The Economist: Africa’s ascendant right - devout, well-connected and MAGA-fuelled

Key topics:Christian right in Africa gains power with U.S. conservative backingAnti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion laws rising across African nationsFamily values conferences push illiberal policies via foreign funding.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.The auditorium doors will open for BNIC#2 on 10 September 2025 in Hermanus. For more information and tickets, click here..From The Economist, published under licence. The original article can be found on www.economist.com© 2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved..The Economist.The African family is under threat. That, at least, was the message of the “Pan-African Conference on Family Values” held in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, this month. Delegates from across Africa as well as several from Western countries described a continent on the cusp of social collapse. Attendees were told that “foreign ideologies” were producing an epidemic of abortion, homosexuality and “gender confusion”. One of the Kenyan organisers blamed incest on sex education. Everyone agreed their liberal opponents were on the march. “The people on the other side who are pushing this agenda are relentless,” declared David Oginde, chair of Kenya’s Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission. Africa’s Christian right sees itself as a plucky, righteous David struggling against a godless, liberal Goliath. This has never been quite right; today it is wildly misleading. Their ties to right-wingers in America mean Christian conservatives in Africa now wield great clout. Donald Trump’s re-election has given “all the anti-rights groups new energy, new power,” says Emmanuel Lee Mutwiri, a Kenyan activist. And the wrecking of the United States Agency for International Development (usaid) and cuts to the sexual-health and advocacy programmes it supported offers a singular chance to undo liberal gains. More conferences devoted to “family values” are planned in Africa. They are sponsored by powerful conservative Christian groups from the West, including Family Watch International (fwi) and the Alliance Defending Freedom (adf), which helped overturn Roe v Wade, the ruling that enshrined the right to abortion in America. By nudging African policymakers in ever more illiberal directions on sexuality and gender, such groups have already had a big impact on African politics. In recent years lawmakers in Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria and elsewhere have demanded sweeping anti-lgbtq measures. In 2023 Uganda passed one of the world’s harshest anti-homosexuality laws, including the death penalty for some same-sex acts. Bills targeting trans people and abortion are next, warns Pius Kennedy, a local activist. Links between Christian conservatives in Africa and the West are not new, but two key developments help explain the strength of their alliance today. First, the aids epidemic in the early 2000s drew the attention of American evangelicals who opposed gay rights. American church groups brought a new militancy to the continent’s gay-rights debate, says Kapya John Kaoma, a Zambian priest at Boston University who studies anti-lgbtq politics. The second was the election of Barack Obama, which convinced some Christian conservatives in America that the ground they had lost to liberals there might be irreversible. As the global culture wars heated up, Africa was heralded as “the last man standing” in defence of biblical values. Outsiders have flung money at African conservative causes. A study of financial filings by the Institute for Journalism and Social Change, a global media initiative, found that 17 American Christian groups together spent at least $16.5m in Africa in the four years to 2022; the total spend in 2022 was about 50% more than in 2019. This was probably only a fraction of the total disbursed by foreign religious groups over this period, notes Claire Provost, one of the authors. American churches do not have to disclose their overseas spending. Africa’s Christian conservatives have grown more effective. In 2014 Uganda’s constitutional court struck down an anti-gay law on procedural grounds. Ten years later the court upheld a more draconian version. The breadth of today’s anti-liberal coalition has helped. According to the Wall Street Journal, fwi helped organise the “family values” conference in 2023 in Uganda; the Russian embassy paid for it. The anti-gay bill soon became law. Copycat bills popped up in Kenya and Ghana..Read more:.Christian nationalism: The driving force behind MAGA – Francis Wilkinson.A bit less fire and brimstoneThe tactics used have grown more sophisticated, too. Africa’s Christian right once argued against abortion and homosexuality in “demonic” terms; now “they couch their arguments in the language of rights itself”, says Ayo Sogunro, a Nigerian human-rights scholar. Conference speakers in Nairobi stressed the rights of parents to protect their children from early sexualisation. “Folks are being prepped and primed in a different way,” says Ramatu Bangaru, a pro-choice activist in Sierra Leone. The movement is also homing in on multilateral institutions. Sharon Slater, fwi’s founder, hosts annual “training sessions” for African politicians hoping to advance these causes at the un. In Nairobi she warned that the World Health Organisation’s new pandemic-preparedness agreement poses “a threat to the African family” because it includes provisions for sexual and reproductive health care. adf has applied (so far unsuccessfully) for observer status at the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights to lobby its officials. fwi has set up shop in Ethiopia’s capital, which hosts the African Union. But perhaps most important, today’s Christian right has allies in the upper echelons of power. Several of Africa’s most influential leaders, including President William Ruto of Kenya and Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s prime minister, are born-again Christians. Many of those in their inner circles are too. In recent years several African first ladies, notably Janet Museveni of Uganda, have been courted by conservative Christian groups and have then promoted socially traditional policies. Such policies are often also politically expedient. Africans rarely resent people from other countries, ethnicities and faiths, but homophobia is still widespread, according to Afrobarometer, a pollster. In countries with recent polling data, large majorities also strongly oppose abortion. Unpopular governments may be tempted to exploit these sentiments. Since taking office in 2022, Mr Ruto—who last year faced mass protests against his rule—has spoken out forcefully against gay rights. Neighbouring Ethiopia is grappling with a protracted civil conflict. Though it has a relatively liberal abortion law, an aggressive anti-abortion movement has suddenly taken root, about which the government has been strikingly silent. The Trump administration has further boosted Africa’s ascendant right. In the past, governments seeking good relations with America, such as Mr Ruto’s, tended to avoid legislation as brazenly illiberal as Uganda’s 2023 bill. Today “what we are going to see the Kenyan government promoting is what aligns with the Trump administration,” predicts Martin Onyango of Kenya’s Centre for Reproductive Rights. Controversial anti-lgbtq laws and efforts to limit abortion rights in Kenya may well be looked at more favourably. Christian conservatives also stand to benefit from the closure of usaid. Charles Kanjama of the Kenyan Christian Professionals Forum says that aid money should come “without strings attached and without shoving the lgbt agenda down our throats”. “How did we get to the point where America is sending taxpayer dollars all over the world to ngos that undermine religious freedom?” agreed J.D. Vance, America’s vice-president, in February. Some in the administration’s orbit say that pepfar, America’s scheme for fighting aids which was frozen in January, should be restored—if the money goes to anti-abortion Christian ngos. Liberals have long complained about the way Western religious conservatives have fanned intolerance in Africa. But their African counterparts may not need much outside support. Even “things we can all agree are bad, such as female genital cutting, are now up for debate again”, notes Gillian Kane of Ipas, an American group that campaigns for safe abortion and contraception. Big shifts, such as the growth of evangelical Christianity, particularly among young Africans, herald a more socially conservative future. Like right-wingers elsewhere, Africa’s Christian right relies on a sense of peril to drum up support. But today it is their liberal rivals who have reason to worry.

The Economist: Africa’s ascendant right - devout, well-connected and MAGA-fuelled

Key topics:

From The Economist, published under licence. The original article can be found on www.economist.com

© 2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.

The Economist

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