing to confront our selective rejection of colonial values and make humanity the centre that holds our shared African values.

Jamil F. Khan is an award-winning author, doctoral critical diversity scholar, and research fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study.