Uganda passes tough anti-gay laws.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Given some of the intellectual background of the emergence of that ideology from the 1890s onwards, would there be anything more intellectually ironic than the concept of Sexual Liberationalist Imperialism?

[Tetro Kornbluth]

It's actually too bad the country still isn't run from Westminister.

When it was run from Westminster, gay sex was still illegal.

Indeed, it's quite likely that Uganda's first anti-gay sex laws were passed in the Colonial period. Certainly that's true for a lot of other countries.

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So then, what are you going to do about it?

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Africans express their homophobia as a nationalistic, or at least anti-western, reaction all the while their governments cheerfully accept western aid; while they stand in lines outside western embassies for hours in insufferable heat for the possibility of an entrance visa to Sodom and Gomorrah; while floating on furniture in the Mediterranean wishing to crash land into Europe. Even if the African himself never sets foot off the continent, he still happily accepts the remittances that his cousins in the Gay US or the Gay UK collect to send back home. It's as if Africans cannot apprehend that the mindset that allows gays to live in relative peace in western Europe/Canada/the good parts of the US is the same mindset that allows immigrant Africans themselves to live, and perhaps thrive, in western Europe/Canada/the good parts of the US for their benefit.

I wish I could say that it would be a great learning experience to resettle these Africans to their equally nationalistic and homophobic brethren in Russia, or China, or India, or the Middle East, or the dreadful parts of the US where the American missionaries are based, and see whether thrive in each, but I know better. Africans are already present in numbers in China and the Middle East, and, for all their complaints about the bigotry and abuse they face from their non-western inhabitants, the experience has not changed their base attitudes against people they think are inferior to them.

'Africans' in other parts of Africa that weren't their individual 'homelands' have had the same experiences for that matter (or even within their own countries some times).

Btw, I'm just wondering whether this is due to the nature of press reporting or the particular legacies of empire or the influence of American missionaries (who like to stick to their own language as much as possible by and large), but I'm getting the impression that these anti-gay campaigns are strongest in the formerly British parts of Africa.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

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Yes, alas, I know of it. I didn't know about its movement across Africa. Interesting although not hugely surprising. These sort of mores tend to be contagious and spread fast.

Ftr, when I was writing about migrants in Africa I was especially thinking of way 'Zimbabwean' migrants have been treated by black South Africans - at least in the townships.

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That sounds fairly plausible. It was merely a comment noting that pretty much all these cases (or at least those published in the media) - Botswana, Malawi, Kenya and Uganda primarily - have been former British colonies. South Africa too, but in colonial terms that's a special case.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Oh I will also add:

Nothing in this thread more shows the parochialism of many American and Western liberals than their focus of all of the blame for this on Christian Evangelicals and their megabucks. Not that that is of insignificant, it's the opposite of course but...