The latest contretemps between Accra and Westminster over the Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill is a masterpiece of hypocrisy masquerading as principle. Here we have a post-colonial African state, still smarting from the hangover of empire, being told by its former master to abandon ‘backward’ laws in favour of ‘modern’ human rights. But whose rights? And who defines ‘modern’?
Let us first dispense with the notion that the United Kingdom is a paragon of moral consistency. It was but a blink of an eye in historical terms since sodomy was a capital offence in Britain. It was 1967 that saw partial decriminalisation in England and Wales, and even then with a higher age of consent. The British Empire, for all its civilising rhetoric, exported homophobia as assiduously as it exported Christianity and the common law. Many of the laws now being condemned as ‘archaic’ in Africa are direct descendants of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, drafted by Lord Macaulay in 1835. The Victorian moral code, now discarded in its homeland, lives on in the legal systems of ex-colonies.
And yet, here is the UK Government, through its High Commissioner in Accra, warning that the bill could imperil Commonwealth trade and aid. This is the same Commonwealth that cradles nations like Brunei, where homosexuality is punishable by stoning, and Uganda, where ‘aggravated homosexuality’ carries the death penalty. But Ghana, with its relatively mild proposed penalties of three to five years imprisonment, is singled out for special opprobrium. Why? Because Ghana is a stable democracy with a burgeoning economy, a safe target for moral posturing from London.
The Ghanaian bill, whatever one thinks of its merits, is not some tribal atavism. It is a reaction to a perceived cultural assault from the West, a desperate attempt to preserve some notion of identity in the face of globalisation. The politicians backing it know that 80% of Ghanaians oppose same-sex relationships, according to surveys. In a democracy, that is a mandate, however distasteful to liberal sensibilities. The UK, which prides itself on democracy, suddenly finds it inconvenient when the vox populi speaks what London considers the wrong language.
But here is the deeper rot: intellectual decadence. The West has spent decades deracinating its own moral foundations, replacing Christian ethics with a secular humanism that is now being exported as a universal standard. We mock the Victorians for their earnestness, yet we are more zealous in our new faith than they ever were in theirs. The United Nations, the World Bank, the myriad NGOs all preach the same catechism of LGBTQ+ rights, environmentalism, and intersectionality. Dissenters are excommunicated from polite society.
Yet history does not move in straight lines. Every empire falls, every moral crusade burns out. The West is in its late Roman phase, obsessed with bread and circuses, social justice as spectacle. We have forgotten that the codes we now universalise were, until recently, parochial innovations. The idea that sexuality is the core of identity would have baffled Aristotle or Aquinas. It is a very modern, very Western invention.
And so Ghana faces a choice: bow to the new imperium or assert its own path. The latter is risky. The IMF might not be so forgiving. But the former is a slow poisoning of the soul. A people that cannot define its own moral boundaries is a people without a future.
The British press will tut-tut. The NGOs will wring their hands. But when the West eventually collapses under the weight of its own contradictions, as all hegemons do, the Ghanas and Ugandas of the world will be left to pick up the pieces. And they will have to decide what kind of society they want to build. That is not a decision for London or Brussels or New York. It is a decision for Accra.
