Across Africa, debates about cultural preservation and traditional values are increasingly being influenced by forces that promote conservative social agendas rooted in colonial and missionary legacies. These movements, often backed by generous Western funding, seek to impose rigid, exclusionary values that contradict the continent’s diverse and historically dynamic cultures.
A recent example of this dynamic played out last week in Nairobi, where the second Pan-African Conference on Family Values organised by the Africa Christian Professionals Forum sparked controversy by claiming to defend “traditional” African family values.
The event’s foreign supporters, including the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam) and Family Watch International, are known for their opposition to LGBTQ rights, reproductive health, and comprehensive sex education.
These organisations, some classified as hate groups by the United States-based Southern Poverty Law Center, often present their positions as inherently African, despite their deep connections to Western conservative funding.
This duplicity came to the fore ahead of the conference in Nairobi when it was revealed that the preliminary list of speakers consisted entirely of white men.
During the event, participants were urged to “resist growing trends that seek to redefine marriage, weaken the institution of family, or devalue human sexuality” and to rise up to defend the African family from a “new colonialism”.
Yet the fact is that the narrative of preserving tradition that was on full display at the conference is far from organic. Instead, it itself continues a pattern established during the colonial era, when imperial powers imposed patriarchal norms and strict social hierarchies under the guise of paradoxically both preserving and “civilising” indigenous cultures.
In doing so, missionary and colonial institutions both reimagined and reframed African social structures to align with Victorian ideals, embedding rigid gender roles and heteronormative family models into the social fabric and inventing supposedly ancient and unchanging “traditions” to support them.
The latter were themselves built on self-serving ideas of Africans as “noble savages”, living in happy conformity with supposedly “natural” values, trapped by petrified “culture”, and undisturbed by the moral questions that plagued their civilised Western counterparts from whose corruption they needed to be protected...
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