A serious African problem

"Homophobia" gets thrown around as an accusation too lightly in the West, but when it comes to Africa, it seems to be increasingly becoming an entirely appropriate description for many of its governments and religious.

This article in Nature News  Homophobia and HIV research: Under siege paints a really bleak picture of what's going on, and not just in Uganda, which recently brought in severe punishments for homosexual activity.  For example:

On the morning of Saturday 12 April, ten police officers raided Maaygo, a men's health and HIV/AIDS advocacy organization in a residential area of Kisumu in western Kenya. Staff watched helplessly as the officers confiscated information leaflets and even the model penis used in condom demonstrations. The police arrested the organization's director and finance officer, as well as one of its members, for “illegally practising sexual orientation information”.

Another bad example:

Similar problems are plaguing research in Ethiopia, where same-sex encounters are punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Researchers are kept from studying MSM and HIV by the Ethiopian Public Health Institute, which must approve medical research in the country.

A programme run by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Ethiopian Public Health Association managed to pass the screening process in 2011 because it used terms such as 'most at-risk populations' rather than MSM or gay, says an Ethiopian advocate for gay and transgender health and human rights, who lives in exile in the United States and asked not to be named because of concerns about the safety of his family and friends. Once the government found out that the project would target MSM and related groups, the research was stopped, he says.

And how about this story from 2010 (even though the article says the situation in that town has improved a lot since then):

The trouble at Mtwapa centred on an HIV clinic run by the Kenyan Medical Research Institute (KEMRI), which conducted risk-group studies at the facility. On 12 February 2010, a mob of several hundred people charged the clinic, incited by two religious leaders — a Christian bishop and a Muslim imam.

The riot was based on misinformation. “It started with a rumour that two gay men were
getting married in the town,” says Eduard Sanders, an epidemiologist with the University of Oxford, UK, who has studied MSM in Mtwapa since 2005, and who witnessed the riot. “But when the mob couldn't find any hint of the wedding, it descended on the clinic because of its well-known research on MSM.”

Armed with sticks, stones and other weapons, the crowd surrounded the clinic,
demanding that the gay men come out. Police arrested people accused of being gay — possibly as a way of saving them from mob justice — and later released them. One KEMRI volunteer was severely beaten, according to the international group Human Rights Watch.

An article in The Guardian in January discussed Africa as being the most homophobic continent, which doesn't seem to be an exaggeration.  It opens with a quote from the Ugandan "ethics and integrity" minister.  He clearly would not appreciate that gay NFL player's kiss that was all over the internet this week:

Simon Lokodo cannot imagine kissing a man. "I think I shall die," he said last week.
"I would not exist. It is inhuman. I would be mad. Just imagine eating your faeces."

Chill, Simon.  Chill.  

Even South Africa, with strong legal recognition of homosexuality (same sex marriage has been in place since 2006), still seems to have a serious problem.  This study, which looked at "internalised homophobia" amongst men who had sex with men, notes at the end that such men are widely considered "un-African" and even amongst sexual health clinic workers are often considered to have caught HIV as God's punishment.

Although it seems there are plenty of left leaning gay rights advocates who blame this on colonialism and the imposition of Christian (or now, Muslim) mores on Africans who were formerly not so hung up about sex, I'm guessing that it would often have a cultural element too, quite independent of that.

In any event, it is obviously extreme, and to be regretted.