Traditional people worry Ghana anti-gay bill will target their Indigenous identities

ACCRA — Traditional healer Naa Busuafi used to feel empowered when leaving tribal ceremonies held on the outskirts of Accra, proud to be living out practices that colonists sought to eradicate.

But that pride has been replaced by fear and dread as a government bill intended to stamp out homosexuality has contributed to a violent backlash against LGBTQ+ people.

Busuafi’s peers connect people with spirits or with long-lost relatives. In TikTok videos of ceremonies, bare-chested women channelling male spirits chant and dance. Men wear a long dress with jewelry when the spirit dominating them is female.

These ceremonies would likely be banned under the proposed bill, which would criminalize cross-dressing. MPs tabled the legislation in June 2021 as a “family-values” bill. It was approved by Ghana’s parliament this past February, but has been tied up in court challenges ahead of the Dec. 7 national election.

The Canadian Press travelled to Ghana as part of an investigative series looking into a global backslide in LGBTQ+ rights and the consequences for Canada, including the role of pre-colonial gender identities.

Ghana’s proposed law would jail those promoting same-sex relations for up to a decade, coerce jail time or force what is referred to as conversion therapy for those caught having gay sex. It also would ban certain medical treatments such as hormone therapy.

LGBTQ+ people say the proposal has led police to target them and has normalized street violence.

“Are you trying to say that our culture is a sin, that our tradition is a sin?” asked Busuafi, who uses the pronoun “they.”

They said Ghana had a relatively permissive attitude about homosexuality in the 1990s. A law that banned anal sex between men existed, but was rarely enforced.

Activists are now tapping into history to try to convince Ghanaians that gender and sexual minorities have a long-standing presence in the region.

“In the spirit realms, queerness exists. And it has existed from prehistoric times, before the slave trade,” said Busuafi’s friend Isaac Bill, who also uses “they” pronouns.

“We are the front-liners to the (LGBTQ+) community.”

Bill identifies as a traditional person in the Ga tribe, and is non-binary. They grew up in Jamestown, a working-class area of Accra where researchers have documented a relative abundance of people with gender identities that are Indigenous to Ghana.

Some in the country reject the label of LGBTQ+, saying it’s a Western phrase that sounds alien to Ghanaians. Instead, some who would call themselves “gay” in the West identify in Ghana as “sasso,” a term that relates to effeminate men. “Kojo besia” is another similar label.

Proponents of Ghana’s bill, such as the Christian Council of Ghana, insist homosexuality is not a tradition in the country.

“As Christians, we uphold the Bible as our principal guide and consider the (LGBTQ+) in all its forms as unacceptable behaviour that our God frowns upon,” the council said in a 2021 statement.

“Moreover, it is alien to the Ghanaian culture and family value system, and as such, the citizens of this nation cannot accept it.”

University of Ghana journalism professor Audrey Gadzekpo, however, disputes that LGBTQ+ people were not a historical part of Ghana, given that British colonizers saw a need to ban homosexual acts.

“Why did the colonialists think to enact a law like that, if we didn’t have homosexuality in our societies? You don’t enact laws where there’s no problem,” she said.

Some local organizations are looking to Canada for lessons on Indigenous genders and sexualities.

Busuafi and Bill both say they’ve noticed the greater prominence of two-spirit people in North America in recent years. The term refers to gender and sexual minorities who are part of Indigenous communities, many of which have specific names and roles for people who aren’t straight.

Canada has seen a revival in two-spirit identities, with academic research and more prominent roles for two-spirit people in Pride events. Busuafi said that process of reclaiming identities obscured by colonialism is something they’d like to see in Ghana, starting with tribal people.

“We are now looking for funding so that we can educate traditional persons,” Busuafi said. “We need to explain it to them, in their own language.”

For now, the challenge they face is often from other traditional people, and it’s changing how they live and work.

Around the time MPs tabled the anti-LGBTQ+ bill in 2021, Busuafi started noticing a shift at traditional events. Instead of looks of respect from people, they would have scowls from neighbours, and were sometimes followed by strangers on their way home.

Busuafi has already stopped hosting community education sessions in their home due to safety concerns. Because their job as a traditional healer involves interacting with the public and being visible, the bill threatens both their livelihood and their traditional identity.

“They will arrest me for doing what I am naturally; for being myself,” Busuafi said.

“Those who want to be Christians, it’s fine, they can practise — but they should not criminalize our culture,” Busuafi said. “They should not stop us from being traditional people. That is who we are; that is what we have been all these years.”

Their message resonates on the other side of the continent. Godfrey Adera, a queer cleric and theologian in Nairobi, said he has found a dearth of research about traditional gender and sexual identities in East Africa.

“That has not been sufficiently documented, and I think it’s because there has been a systemic attempt to erase that in scholarship,” said Adera, who has studied theology for a decade.

“It’s our task now, as advocates for inclusive faith spaces, to reclaim that.”

Adera runs an interfaith church called the Cosmopolitan Affirming Community, whose ceremonies try to incorporate traditional chants and the cultural importance of nature in different tribes.

“Before the disruption of western Christianity, there were African traditional religious leaders who were queer, and they were accepted in the community. And so in our religious spaces, we cannot ignore African spiritualism,” he said.

Georgetown University anthropologist Kwame Edwin Otu said westerners and their governments should empower Africans who are gender and sexual minorities by doing what they suggest on the ground.

For some, that might mean avoiding the term “LGBTQ+,” which resonates with some but feels to others like a foreign word that undercuts the existence of Indigenous identities.

He also said the current homophobic backlash is in part a reprise of when Christian missionaries sought out to convert Africans, believing they needed to be civilized through colonial rule, slavery and imposed Christianity.

“This trifecta (has) really shaped how Africans currently perceive themselves,” Otu said.

“The big controversies we are seeing in Ghana around whether (LGBTQ+ identity) is Indigenous or imported — these are part of the legacy.”

The end result is the angry mobs and hate speech on talk radio that have led Bill to take offline most of the information his organization, the Mediators Foundation, had posted to help LGBTQ+ people.

“This bill has caused a lot of havoc, even though it hasn’t been legalized yet,” they said. “That law is giving them the upper hand to just treat queer people in whatever way they want to.”

Bill said it has led to the point of pondering the painful choice of emigrating from the place rooted in the traditions that give their life meaning.

“I love my country, Ghana. This is where I grew up.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 2, 2024.

This is the fourth story of an eight-part series investigating a backsliding of LGBTQ+ rights in Africa and the consequences for Canada as a country with a feminist foreign policy, which prioritizes gender equality and human dignity. The reporting in Ghana, Cameroon and Kenya was written with financial support from the R. James Travers Foreign Corresponding Fellowship.

Dylan Robertson, The Canadian Press