Africa, LGBT rights and global agencies

World Bank continues to put pressure on African nations against anti-homosexuality laws

In May, Uganda signed an anti-gay legislation, and last week the World Bank said it will not give any new funding to Uganda over its anti-homosexuality law. The question is: why is LGBT such a sensitive question for the global money-lender? Does LGBT have an economic side too or is WB socio-culturally biased?

Not just WB, the UN also considers LGBTQI as a Vulnerable Group and organises training programmes to normalise the idea. The EU calls on countries that criminalise homosexuality or restrict it to repeal laws that infringe on the universal human rights of sexual minorities, and takes actions via European External Action Service.

Pressure on Africa has been ongoing in this stance. In 2011, Cameron threatened to withhold UK aid from governments that ban homosexuality. The same year, Obama vowed legal, moral and financial support for gay rights organisations in Africa. And in 2018, Denmark withheld aid to Tanzania and so did WB for its crackdown on homosexuals.

Some African states have given up to such diplomatic and financial pressures from the West. While 22 of the 55 African states have legalised homosexuality, it is not accepted as norm in their societies. The rest of the continent has resisted forcefully in spite of all pressure.

This year, the Kenyan President said, “I am a God-fearing man… our culture, values, Christianity and Islam cannot allow women to marry each other, or men to marry fellow men.” The Uganda’s President said his government’s actions were against the coercion of individuals into homosexual behaviour, and accused WB of using money to try to “coerce” the country’s government. And Ghana’s Supreme Court has dismissed a legal challenge seeking to block parliament from passing a stringent anti-LGBT bill.

So why is the West so much into making LGBT a norm for the whole of humanity?

Dare we say that the West has been extremely malicious in its treatment of the sexes since the beginning of the enlightenment! The scoundrel mindset of Western aristocracy has always pushed them towards extreme exploitation and abuse of the whole humanity. They have been enslaving them, colonising them and coning them at every opportunity — all under their single practical value of divide-and-rule. And ironically so, divide-and-rule was so embedded into their mindset that they had to sever their own society with the same knife — with the feminist movement.

Feminism started with wanting women’s right to vote, and quickly morphed into the women’s liberation and legal and social equality for them. In the 1990s, focus turned towards individuality and diversity. And today it can be recognised with combating sexual harassment, violence against women and rape culture, as in the Me-Too movement. Why did that happen? Why have women, instead of asking for more equality and liberation, got back to square one, again asking for protection against rape and exploitation?

Veteran feminist Germaine Greer says, “Liberation didn’t happen, what happened was that commercial pornography was liberated, fantasy was liberated, people weren’t liberated.” Under the flag of feminist liberation, women were pushed into forsaking the family and entering the workplace. The freedom or free availability of women made free-sex and prostitution the norm in place of the family. Later, the internet changed prostitution into a multibillion-dollar online industry, worth $97 billion globally, with the US alone generating between $12-14 billion annually.

According to Feminist Julia Bindel, the proliferation of extreme seductive and additive pornography has been normalised among young men, and boys as young as 10; and that pornography is excessively based on aggressive, abusive, coercive male-violence, and perpetrated on the most disenfranchised women of the society. But it’s not just the lucrative $97 billion business, the fact that pornography has and potentially can enter every home, and that young untrained minds accept all they see on screen as the norm, leads them to do and expect exactly what they see. This is making their sexual lives unreal and unstable.

More so, studies have found that there is a relationship between pornography and homosexuality. The fact of having both naked men and women on screen all the time means that whereas seeing men should turn other men off, you end up being turned on. Also, the fact that while watching porn you are constantly going through shock, surprise, voyeurism and fantasy; and you are alone; and add to that the splitting of the family and the rise of solitary individualism. All these have led to the confusion and loss of gender-identity in the West, and more and more porn-watchers are turning homosexual.

The New York Post recently published the findings of a survey that says the more you watch porn, the more likely you are to be bisexual.

So, there’s the catch: with all the onslaught of western culture into our homes via their media and the internet, the West is not satiated because the family is still intact in Muslim and other conservative societies. The family will only break when men will openly come out as homosexuals. Even when studies have found lifetime prevalence of suicide attempts, psychosocial correlates and mental health issues like depression and anxiety, among LGBTQ, 50% more than the average population. Even when out of 1.1 million American having HIV/AIDS, 66% are gay men, one of every five, and the same kind of ratios goes for Monkeypox. And even when mainstream feminists like Heather Brunskell have highlighted the plight, brutality and dangers of disease and mental/physical punishment faced by women in porn-industry.

Heather writes in Inventing Transgender Children and Young People, “The ‘transgender child’ is a relatively new historical figure, brought into being by a coalition of pressure groups, political activists and knowledge makers… Bizarrely, in transgender theory, biology is said to be a social construct but gender is regarded as an inherent property located ‘somewhere’ in the brain or soul or other undefined area of the body. We reverse these propositions with the concept that it is gender, not biology, which is a social construct.”

And now, the West, in its old scoundrel mindset wants to bring the same ‘liberation’ in Africa, of homosexuality, of LGBT, of LGBTQIA2S+ or maybe LGBTIQCAPGNGFNBA — perhaps because Africa has always been the White man’s butcher block: he can extract slaves from it, he can loot its mineral wealth, and he can kill its genuine leaders. So why can he not do his great homo-experiment on it, tear its family, strip its youth of cloths and dignity, and liberate it of religion and modesty!

Published in The Express Tribune, August 18^th, 2023.

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