Frank Mugisha: Westerners Imported Homphobia, Not Homosexuality, Into Africa
- Frank Mugisha, executive director of Sexual Minorities Uganda and the 2011 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award laureate, discussing Ugandan and African anti-LGBT violence in The New York Times. He adds that suspected LGBTS in Africa can get fired, expelled, denied health care or beaten, raped and imprisoned by police.
With the homosexuality-in-Africa subject, people seem to take whatever position suis their agenda. So some claim that homosexuality never existed in Africa until the West imported it there; others say homosexuality was accepted in Africa until the West imported homophobia.
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I believe he makes a good point. There are/were tribes in Africa that classified sexuality and gender in in different ways. It wasn’t until the introduction of religion(Christianity, Muslim, etc) that homosexuality became a “problem”.
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Fact.
Several scholars have already shown this to be true. To help some of you uninformed gays, I now present a holiday reading list (listed roughly in order of helpfulness, as estimated by me), ASSUMING YOU CAN READ AND THINK CRITICALLY (@david:, @JayKay:).
1) Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities:
http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Wive.....12UTD7ZYJU
2) African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization:
http://www.amazon.com/African-.....12UTD7ZYJU
3) Between Law And Culture: Relocating Legal Studies
(relevant parts are on pp.277-282 [on the Google Books version; was available online for free last I checked]):
http://www.amazon.com/Between-.....12UTD7ZYJU
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I guess the debate about whether homosexuality or the opposite (homophobia) being what was imported to Africa by whites can go on forever. But at this point it should be…..so what? The African countries have enough trouble going on that it shouldn’t even be an issue. If homosexuality was imported to Africa…so what? Cars and medicine are imported too. If homophobia was imported to Africa…so what? They should make up their own rules and not let outsiders tell them how to judge people. I guess it’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s the simple view of this outsider.
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@CBRad: you’re right about that, @ comment #17. i don’t see how any clearheaded person can claim that same-sex desire was imported by any group of people to another group. it isn’t some virus that can be carried across borders. i daresay same-sex desire exists and has always existed in every human society (though i don’t know if this has been formally studied…but it must have been by now, no?)
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@redball: Well, I’m saying it can be debated because other “experts” (like gay hero Malik Shabazz and co.) say it was absolutely introduced into African societies by whites as a way of weakening their society. But, however it “arrived” in Africa, it SHOULD be a minor issue.
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@JayKay: He is pointing to the irony of his countrymen claiming homosexuality is a Western import when they are using Western religion and Western sodomy laws to justify their position. The “Western import” argument is major argument in Uganda and warrants a response.
I don’t see where he’s claiming that Ugandan leaders don’t have any responsibility in lapping all this nonsense up. It takes two parties for neo-colonialism to work: both the colonizers and the ruling classes and elites of the colonized. Of course, this is complex political thought, so I wouldn’t expect such ideas to cross your mind.
Secondly, if you think forty years is “a while now” after colonization (over 100 years), then you know little about the effects of colonization, not to mention the Cold War politics that kept western powers meddling in Africa (not to their benefit).
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@CBRad: Which Malik Shabazz? He sounds like a black nationalist/Nation of Islam-type freak (I’m black, btw). Or plain scam artist. Are you talking about Malcolm X or this still-living Malik Shabazz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malik_Zulu_Shabazz)…or someone else entirely?
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@HaMashchit: When I came out to my (Nigerian-immigrant) parents they also claimed that “this [homosexuality] doesn’t exist where we come from!” I’ve heard from gay Indians that their parents said the same thing about India being apparently devoid of homos. Ummm NO homophobia merely drives it underground. Basic critical thinking. Pathetic.
So I’d say this is a common statement/belief/defense mechanism among people from (at least some) developing countries–African as well as (South) Asian.
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Africa was very gay friendly before idiot European/American missionaries turned them against us. There are still remote areas which are relatively untouched by colonialism where the old ways are still intact and they are very pro-gay. I have met such people from the Congo and from Burkina Faso – where the Dogon people refer to gays as Gatekeepers and give them a place of honor in the community. Historically, before the whites brought homophobia to Africa, the shamans (sometimes called witch doctors) were all gay or lesbian. Some African tribes used to say you could tell if a baby would be gay by feeling the vibrations of the fetus in the pregnant mother. They considered it a great honor to have a gay baby. The mothers would watch for sure signs that the child was gay as he grew, and they would not force such children to play with sling shots or knives if they preferred to cook or sing, for example. Missionaries destroyed all that.
Africa has much in common with America’s Native Americans in this regard. Virtually ALL Native American tribes were pro-gay until the Europeans came and began killing the gay Indians… even having packs of dogs eat the gay Indians alive in what is now South America.
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Africa and the Americas are not the only places where European missionaries terrorized people into hating gays.
They did this in Russia as well in the 1600′s when Peter the Great began inviting Europeans to come help develop Russia. The Europeans arrived and saw Russian men showing affection in public and having open romances and they wrote back to the homophobic west about how shocked and disgusted they were by this.
However, it seems like every society has probably changed its treatment of gays over time. Early Christianity was notoriously pro-gay and pro-female. It just got taken over by homophobe and misogynists later on. Americans probably were much less homophobic in the 1800′s than they have been since Jerry Falwell & the “Moral Majority” came along in the 1970′s.
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@Cohen Tortures Us: anytime! so glad to know someone appreciates it!
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I’ve also read the Black Nationalist belief (or claim of belief) that homosexuality is a western thing because it arises from the whole power-play power-hungry thing in sexist white male societies, whereas Africa had a non-sexist respect for the natural mutually-complimentary qualties of male-and-female, so no disorders like homosexuality arose. Again, I have trouble believing there were no same-sex relations in Africa before contact with Europeans or Arabs. Though, granted, they might have taken on a different form/character than back in the West.
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@HaMashchit: Don’t pay JayKay any mid. He lives in this delusional world where white men are a persecuted minority
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@CBRad: Yeah you can read a lot of things out there. Malik Shabazz is part of the New Black Panther Party which is a black supremacist group soooooo………I would give their “history lessons” the same amount of credence I would those of the white supremacists.
Which is zero.
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Too true. For all the talk on here about how primitive Africans are because of their homophobia, it’s the product of our very own missionaries.