Christian and conservative groups that fight abortion and gay rights in the U.S. and Europe are intensifying their work across Africa through conferences, activism and promotion of a “Declaration on Family Values” that express grave concern about sex education, birth control, the “normalization of abortion as a right” and “advocacy of gender identity ideologies.”
U.S.-based groups including the Heritage Foundation, Alliance Defending Freedom, Family Research Council, Family Watch International, Human Life International, LifeSiteNews, Population Research Institute and the Center for Family and Human Rights took part in the Pan-African Conference on Family Values in Nairobi, Kenya May 12-17.
Family Research Council’s Travis Weber said “no subject loomed larger” during the conference than “what the West has done to target the African family in recent years,” especially during the Biden administration, which he said promoted “malicious” and “exploitative” policies.
“African government leaders are having their arms twisted by Western diplomats and NGOs and told that if they don’t agree to allow abortion and LGBT ideology, they aren’t going to get the financial aid they often so desperately need,” Weber said in an article, “The West’s Assault on the African Family.”
“Sexual ideologies are a religion in the West, and the West is quite logically zealously proselytizing what it believes,” said Weber, calling the battle “a spiritual war.”
The Western groups told the Nairobi conference U.S. efforts to promote universal human rights and sex education in schools represent a form of “new colonialism … in the form of white Western elites attacking the biblical view of the family in Africa.”
Greg Slater of Family Watch International told conferencegoers that LGBTQ rights are “fictitious rights” and believers need to “reclaim our societies from the globalist agenda” and “restore the God-given roles of men and women.”
The original all-white speaker lineup on the right and the revised speaker lineup on the left.
Some Africans see irony in ideologically driven U.S. and Western groups telling Africans to resist “ideologically driven foreign policy interventions.” An early poster promoting the conference featured only white, non-African speakers, further infuriating African critics of the efforts to politicize the family.
“The conference … sought to promote a regressive anti-LGBTQ agenda in Africa under the guise of protecting ‘family values,’” said the South African LGBTQ outlet Mamba Online.
Kenya Times reported on the controversy over the all-white poster.
“This is not African liberation,” said Irungu Houghton, Amnesty International’s Kenya director. “This is cultural manipulation cloaked in Pan-African rhetoric.”
Houghton railed against the Western efforts to promote conservative values in Kenya’s The Standard, arguing Africa can figure out its family issues on its own: “As the cradle of humanity, Kenya has had several millions of years of indigenous family values and family-making experience.
Irungu Houghton
“We have extended, polygamous, nuclear, monogamous, blended, multi-generational, foster, childless and refugee families among others. Today, families are led by a single adult parent, grandparents, co-parents, adopted parents, same-sex couples, other collective care arrangements and children.”
One critic said “white American men” were trying to export Western fears and problems to Africa.
“They are trying to instill fear by claiming there is an agenda to reduce Africa’s fertility and population rates, but this is an imposition of Western problems, such as declining fertility rates, on Africa,” said Kemi Akinfaderin of the group Fòs Feminista.
The Nairobi family conference was hosted by the Kenya Red Cross even though some 12,000 people petitioned the group to not do so.
Ordo Iuris, a conservative Polish Catholic think tank, participated in the conference and promoted its publication “Advocacy in International Institutions: A Guide for Non-Governmental Organizations that Want to Engage in the Protection of Human Rights in the International Arena.”
“It’s time to make your voice heard for the defense of life, family, and freedom!” said the group.
Western groups are behind many such conferences in Africa. May saw the third annual Interparliamentary Forum on Family, Sovereignty and Values in Uganda. The gathering is sponsored by Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccination advocacy organization founded by Robert F Kennedy Jr., now U.S. secretary of health and human services.
In August, Alliance Defending Freedom will sponsor a meeting with Advocates Africa, a network of Christian lawyers and law students.
And 2027 will see another Pan-African Conference on Family Values, this time in South Africa. An organizer said the event would highlight “new voices, bold ideas and a renewed commitment to faith, family and freedom across Africa.”
Kenya and Uganda already have some of the world’s most restrictive laws on homosexuality. These laws criminalize consensual same-sex conduct, with sentences including life imprisonment. Uganda’s President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni supports the Western groups’ message and says former U.S. President Joe Biden pressured his nation after it passed its Anti-Homosexuality Act in 2023.
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