Six on Africa: American evangelicals and the extreme homophobia they have helped cultivate in African countries; The Wester
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"In August 2018, a six-year-long court process against notorious anti-gay, evangelical pastor Scott Lively came to an end. In 2012, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a federal lawsuit in the state of Massachusetts against Lively on behalf of Sexual Minorities Uganda, a non-profit umbrella organization for LGBT advocacy in Uganda. The suit alleged that Lively, who had traveled to Uganda in the early 2000s, sought to deprive LGBT individuals in Uganda of their fundamental human rights. In the lengthy court process that followed, U.S. District Judge Michael Ponsor opined that there was no question that Lively’s actions “in aiding and abetting efforts to demonize, intimidate, and injure LGBTI people in Uganda [constituted] violations of international law.”
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However, given that the most significant parts of Lively’s conduct occurred on foreign soil, Ponsor decided that the court did not have extraterritorial jurisdiction over the case and dismissed it. In August 2018, Lively sought to have the pieces of Ponsor’s opinion affirming his crimes stricken from the record but was unsuccessful.
Cases like Sexual Minorities Uganda v. Scott Lively provide insight into the bitter history involving American evangelicals and the extreme homophobia they have helped cultivate in African countries like Uganda. Though nearly a decade has passed since the most prominent interventions by American evangelicals, LGBT individuals in Uganda continue to face intense persecution stemming from the rhetoric once used by these evangelicals. With ongoing efforts to repress LGBT individuals and U.S.-based evangelical groups continuing to intervene, activists warn that only a human rights approach — as opposed to an ideological one — can aid LGBT Ugandans’ struggle."
"These gaps in consideration emerge from a troubling history. In her 2016 book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, the Tufts University professor Christina Sharpe argued that black people in America and around the world exist in a state of nonbeing, that the specter of slavery has rendered black pain and death fundamentally incomprehensible to the world: “Living in the wake means living the history and present of terror, from slavery to the present, as the ground of our everyday Black existence.”
Read: How three decades of news coverage have shaped our view of the world
In Sharpe’s analysis, black people do not easily earn sympathy, whether by dying in a plane crash or in an altercation with a police officer. Racist myths challenge the basic tenets of human compassion, even and especially in death. If black people are innately violent, if Africans live on an inherently backwards continent with fundamentally shoddy airlines, then their deaths are not tragedies. They are eventualities. They are facts, not stories.
But what might it look like to consider the immense loss of life each year at the hands of police as more than a statistic, to recount the life lived by each victim with deep attention to that person’s specific histories and particular quirks? How might the reporting on terrorist attacks and other tragedies that occur in Africa shift if considered outside the narrow framework with which Western outlets portray the continent? These are devastatingly simple questions. And many community-driven outlets have been answering them for years.
Shifting the tenor with which African stories, tragic or otherwise, are reported in Western media requires an acknowledgment of both African humanity and all the social forces that have conspired to erode it in the public consciousness. It demands accountability, not to Western audiences for whom proximity is the only shortcut to empathy—but to black victims and the readers who would most easily join their ranks."
"More than two decades ago, I bumped into Shirley Graham Du Bois‘ son, the now deceased David Du Bois, on a midtown Manhattan avenue. It was then that he casually informed me that his mother’s papers resided in the Cairo flat where he then lived. I quickly arranged to fly there and stay there for days on end, taking copious notes, while he performed admirably the role of the gracious host.
Nothing was off limits—except for a file that he had segregated, which I inadvertently read. Therein were love letters between her and a leading Pan-Africanist—not named W.E.B. Du Bois. I deemed it to be unethical to report on this research finding but assumed that at some point in the future, another scholar would: alas, subsequent scholars have informed me that no such cache of letters are with her papers now, presently deposited in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Were these letters destroyed? Are they still in Cairo? Or did David’s segregation save me from the fate of too many biographers: a latter day King Leer?
Whatever the case, I do know that this vignette underscores the age-old point that the duty of the historian is to rewrite history, not least because—inevitably and as may happen in the case of Shirley Graham Du Bois—new records materialize and changing conditions shape our interpretations of history.
On this latter point, in my biography of Shirley Graham Du Bois, I was quite critical of her “Maoism,” the infatuation with China during the height of the “Cultural Revolution,” taking place as she was breathing her last breath in that nation in the late 1970s. Today, I remain critical of this political stance."
For example, she—and many others such as Amiri Baraka and a good deal of the U.S. delegation to the 6th Pan African Congress in Tanzania—never grasped fully that China had cut an anti-Soviet deal with U.S. imperialism in the early 1970s during President Nixon’s journey there. This deal induced this Asian giant to side with Washington during a true turning point in world and African history: the 1975 proclamation of independence in Angola (a land from which emerged a significant percentage of the people now known as “African-American”), which was vouchsafed by the dispatching of thousands of Cuban troops, opposed by Washington, apartheid South Africa—and “Maoist” China."
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