Africa, stifling queer rights
evangelical charities. Since churchrelated organisations are not required to report their funding in both the United States and in Africa, it is difficult to quantify the exact amounts going to Africa.”
The difficulty in tracing “exact amounts going to Africa” is exacerbated by the fact that “conservative funders tend to be secret”.
It adds: “Funding from US conservatives is highly personal — only bishops with US connections receive it — and unrestricted, unlike that of mainline churches, which demand strict accountability from African churches for all the money they receive. Therefore, some African religious leaders prefer it and view American conservatives as more generous than their progressive counterparts.”
So effective has the ploughing of resources into this campaign been that, according to the report, “the Rev Rosemary Mbongo, an Anglican leader from Kenya, said, ‘Africans, Asians and Latin-American evangelical Christians have the voice today; they owe it to American conservatives’ ”.
Jide MacCaulay is a Nigerianborn, United Kingdom-based pastor who founded the faithbased queer rights organisation House of Rainbow as a “response to the abuse against sexual minorities” in his home country.
“The influence of conservative ideology from the West on African churches and the global South is a great worry. The fact that they have so much control and so much money is a huge problem. There is, for example, a group called Mass Resistance, which has its roots in the US, that has systematically been funding a group of Nigerians to create a chapter of mass resistance against homosexuality and abortion or anything they consider to be immoral — whether or not that infringes on people’s human rights. This in itself is criminal and we have to be careful not to allow this to continue — particularly in the name of religion,” says MacCaulay.
“We have a battle to fight,” he says, adding: “My colleagues in Africa who are bringing these issues up need to be supported. And I don’t think they need to worry too much, because they are speaking the truth. After all, Jesus Christ spoke out at a time when his voice was seen as the minority voice on issues that were controversial. We continue supporting our colleagues on the ground — and it’s not only about money, the support we can offer — especially in places like Kenya, Malawi and Zambia.”
Ruth Rohrer is not letting a lack of money stop her from the inclusive ministry work she conducts. Born and raised in Zambia, Rohrer moved to the US, where she became ordained as a preacher in the Southern Baptist church. “About as conservative as you can get,” she laughs, adding: “So, yes, I was very tunnel-visioned; I believed that homosexuality is a sin.
“But I asked God to use me where I was needed. And God and I, we have a very good relationship, you know,” she laughs, before adding: “And he said to me, ‘Read the Bible again; read it properly. Your job is to lead people to me.’ It was then that I realised that there was a need to stop the continual violence and oppression of LGBTIQ people.”
Now working together with the Zambian transgender rights organisation Trans Bantu Zambia, Rohrer provides psychosocial support to the organisation’s staff as well as the broader queer community.
“We once held a workshop on religion and sexuality and after that there were about 17 people wanting a Bible of their own. You see, for all their lives, they had held these beliefs, but never really read the Bible. All they know is the messages they hear from the pulpit,” she says, adding that she is now raising funds for the purchase of these Bibles “in both English and vernacular”.
Rohrer conducts what she refers to as inclusive ministries. “I counsel people to believe in their value as human beings; that in this package, no matter the sexual orientation or gender identity, they have value.”
Her ministry work includes oneon-one prayer sessions, Bible study classes and “just visiting with people or buying somebody some groceries”, because “you can’t talk to someone who is sitting there with an empty stomach”.
Continuing to take money from her own pocket to fund this ministry work is important to her because, “if a church rejects you because of who you are, there is a lot of inner struggle and turmoil. So, you know, depression and suicide. When it comes to spirituality, people look for who will support them. It’s usually the level of family acceptance that determines what they do with spirituality. A common thing in Zambia is for families to report their queer children to their pastor and then having the ‘demons’ cast out. And if that exorcism doesn’t work, often the child will get badly beaten.”
In an article published on the PRA website, Kaoma notes how, in 2014, “Reverend Pukuta Mwanza, executive director of the Evangelical Fellowship of Zambia, encouraged sexual minorities to ‘cure’ their homosexuality through prayers and counselling”.
If prayers and counselling fail to “cure”, Rohrer says, another increasingly common practice is employed.
“Corrective rape by family members — or such rapes being set up by the family — is also common,” she says, adding that she has counselled girls as young as 16 to whom this had happened.
The report, When Faith Does Violence: Re-Imagining Engagement between Churches and LGBTI Groups on Homophobia in Africa, published in 2016, was written by Kaoma, Gerald West and Charlene van der Walt. It notes: “Sexuality has become a new site of struggle and the ‘old’ theology does not fit, for it is founded on heteropatriarchy.”
Heteropatriarchy, the authors say, “is clearly one of the systems that undergirds homophobia. ‘Corrective rape’ is a sign of patriarchy’s pathology, as it battles (literally) to bring ‘unruly’ African bodies back to their normative place within patriarchy, disciplining them. Heteropatriarchy’s desire to control African bodies takes many forms, including the criminalisation of gay and lesbian sexualities by African nation states.”
Another report, this one by the Other Foundation and titled Silent no Longer — Narratives of Engagement Between LGBTI Groups and the Churches in Southern Africa, was released earlier this year. It found: “Originally, the Christianity of Southern Africa, as elsewhere on the continent, was a product of the ‘trinity’ of commerce, civilisation and Christianity