The law, the government, and the media: Being gay in Ghana today

As the warmer months across West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea draw to a close, Derek soaks up Ghana’s final sunnier days before the rainy season and gears up for the new classes in computer programming he plans to take in the upcoming academic year. For the 21-year old, the summer holidays have been a time for introspection and reflection about the present and future.

“My main goal for the future is to marry and have two kids. Not too many kids, because then they just cry and annoy you,” Derek muses. However, while Derek’s yearning for fatherhood and a happy marriage are common enough—in West Africa and everywhere—in Derek’s case, these possibilities remain elusive and troubling.

He finally voices the question that is bothering him. “And how do you expect me to marry a man and have kids?” he asks. “You have to be crazy to think that. It just can’t be.”

Derek is one of Ghana’s two million gays and lesbians, a cohort that comprises roughly ten percent of the nation’s population. And for the many Ghanaians who identify as queer, Derek’s concerns about bridging the gap between his own sexuality and societal expectations are not at all unfamiliar.

In this country where being gay is one of Ghana’s unspoken taboos, adverse views toward gays and lesbians are not uncommon among the general public, and this widespread homophobia is only solidified by legal statutes that criminalize homosexuality.

British common law, first introduced into Ghana’s legal code while the country was still a colony of the British, is used to arrest and prosecute gays and lesbians even today. While same-sex relations are not explicitly illegal in Ghana, section 104 of the criminal code of 1960 criminalizes “unnatural carnal knowledge.” The clause was last amended in 2003, and for queer Ghanaians, section 104 often holds precedence over the freedoms of association and expression guaranteed by the constitution.

In 2003, the government used the clause to charge and sentence four Ghanaian men for homosexual behavior. The Daily Graphic, Ghana’s state-sponsored newspaper, ran a front-page spread with headshots of the four men, who were eventually found guilty by a district magistrate court of “unnatural carnal knowledge” and sentenced to two-year jail sentences each.

More recently, in September of last year, former Minister of Information Kwamena Bartels cited the same clause in a statement condemning homosexuality.

“The government does not and shall not condone any such activity which violently offends the culture, morality and heritage of the entire people of Ghana,” the statement read.

Bartels’s office issued the statement in response to rumors of an international gay rights conference allegedly scheduled to take place later that month at the Accra International Conference Centre.

However, the gay and lesbian community in Ghana denies that such a conference was ever scheduled to take place. Prince MacDonald, founder or the Gay and Lesbian Association of Ghana (GALAG), said that the government released the statement without verifying the rumors.

“If there was an international conference scheduled, they should have checked to see if somebody had booked the place,” he said.

While the state plays a central role in the criminalization of gays and lesbians, the government’s treatment of the issue is for the most part a reaction to popular views on homosexuality, explained Abraham Akrong, a senior researcher at the Institute of Africa Studies at the University of Ghana and an associate pastor at the Ghana Police Church.

“The government said no, for completely political reasons,” he said. “Because when the government says yes, the thinking is, ‘How can you subject society to what is unnatural, to catastrophe?’ Even if the politicians feel it’s nothing.”

MacDonald said that several national media houses spawned the rumors surrounding the conference and then presented negative coverage of the incident.

“The media pushed the government to make the statement, which just shows you how empty the government is,” he said. “Ghana’s media, most of it is not objective. Even if we paid millions of cedis [the Ghanaian currency], we would still have got the same coverage because of their biased mindset and religious perspectives.”

In the month following both the 2003 arrests and the 2006 statement, a deluge of anti-gay sentiment flooded the country’s national papers and airwaves.

“Most of them were horrible,” MacDonald recalled of the news coverage written and aired in response to the incidents.

The view that homosexuality is a foreign or imported lifestyle is widespread in Ghana, and many Ghanaians perceive same sex relationships as un-African, a phenomenon of the Western world.

“The media would never publish a story about two consenting adults, but then they would publish something about a white person sodomizing a Ghanaian,” McDonald added.

The Daily Graphic ran an editorial the day following the 2003 arrests claiming that “all the reported cases of homosexuality have some foreign interest.” The editorial also underscored the need “to insulate our rich cultural practices from the incursions of the destructive effects of the West.”

“It is imperative,” the editorial continued, “that we take bold steps to protect our young ones from falling into the debased form of sexual practices that offend the sensibilities of the African and the Ghanaian in particular.”

Yaw Boadu-Ayeboafu, editor of the Daily Graphic, said that Ghana’s legal code and popular views on homosexuality compelled the paper to publish the editorial.

“It’s criminal here to be a gay or to be a lesbian. Whatever is criminal here can’t be presented in a positive manner,” he asserted.

“You can talk about some issues that are controversial, but it’s been very unanimous in terms of the gay issue,” he continued. “No one wanted to assault anyone, but no one can positively portray something criminal. The gay rights issue is a simple issue. It’s a question of illegality.”

“You only need to talk to the average person and see their reaction,” Ayeboafoh added. “You should have seen the letters people wrote in about the piece [on the September 2006 conference]. They were enraged.”

Although public discussion of same sex relationships remains largely nonexistent, when the issue does arise, many Ghanaians express views positioning homosexuality as a lifestyle both alien and disruptive to traditional culture and belief systems.

“I do have some gay friends, but they are all foreign,” asserts Anthony, a vendor who sells jewelry and curios to the tourists who visit Elmina’s beachside resorts. “From the US, Holland. I have one from Switzerland, and I have one from England and we could never agree.”

While Akrong disagrees with the view that homosexuality is foreign to Ghana or West Africa more generally, he acknowledges that the visibility of the gay rights movement is a recent development.

“[Homosexuality] has been here before colonialism, but it’s so suppressed that it’s difficult to own it,” he said. “The reality is that there may be many gays in Ghana, but its prominence is what is foreign. The fact that we discuss it at all is very recent.”

MacDonald calls into the question the very premise used to relegate homosexuality to a sphere of otherness—the distinction between African and foreign.

“The notion that this is not African, that it’s a foreign thing, it’s a big lie. There are so many things that are foreign, like the chairs and the tables we are sitting at now. The shirts and the clothes that we wear now are not African when we first started using them. But we use them now anyway, so that is why we have to ask, ‘What is African and what is not? What makes something foreign and what makes it Ghanaian?’ That needs to be clarified.”

“The issue truly is that most of us in Ghana never met anyone—I never met anyone from the US or the UK—before I knew I liked other men,” MacDonald recalled. “To me this is an insult, to tell me I don’t know what I want as an African. But even when I was in my village, I knew I was gay. I just didn’t have a word for it.”

© 2007 Rhema Hokama