US President Barack Obama’s three-country visit of Africa will be remembered for two things: his pledge on Africa’s economic empowerment and his gospel of gay marriage. On the first, he received an enthusiastic alleluia, it is about time. On the second, he got the equivalent of boos.
Obama’s most important speech during his visits to Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania was about his resolve to boost US investment in Africa, especially in the most critical area of power production.
At present only about 33 per cent of Africans have access to electricity, Obama pointed out. His goal is to double that with a $7 billion initiative he termed Power Africa. It specifically targets six African countries: Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria and Tanzania. But it is presumably just the beginning and the impact will, in any case, spill over to other African countries.
Obama’s speech was significantly delivered in the University of Cape Town, the same venue where the late US Senator Robert F. Kennedy made an impassioned attack of apartheid in 1966, following the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela. It took about 38 years before apartheid ended. One hopes that Obama’s pledge will bring much — much — faster relief.
While in Tanzania, Obama visited an American-owned electricity company that effectively generates power for that country. He noted the mutual benefit: Tanzanians get reliable electricity and the American company makes money.
It could be argued that the Tanzanians would be better off generating their own electricity. But in a globalised economy, what matters is the net benefit.
Unfortunately, Obama’s interest in Africa’s economy is quite belated. In fact, until now, the US president that Africa claims as its own has lagged behind his predecessors — George W. Bush and Bill Clinton — in extending a helping hand to Africa.
In his defence, Obama has had his hands full dealing with America’s own economic difficulties, political rascality, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the upheavals in the rest of the Middle East and North Africa.
Meanwhile, emerging economic powers elsewhere — China, India, Brazil — were all fervently investing in Africa, realising that it could well become the pivot of the world’s economy.
But America is America. So, when Obama promised to boost U.S. investment in Africa “as equal partners,” it was a message that stirred hope anew.
It is noteworthy still that Obama’s visit to Africa didn’t begin well. He had hardly alighted from his jet in Dakar, when he ticked off the Senegalese. The spat, if you will, was captured by a local newspaper here in the US: “Obama clashes with African host over gay rights.”
It was a reference to Obama’s exchange with Senegalese President Macky Sall, after the US president urged the Senegalese to grant equal rights to gays.“People should be treated equally, and that’s a principle that I think applies universally,” Obama had argued.
Just the day before — as Obama was airborne toward Senegal — the US Supreme Court struck down a federal law that defined marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman. And Obama hailed the ruling. His call for equal rights for gays in Senegal, a predominantly Muslim country, was in effect a call for the sanctioning of gay marriage there as well.
But in Senegal, as in most African countries and elsewhere, homosexuality is still a criminal offence. In places such as Mauritania, Sudan and our own northern Nigeria, the punishment is the death penalty.
How sensible then is it to ask for equal rights in that sense in such contexts? There is a long mile between criminality and equal rights. It would have made a lot more sense to focus on decriminalisation.
For people to be imprisoned or killed for a lifestyle that though socially deviant is not a threat to society is just illogical. Such punishments emanated from the excesses of religion and have been imposed under such inhuman ideologies as Nazism and Fascism.
Still, by waving the US Supreme Court’s decision as the model for African countries, Obama demonstrated the kind of cultural hubris that has often alienated non-Western people from the West. It is another instance of, “We are so progressive and you are not.”
The problem with such dichotomies is that they usually don’t hold up under scrutiny. In using the US Supreme Court’s decision as a backdrop for proselytizing about gay rights to other countries, Obama, in effect, suggests that Americans have indeed embraced such rights. But that is far from the case.
A majority of adult Americans still oppose gay marriage. Only American youths sanction it by a significant majority. In states where the question of gay marriage has been an issue on the ballot, it has been consistently defeated.
Even in California, one of the most liberal states in the country and home to San Francisco — the gay capital of the United States — the voters overturned a law that authorised gay marriages. A federal court invalidated the vote, and the Supreme Court chose not rule on it, in effect, allowing the law to stay.
In ruling on the federal Defence of Marriage Act (DOMA), which banned recognition of gay marriages, the Supreme Court narrowed its decision to the question of whether federal agencies should recognise gay marriages for purposes of family benefits. The court, in effect, left it to the states to decide whether or not to sanction gay marriages.
Even the Supreme Court’s decision on DOMA reflects how contentious the issue of gay marriage still is in the United States. It was a narrow 5-4 decision, which means that just one justice could have swung the opinion the other way.
Particularly problematic about Obama’s sermonising to his Senegalese hosts is that he doesn’t seem to reckon with the fact that it took the United States about 230 years of democracy before any state sanctioned gay marriage.
Even Obama himself is a late convert. According to the Daily Beast, it took him 10 years to go from an opponent of gay marriage to its apostle.
As a presidential candidate as recently as 2008,Obama would say only that his view on gay marriage was evolving. To now proselytize to a fellow head of state — of a Muslim country, for that matter — is considerably impudent.
A Pew Research poll cited by the Associated Press found that about 90 per cent of Africans believe that homosexuality should not be accepted by society. That attitude was not that different in the Western world until recently.
On such matters that are so laden with cultural sensitivity, it is necessary that Western advocates approach their counterparts elsewhere with less sanctimony and greater awareness of their own history.