Q&A: Artist warns Ghana's anti-LGBTQ+ bill threatens all citizens

BERLIN - Proposed legislation to restrict the rights of people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender in Ghana undermines all citizens' rights, a popular Ghanaian musician and LGBTQ+ ally said.

The bill, which was resubmitted to parliament in February after the former president did not sign it into law before his term ended, would toughen existing colonial-era laws criminalising same-sex relations.

The bill includes jail terms for identifying as LGBTQ+, expressing public support for LGBTQ+ people and funding organisations that work in this area. It requires people to report infringements of the law to police.

When it was first introduced in 2021, human rights group Outright International documented cases of police abuses against people perceived to be LGBTQ+, including arbitrary arrests, intimidation, extortion and physical intimidation.

LGBTQ+ activists say Ghana's legislation and similar laws across Africa are influenced by religious conservative groups in the United States.

Context spoke by phone with Emmanuel Owusu-Bonsu, better known by his stage name Wanlov the Kubolor, who is a Ghanaian-Romanian musician and artist and an ally of the LGBTQ+ community.

Why are you campaigning against the anti-LGBTQ+ bill that is in the Ghanian parliament?

The bill affects everybody. This is a bill that criminalises empathy and humanity. So if you are a parent of a queer person and you don't report the person, you are going to prison for at least 10 years.

If you're a landlord, an employee, an employer, and you don't report people whom you suspect to be queer, you are going to be criminalised. So it's actually a bill against every single person in Ghana.

People think it's a bill that's just going to impact the queer community, forgetting that our country, Ghana, is also quite corrupt. If this bill passes, the police are going to have their carte blanche to stop any human being they want to and accuse them of a crime.

This means that the police can extort people way more easily, and get more money from citizens.

The average citizen needs to know how this bill is going to affect them personally, and they are not aware of it.

Why have the rights of LGBTQ+ people become controversial in Ghana?

Politicians use the same thing anytime there's a scandal ... and they have to answer to the citizenry. All of a sudden they make the media start pointing out the queer community and start creating some distraction. There actually is zero need for any kind of legislation on queer existence in Ghana.

It's a political tool. They need to invest in hospitals. They need to make health insurance really mean something. There are so many things we need: street lights, good roads, better transport systems.

These are the things affecting our lives. There's food rotting on the farms, because the roads are too bad for the trucks to transport fruit from the farms to the markets.

There's so much going on which is taking away lives every day. Yet it seems like 90% of the energy is focused on the queer community, which is just living here and contributing their fair share to the economy.

The bill's advocates say LGBTQ+ rights are a Western import and a new form of colonialism. How do you view that assertion?

It takes just a few minutes to research pre-colonial queer existence in Africa and see hundreds of examples all over the continent of queer history in Africa and how colonialism came with this binary, religious imposition and changed that.

This bill, which has been introduced in parliament, is written in Texas. That is Western influence. The homophobia is coming from Texas. We hear the same language in Uganda, Poland, Hungary, Nigeria. The same language from top to bottom.

It's very African to be queer. It's just human to be queer.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

(Reporting by Enrique Anarte in Berlin; Editing by Ayla Jean Yackley.)