• An Overwhelming Consensus? How Moral Panics about Sexual and Gender Diversity Help Reshape Local Traditions in Ghana, Kwaku Adomako, in: Politique africaine 2022/4 (n° 168), pages 75-94

The links between the global “anti-gender” and anti-LGBT* movements have been discussed by many authors. Doris Buss, for example, shows how western “pro-family” activists may link the “homosexual” and “feminist” movements to “an undermining of the ‘natural family’”. In a similar vein, when it comes to Africa, Haley McEwen explains how leaders discursively use the protection of the gender binary and the nuclear family (previously ushered in by missionaries and colonial administrators to maintain racial hierarchies) as a pretext for making anti-colonial political claims to secure national sovereignty. A principal tactic that is deployed is to repudiate homosexuality, qualifying it as an alien, “non-African” phenomenon. As this paper will show, Ghana’s case exhibits similar moves to instrumentalise LGBT-related controversies as “sexual moral panics” to achieve political ends in ways comparable to what many authors have described for homosexuality in Africa for decades. The increasingly global debates surrounding gender advocacy, feminism and LGBT rights are provoking a rise in polarisation globally, but there are few places where these subjects have been more topical than Ghana. The country criminalises “unnatural sexual intercourse” and is no stranger to media firestorms about homosexuality. For example, in 2006, the public imagination was incensed by reports of a supposed “homoconference” which later reports suggested was a hoax. In September 2019, the Ghana Education Service’s guideline…

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