Bashing gays could cause genocide – Professor

A Ghanaian Professor at the University of South Florida, Dr. Edward Kissi is schooling the president of Equatorial Guinea on gay rights.

Mr. Obiang Nguema Mbasogo is reported to have warned Ghana’s President, Mr. John Mahama not to allow the issue of homosexuality to gain roots in his country because it is an “abomination before God”.

President Mbasogo’s comments came days after the issue of gay rights became topical in Ghana, triggered by a presentation made by Dr. Kissi in Accra.

In a response, Dr. Kissi says President Mbasogo’s reference to religion to discriminate against homosexuals was unfortunate.

He likened the current appeal to the Bible and morality in discriminating against homosexuals to the demonization and discrimination of black people using the same Bible in the 16th century.

Below is the full letter written to the African President by Dr. Kissi.

AN OPEN LETTER TO H.E. OBIANG NGUEMA MBASOGO, PRESIDENT OF EQUATORIAL GUINEA.

18 June 2013 H. E. Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, President, Republic of Equatorial Guinea Central Africa

Dear Mr. President:

I extend warmest greetings to you and your First Family of Equatorial Guinea!

Meanwhile, I am writing to you, through USA Africa Dialogue, as a husband and father of two children. USA Africa Dialogue is a discussion forum created by one of Africa’s distinguished scholars.

I read, on Saturday 15 June 2013, at the online news website Ghanaweb.com that you have also added your voice to the issue of homosexuality in Africa. As you may probably be aware, I had also spoken about that subject, among other matters, in a seminar on the topic “Human Rights and the Debate over Dignity and Social Order in Africa”, in Accra, Ghana, on June 5, ten days before your reported address on the same subject. My talk was reported on major websites in Ghana under the sensational caption “Allow gays sexual freedom in Ghana---Professor.”

Your reported address to local and international journalists at a press conference in Malabo, the capital of your country, touched on many issues among which was the subject on which you and I have ( at different venues) spoken recently. In your address, which Ghanaweb reported under the caption “Mahama warned over homosexuality,” you are quoted to have warned Ghana’s President John Mahama Dramani and other African leaders not to allow the issue of homosexuality to gain roots in Africa because it is an abomination before God.

What struck me, Mr. President, about your reported address is your invocation of God, and appeal to the Bible in your warning to the Ghanaian Head of State. You are, among other things, reported to have said:

“Homosexuality is not God’s will for His people and should not even be discussed in Africa including Ghana. We strongly believe that righteousness exalts nation and not homosexuality.”

Mr. President, You are also reported to have quoted the scripture (The Book of Leviticus Chapter 18) to support your position and admonition to African leaders that God’s wrath will be upon them if they tolerated the abomination that homosexuality is.

It is possible that you never actually made these remarks. In that regard, my open letter to you may be misplaced and, if so, I sincerely apologize. But, if the report is accurate, then both of us are grappling with a grave moral matter of our time.

I am not a theologian; just a simple citizen of Ghana as well as an African teacher in an American university. As I think about your admonition, Mr. President, I have asked myself certain questions which I wish all heterosexuals like myself will also ask themselves, which include the following:

In the process of growing up into adolescence, at what point did we “choose” to be the heterosexual males and females that we now are? Did we feel, as we matured, a natural attraction to people of the opposite sex? If that natural feeling we felt, as heterosexuals, for people of the opposite sex came to us naturally, could it be possible that there are other human beings who had natural tendencies and sexual predispositions different from ours? Theirs toward the same sex groups as they grew up? Suppose their different feelings and impulses came to them just as naturally as ours (heterosexuals) came to us, is it moral and appropriate for us heterosexuals to categorize our feelings for the opposite sex as the most “natural”, “normal”, “biologically and genetically superior”, “morally upright”, “divinely-mandated” and cast those who felt differently as so “genetically abnormal”, “morally sick”, “socially deviant”, and “spiritually evil” that we should not even talk about them as you suggest?

Scholars who study genocide and human rights regard this kind of attitude towards a group as a form of “dehumanization” or “demonization.” In the history of humanity, that is a potential cause of genocide (the deliberate attempt to destroy a group which is often preceded by the exclusion of the demonized group from legitimate discussions about nationhood and human rights).

Mr. President, as you know, there was a time in the 16th Century when religious people (Bartolomew de Las Casas included) used God and the Bible to demonize black Africans. In that period, some Dominican friars sought to find out which of the two groups (native Indians and black Africans) were “human” or “sub-human” and, therefore, fit or unfit for enslavement. They concluded that black skin color was enough justification for Africans to be bought and transported to the Americas for slave labor. The religious people who participated in that discussion used the Bible, as you did, particularly Genesis 9: 20-27 to suggest that people with black skin color were the descendants of Ham, the man who, according to the Bible, had been cursed by Noah, for jeering at his father’s nakedness. That our skin color, as Africans, constituted a negative symbol of that divine curse of Ham.

As you know, Mr. President, the 16th Century was a time when religious people also grappled with which skin color (White or Black) was a mark of sin and dishonor. God and the Bible were misused to elevate whiteness over blackness and institutionalize racial prejudice and demonize black Africans, enslave, colonize and convert them to Christianity as acts of salvation.

Even in Africa, it was not long ago (1948) that apartheid (that brutal racial system of privileging whiteness over blackness) was instituted as a legal system of government. That year (1948) was also the year that the United Nations promulgated its Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Mr. President, it should, therefore, not surprise you and me that South Africa is the only country in Africa that shows some tolerance and compassion for sexual minorities, the very group whose exclusion from major discussions in Africa that you advocate. Your Excellency, nations that have known the ramifications of prejudice such as South Africa; Germany, and the United States tend to be the most tolerant of difference and the most sensitive to the humanity of vulnerable minority groups. We, Africans, who have been victims of racism, slavery and colonialism, should be the last groups of people to be hateful, prejudiced and intolerant of others. We should learn from our own histories, and what happened in Nazi Germany.

Mr. President, it appears that being a homosexual in many parts of Africa, but South Africa, today, is akin to being a Jew, a homosexual, a member of the Jehovah Witness church, and a Roma or Sinti, in Nazi Germany, in the 1930s: dehumanized, persecuted, and deemed unworthy. Are we becoming like the Nazis in our hatred for our fellow human beings?

Mr. President, when we withdraw the humanity of our fellow human beings from them, we remove them from our universe of moral obligation to even consider them as human. They become another expendable species of humanity against whom all manner of hatred and injustices are deemed normal and moral.

Mr. President, I tend to see three levels at which the discussion over the rights of sexual minorities (groups of people whose identities are partly shaped by their sexual orientation) are being conducted in Africa, today.

Level 1: Sexuality and Religious Morality. Here, the debate is often frozen with appeals to the Bible, references to Sin; Abomination; Sodom and Gomorrah, etc. No alternative views are even entertained here.

Level 2: Culture and Tradition. The arguments here are often simplistic and include the following: Homosexuality is alien to “African culture, values and traditions.” Homosexuality was brought by Europeans to Africa. These arguments assume that until the Europeans arrived in Africa, Africans were moral, pure and innocent. Which particular indigenous traditions in Africa do homosexual practices violate are often hard to tell. Those who offer these arguments often point to “Christianity” and the Bible as those “African traditions” that homosexual orientations violate. This is where African anthropologists, Chiefs and other custodians of African traditions can help advance the debate.

Level 3: Group Identity and Human Rights. The questions here include: Do Homosexuals constitute a group defined as such by their sexual orientation, and whether as a social collectivity, they have rights and deserve our tolerance and respect? In short, are they human with inalienable human rights?

It is here that as a scholar who studies genocide and human rights, I have stated my case for a diverse Africa to tolerate diversity, even if sexual in nature. I recognize that it is often comfortable for cultural relativists to take refuge in “culture” and “traditions” when it comes to the discussion of rights. But, I wonder whether ideas of African cultural exceptionalism can work in our contemporary global arena. Have we, as Africans, thought carefully about the ramifications of making such arguments.

Mr. President, we should not freeze the discussion at Level I, and peddle myths about “African traditions” and African sexualities at Level 2, and forbid any discussion at Level 3. That will not be good for our continent.

Mr. President, there may be less than 1% of homosexuals in every African country. Even in South Africa where that orientation is legally tolerated, many South Africans are not rushing towards homosexuality. Thus, let us defuse this moral panic that is raging in some parts of Africa. Of the many problems facing our Continent: bad governments; corruption; unemployment; poor sanitation; poor roads; hunger; malaria, etc, homosexuality is the least of them. There is a continuing war of attrition in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Central Africa. That war has killed millions and many women have been raped in violation of their dignity and human rights.

Mr. President, perhaps you might ask: who is this Edward Kissi and why is he all over the place on this issue? By professional orientation, Sir, I study and teach about the Holocaust, genocide and human rights. I am the author of the 2009 United Nations Discussion Paper for UN Member States entitled “The Holocaust as a Guidepost for Genocide Detection and Prevention in Africa.” I am a member of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and one of a few African scholars who study the Holocaust and genocide in the world today and, perhaps, the only Ghanaian scholar, today, who studies these subjects (I stand to be corrected if there are any out there beside myself. I would like to hear from them because the more voices, the merrier).

I have been involved in UNESCO’s initiatives for promoting Holocaust and Genocide Education in Africa. I attended, by invitation, UNESCO’s first regional consultation on Holocaust and Genocide Education for sub-Saharan Africa with representatives from the Ministries of Education of fourteen (14) African countries held in Cape Town, South Africa, in September 2012. I spoke at this meeting on why it is necessary to teach about the Holocaust and about genocide in African schools. I spoke at this year’s (2013) International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, in Paris, France. Incidentally, homosexuals were also persecuted during the Nazi era showing the thin lines dividing minorities in an atmosphere of persecution. I am also a fellow of the International Institute for Advanced Studies (IIAS), a think-tank in Ghana.

So, Mr. President, you can see why I have added my voice to this discussion that you warn African leaders and nations not to even entertain in Africa. For me, Sir, it is a matter of Conscience; in fact the burden of Conscience that flows from the ethics of my profession. I am NOT promoting Homosexuality in Ghana or anywhere in Africa. I am advocating for the humane and compassionate treatment and understanding of those who are “naturally” different from us--- our fellow human beings who have done nothing harmful to us. I believe that our humanity is measured by how we view and treat those who are different from us, the vulnerable and the persecuted in our human family.

Mr. President, let me conclude with the famous words that have been attributed to the Protestant priest Martin Niemoller who witnessed the Holocaust in Nazi Germany in the course of World War II:

First, they came for the Communists And I did not speak out because I was not a communist.

Then they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew…

Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.

Mr. President, when prejudice and intolerance paralyze the conscience of a society, the unconscious soul of that society cries out for the voices of the compassionate and not the screams of the indifferent.

I thank you, Mr. President!

Yours Respectfully,

Edward Kissi, Ph.D. Associate Professor, University of South Florida Member of the International Association of Genocide Scholars Fellow of the International Institute for Advanced Studies, Accra, Ghana.