The news from Accra lands with the thud of a Victorian moralist’s Bible. Ghana’s Parliament has advanced a bill that criminalises not only same-sex relations but also any advocacy for LGBTQ+ rights. The penalty? Up to five years in prison. Britain, ever the anxious headmaster of the Commonwealth, has responded with a stern telegram: restraint, please. Do not embarrass the family.
Let us pause to admire the irony. Here is a former colony, once lectured on the virtues of civilisation by a nation that imprisoned Oscar Wilde for gross indecency, now being lectured on the virtues of tolerance. The wheel of history turns, and the pupil has become the preacher’s nightmare.
But the deeper question is not about gay rights. It is about the fragility of the Commonwealth, that peculiar institution that survives on sentiment and shared history, rather than trade or treaties. Ghana’s bill is a grenade tossed into the drawing-room of a club that prides itself on its decorum. The British Foreign Office, in its carefully worded statement, hints at consequences: ‘We urge Ghana to uphold its international obligations.’ Translation: do not make us choose between our values and our nostalgia.
Yet, one must ask: whose values? The Victorian era, which Britain now affects to despise, was an age of rigorous moral codes. It was also an age of empire, where British values were imposed at gunpoint. Now, the post-colonial world has its own moral codes, and they are not always pretty. Ghana’s parliamentarians are not savages; they are democrats responding to a deeply conservative electorate. To demand that they embrace Western sexual liberalism is to demand that they abandon their own culture. It is a form of intellectual colonialism, dressed in rainbow colours.
And what of the Commonwealth itself? This is a body that has long been a convenient fiction, a forum for tea and handshakes. But when a member state passes a law that London deems repugnant, the fiction cracks. Will Britain suspend Ghana? Expel it? Or will it, as it has done with other illiberal members, look the other way? The answer, I suspect, is the latter. Because the alternative is to admit that the Commonwealth is a sham, a relic of a bygone era.
The real scandal is not that Ghana is regressing. It is that the West, having spent decades lecturing the world on human rights, now finds itself unable to enforce those rights without appearing hypocritical. Did we not champion the sovereignty of nations? Did we not celebrate the end of colonialism? Well, here is the consequence: a sovereign nation exercising its right to be bigoted.
I am not defending the bill. It is cruel, ignorant, and ultimately unenforceable. The war on homosexuality is like the war on drugs: a fantasy that causes more suffering than it prevents. But I am weary of the Western assumption that our values are universal and urgent. They are not. They are recent, contingent, and deeply contested even in our own societies.
So let Britain urge restraint. Let it tut and shake its head. But let it also remember that the empire is over, and that the Commonwealth is a voluntary association, not a court of appeal. And if Ghana chooses to walk away, or to be pushed, then perhaps we should finally admit that the Commonwealth was a beautiful dream, but a dream nonetheless. History, after all, does not end with the triumph of liberal democracy. It lurches, and it sometimes crashes.
The bill in Accra is a warning: the 19th century is not as dead as we thought. And the 21st century is not the triumph of reason, but a battlefield of competing faiths. Britain’s choice is simple: accept that battle, or retreat into nostalgia. I suspect it will do neither. It will wring its hands, and the world will continue its morally schizophrenic dance.
