The news arrives with the familiar thud of a door slamming on history. Ghana’s president, Nana Akufo-Addo, has announced that he will scrutinise the Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill before giving it his assent. This bill, a legislative monstrosity that would criminalise LGBTQ+ identity and advocacy, has been waiting for the president’s signature since its passage in February. Now, the United Kingdom has waded in, tutting from on high and reminding Ghana of its commitments to Commonwealth values. The UK’s Africa Minister, Andrew Mitchell, has said that the British government is “profoundly concerned” about the bill and is urging compliance with human rights norms. How deliciously ironic. The former colonial master, which once imposed its own Victorian moral codes across the globe, now lectures its former subject about tolerance. This is not a row about human rights. It is a row about the theatre of civilisation.
Let us first dispense with the moralising. The United Kingdom, for all its self-congratulatory liberalism, is a nation that spent centuries exporting its particular brand of sexual hypocrisy. The Victorians, those paragons of prudery, were simultaneously the architects of the most repressive laws against homosexuality in the Empire. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalised “carnal intercourse against the order of nature”, was a British invention. It was exported to colonies from Singapore to Kenya and remains on the books in many Commonwealth countries today. Ghana’s anti-LGBTQ+ bill, which proposes prison sentences of up to ten years, is a direct descendant of that same colonial legal framework. The Union Jack does not wash its hands of this easily.
Now, the UK stands as the self-appointed guardian of human rights, demanding that Ghana fall in line with the Commonwealth’s modern values. But what are these values? The Commonwealth is a relic, a club of convenience for former colonies and the metropole. It has no enforcement mechanism, no real power, and a history of ignoring egregious abuses in member states such as Brunei and Uganda. This is not idealism; it is geopolitical posturing. The UK is desperate to appear relevant on the world stage, to wrap itself in the tattered banner of moral leadership. But Ghana owes it nothing. Akufo-Addo, a lawyer and human rights advocate by training, knows this. He has said that the bill will be subjected to a “thorough and transparent” review. That is as much a procedural dance as it is a political gesture. He is caught between conservative domestic forces, whipped up by the usual religious and cultural demagogues, and the international community, which demands that he uphold the universal standards of dignity and autonomy.
The tragedy is that Ghana is a reasonably stable democracy. It is not a broken state. Its citizens enjoy freedoms that others in the region can only dream of. Yet here, in the name of family values, it is prepared to make pariahs of a vulnerable minority. This is not an African problem. This is a human problem. The same arguments about “tradition” and “cultural decay” were made in 1960s Britain against the decriminalisation of homosexuality. The same fears of national decline, of foreign contamination, drove the moral panics of the 1950s. History repeats itself because we refuse to learn from it. The Victorians are dead, but their ghosts haunt the corridors of power in Accra. The bill, if passed, will set Ghana back decades. It will make criminals of doctors, teachers, and social workers who do nothing more than offer compassion. It will force people into hiding, into fear, into lives of quiet desperation. That is the legacy of colonial law. That is the price of moral cowardice.
Yet I am not entirely unsympathetic to Akufo-Addo’s predicament. He is a leader torn. His own party, the New Patriotic Party, has strong ties to religious groups that demand this bill. He faces an election in 2024. The anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment is a populist wedge, a way to distract from economic stagnation and corruption. But leaders are elected to lead, not to pander. If he truly believes in human rights, he will veto this bill. He will stand up to the mob and say, “No, we will not repeat the errors of our oppressors.” But I fear he lacks the spine. The UK’s intervention may actually make things worse, as Ghanaians bristle at foreign interference. The president may well be forced to sign the bill out of nationalist pique. That is the unkindest irony of all: the liberal West’s hectoring may actually doom those it seeks to save.
I am not an optimist. I see the arc of history bending not towards justice but towards a cyclical return to barbarism. The Bill for the Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values is a misnomer. It is a bill for the promotion of persecution, for the enforcement of mediocrity, for the triumph of the herd over the individual. Ghana’s president must decide whether he will stand with the world or with the mob. The Commonwealth, that empire of echoes, will watch. But the truth is, no one’s hands are clean. We are all wading through the same muddy river of history. The only question is whether we will drown or find higher ground.
