By Lenrod Nzulu Baraka

The Ukraine war and the LGBTQ+ issue have thrusted Africans and more specifically African politicians into the limelight and on to the international stage.  The historically minded would understand why many African leaders overtly or covertly support Russia in its proxy war against the West in Ukraine.  Africans who know their history would remember that it was the Soviet Union that sent weapons and personnel to Africa in support of the African independence movements, especially in South Africa, and Angola.

The reluctance of many African leaders to vote against condemning Russia at the UN in recent times is a fitting quid pro quo for the assistance rendered to the African continent by the Soviet Union. African leadership can be congratulated for taking an independent stance on the Ukrainian issue.  History will no doubt judge African leadership favorably for their highly reasonable and perfectly understandable show of support for Russia.

Perhaps not so reasonable and understandable is the current stance being taken by many African politicians on the LGBTQ+ issue.  The incomprehensible nature of the current African stance on the LGBTQ+ issue stems from the realization that much of the animus against the LGBTQ+ community on the African continent is rooted in either Judeo-Christian or Islamic religious ideals.

We in the Caribbean are well aware of the conditioning process that effectively separated our enslaved African ancestors from their African essence.  Enslaved Africans in the Caribbean were stripped of their history, their languages, their culture, their religion, and even their African names.  Kunta Kinte was fed into the mouth of the beast and expelled as Toby. Every effort was made to ensure that enslaved Africans were disconnected from their African identity.

Many Black people assume that the Africans who evaded capture on the continent were spared the conditioning process that made a Toby out of a Kunta Kinte. Such an assumption unfortunately is sadly incorrect. Continental Africans were spared the agony and terror of chattel slavery, courtesy of the Christian Europeans, but there was no escaping the same conditioning process once the European powers cut Africa up like an apple pie and divided the continent among themselves.

Africans on the continent may have retained more of their African identity than their kith and kin in the Diaspora, but they also have scars that were inflicted deep in their African souls. Continental African have drunk deeply from the golden cup of European religion, education, language, politics, law, and culture. Judeo-Christian values and norms are as deeply enshrined in the hearts of continental Africans as they are in the hearts of Africans in the Diaspora.

A careful analysis of the rhetoric being bandies around in the public square by many African leaders clearly reveals that those leaders who are opposed to extending full human rights to the LGBTQ+ community in Africa are opposing on the basis of their spiritual affinity with the religious value structure imposed on them by their European or Arab colonizers. The conservative, prudish, Victorian religious ethic with its antiquated views on human sexuality is the motivating factor behind most of the anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment on the African continent. 

The same conservative, evangelical, Bible literalism that that is opposing the LGBTQ+ community in the US and around the world wherever conservative evangelical Bible literalism is strong, is the same force that is opposing the LGBTQ+ community in Africa. This is very ironic because the same Europeans who introduced conservative evangelical Bible literalism have consigned it to the dustbin of history along with all the antiquated laws that were a throwback to the prudishness of the Victorian age.

Regrettably many Africans on the continent and many Blacks in the Diaspora are trapped in a time warp in which religion trumps reason and common sense. The Europeans, who bequeathed the backward and sometimes barbaric moral and ethical system found in the Judeo-Christian scriptures, have wisely evolved to a higher system of values and ethics. It is to the shame of many people of African ancestry that we find it so hard to follow suit and consign the same backward religious values to the nearest garbage can.  No wonder the whole world laughs at Africans and Black people in the Diaspora. We have imbibed the detritus of antiquated European, Jewish, and Arab spirituality and are now defending ideals from these spiritual systems, flying the false flag of African culture.

Lenrod Nzulu Baraka is the founder of Afro-Caribbean Spiritual Teaching Center and the author of The Future of African and the Caribbean: Challenges and Possibilities.