Allan Olingo
Earlier this month, the Africa Christian Professionals Forum, a membership-based organization whose stated mission is to build “a society that upholds our Biblical values,” put on the Pan-African Conference on Family Values in Nairobi, Kenya.
One of the event’s speakers, Travis Weber, blogged afterwards about “the West’s assault on the African family,” denouncing a “new colonialism” that he said Africans at the conference were concerned about. That colonialism being “white Westerners now coming once again to tell Africans what they need,” wrote Weber – a white Westerner – without irony.
For Weber and others at the conference, the threat to “African family values” comes from efforts to provide young people with sex ed, women and girls with access to safe abortions, and to recognise and protect LGBTQ+ Africans.
But who gets to define “African” values? Is it the state? The church? Africans themselves? Or foreign actors like the ultra-conservative European and US organizations who co-sponsored the Pan-African Conference, and are reported to have spent tens of millions of dollars opposing sexual and reproductive rights on the African continent?
I’m not so sure there even is such a thing as “African values” — certainly not in a form that everyone agrees on. Effectively, the term seems to me to stand in for traditionalist ways of life that, like in any society, are constantly changing with time.
Growing up in rural Kenya, it was my family — especially grandparents and older uncles — who took on the role of instilling values in us. Our elders dictated everything, from how we dressed and spoke, to how we related with one another.
The church, Anglican in my case, reinforced these teachings. Meanwhile the Catholic Church — the largest Christian denomination in Kenya — seemed most vocal in pushing back against Western influence. I still remember Archbishop of Nairobi, Cardinal Maurice Otunga, on television almost every Sunday, condemning the westernization of African families.
Today, however, it seems to me that both the Catholic Church and family elders are no longer as vocal. Instead African evangelicals and organizations belonging to the Christian Right have stepped into the fore. Some of these have been classified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a U.S. civil rights watchdog.
They include Family Watch International, whose founder Sharon Slater was one of the speakers at the Pan-African Conference. Slater is known for organizing annual “training sessions” in Arizona, where she coaches African politicians on how to lobby for conservative causes at the United Nations and other multilateral forums. In May 2023, just a month after she met with Uganda’s first lady Janet Museveni and several members of parliament, Uganda enacted its controversial Anti-Homosexuality Act, which prescribes life imprisonment for same-sex activities, and even the death penalty in some cases. Slater and her organization were accused of lobbying for the bill, a claim Family Watch International has denied.
When people like Slater say they are here to protect African values, they are implying that Africans naturally oppose women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights. This, in my experience, is simply not true.
For my recent reporting on the massive cuts to U.S. foreign aid budgets I spoke with several women in rural Kenya who said they had directly benefited from these reproductive health services. Frontline healthcare workers — many of them women who work as community health volunteers — told me about the enormous pride they take in playing a part in reducing preventable deaths among women and children. And I met adolescent girls who had, for the first time, accessed age-appropriate sexual and reproductive health information.
The truth is, African values are dynamic, diverse, and deeply rooted in our lived experiences, cultures, histories, and aspirations. Those histories include the violence of colonialism which imposed Victorian norms, enforced through the anti-sodomy laws introduced across the British Empire.
Yet time and again, we see certain groups, typically for political reasons, attempting to narrow this rich complexity into rigid frameworks that are often weaponized against women, youth and LGBTQ+ communities.
“These are not the concerns of everyday Kenyans,” Ivy Werimba, communication and advocacy officer at GALCK+, a coalition of Kenyan LGBTQ organisations told AFP. “The protection of family values does not look like what they’re trying to force upon us.”
The opposition to Slater and others, claiming to defend African family values, has been loud and clear. Writing on LinkedIn in the week of the conference, global health facilitator from Uganda, Martha Clara Nakato said: “African families are evolving… this transformation is not a threat, it is a powerful opportunity to reimagine and advocate for safer-families, and inclusive rights-based policies that honor both traditions and progress. All families regardless of structure deserve protection, dignity, and equal rights in areas such as marriage, inheritance, caregiving, and bodily autonomy.”
As women’s rights lawyer Tabitha Saoyo told AFP, the rollback of rights tends to inevitably follow these conferences, particularly for groups that already face marginalization. With events similar to the one held in Nairobi planned for Sierra Leone, Rwanda and Ghana, it remains to be seen whether African leaders will see the continent’s future as Nakato and many of their citizens do: as one that honors both tradition and progress.
