The passage of Ghana’s draconian anti-LGBTQ+ bill is not merely a domestic moral panic. It is a lightning rod that exposes the fraying threads of the Commonwealth and the West’s selective indignation. One can almost hear the creak of Victorian pith helmets being adjusted in Whitehall as trade officials scramble to assess the fallout. For Britain, this is a familiar dance: professing liberal values while clutching at trade deals with nations that conspicuously reject them.
Let us be precise. The bill, which criminalises same-sex relationships and even advocacy for LGBTQ+ rights, is a textbook case of postcolonial reaction. Ghana, like many African nations, frames this as a defence of cultural purity against a decadent West. Yet history is not on their side. The same Victorian moralists who imposed their own sexual mores on the Gold Coast now lecture from London. The irony is thick enough to cut with a cutlass.
What interests me, however, is the intellectual decay on display. The bill’s supporters invoke tradition, but tradition is a living thing, not a fossil. Was it not the Ashanti Empire that tolerated gender-fluid roles before the British arrived with their Bible and buggery laws? The real tradition here is the colonial legacy of criminalising otherness. Ghana’s legislators are building on a foundation laid by their former oppressors. They have become custodians of a prison they did not build.
Now the Commonwealth faces a fracture. The UK’s trade posture is one of quiet desperation. Post-Brexit Britain needs deals, and Ghana is a growing economy. But at what cost? The Foreign Office will mutter about human rights while the Department for International Trade huddles with mining conglomerates. This is the same hypocrisy that saw Britain sell arms to Saudi Arabia while condemning its human rights record. The empire may be gone, but the habits persist: profit over principle.
Yet let us not absolve Ghana. The bill is a political tool, a distraction from economic stagnation and corruption. The Ghanaian public has been fed a diet of fear: that LGBTQ+ rights are a foreign contagion. This is the classic manoeuvre of failing elites: find an enemy within, rally the faithful, and postpone the reckoning. It worked in Russia and Uganda. It will work in Ghana until it does not.
What of the Commonwealth then? This grouping of former colonies was always a stage for performance. Ghana’s bill is a reminder that the Commonwealth is not a family; it is a museum of historical grievances. The UK cannot lecture without sounding like a colonial schoolmaster, and Ghana cannot resist without sounding like a petulant child. Both are trapped in a cycle of mutual theatrical outrage.
The West must accept that its values are not universally desirable, especially when they are promoted through the barrel of a trade embargo. And Africa must accept that its fight against neocolonialism is not a licence to persecute minorities. The path forward is not through legal savagery but through honest conversation. That requires leaders on both sides to admit that their hands are dirty.
Until then, Ghana’s bill is a mirror. In it, Britain sees its own past. Ghana sees its own future. Neither should be proud.
