Unbeknownst to most Americans, for whom Africa scarcely registers as an afterthought, the United States has a long and deep history of special relations with Ghana.
I am not talking about the story of the Atlantic slave trade, which brought roughly a tenth of its overall traffic, or 1.2 million human beings in chains, to the Americas from the shores of what is now Ghana. The sourcing of bonded labor from Ghana lasted for hundreds of years but peaked in 18th century, when the sacrifice of African lives to brutal plantation work fed an explosion of wealth in the West.
The special relationship in question here involves none of that tragedy, and yet it lays bare cautionary tales for both parties. It began in earnest around 1992, when a new constitution in Ghana established an independent electoral commission—leading to a long period of stable democratic rule.
Since then, the country has conducted a string of highly competitive elections, including repeated nail-biters that have generated far less partisan disturbance about the results than, say, the United States. This has helped turn Ghana into a model to be embraced and upheld by Washington as an example of democracy worthy of emulation by nearby African countries in a neighborhood where democracy, always an up-and-down affair in the region, has suffered numerous setbacks in the past decade.
Over the years, Ghana’s democratic performance has repeatedly won it the favor of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), Western-dominated financial institutions in which the United States holds great sway. To them, it does not seem to have mattered so much that their economic policy advice and various financial support packages have not led to any lasting improvement in Ghana’s prospects as a nation. To acknowledge this would be to recognize the stark inherent weaknesses of their approach to international development.
Just as with elections, the West needs to have Ghana available for display as a good “pupil”—and in some sense, even though Ghana is only a medium-sized country by the standards of the continent, it has become too big, or at least too important, to fail.
More recently, a third plume has been added to Ghana’s cap: security. In the Sahel region, a broad, semi-arid area that lies to Ghana’s north, one weak and unstable landlocked country after another has sharply downgraded its relations with its former colonial power, France. For years, Paris had been helping them fight against the spread of Islamic insurgencies—and failing. In quick succession, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso have all cried “enough!”
Inviting French troops to leave, they have opted instead for a new approach, however uncertain, which consists of strengthening relations between themselves and inviting the help of new partners, Russia foremost among them.
This not only affects France, whose position in the world has long depended on the kind of aggrandizement that it enjoys by being the patron and sometimes master of a large clutch of still-dependent former African colonies. It could also affect Washington’s ability to station sizable drone forces in the region, both to support its own local intelligence operations and to combat Islamist groups without risky on-the-ground troop operations.
This is not all that the ongoing changes in the Sahel affect, though. The removal of Western anti-terrorist operations in the region inevitably leads to a greater reliance on generally richer and more stable coastal states (think Ghana and Ivory Coast in particular) for preventing the growing influence of al Qaeda and Islamic State affiliates.
Here, then, is yet another reason that for the West, Ghana has become too important to fail. If it doesn’t step up to help anchor a U.S. and European security presence in the region, or worse, if it should fall prey to spreading terrorism, then West Africa—a vast region that is home to a fast-growing population of hundreds of millions of people—risks becoming radically destabilized. The potential consequences of this, first for West Africans themselves but also for the West, are dire.
Violence and economic misery in the heavily populated coastal regions of this part of the continent will not only stunt lives and arrest improvements in living standards, but they will also likely spur a much greater wave of migration than hitherto seen in Europe or North America.
Now there is a new complication. Beginning even well before colonial times, Ghanaian culture has been deeply penetrated by that of the West. Up and down the coast, one of the ways this can be most readily seen is in the proliferation of evangelical churches, many of them influenced and supported by American evangelicals.
Recently, this influence has made itself felt through a successful push by the Ghanaian parliament to pass an abhorrent bill criminalizing people who identify as members of the LGBTQ community. In many ways, this mirrors evangelical influence in conservative U.S. states such as Florida, for example, where legislators have passed laws restricting the use of personal pronouns in public schools and prohibiting gender-affirming care for minors, among other measures targeting LGBTQ Floridians. In Ghana, conservative Christian groups were joined in supporting the new law by conservative Muslims and traditional leaders in the country.
Ghana’s outgoing president, Nana Akufo-Addo, has avoided making his intentions clear about whether he will sign the bill, saying that he is awaiting a ruling by the country’s Supreme Court on its legality first. Even without the president’s assent, the parliament can put the law into effect with a two-thirds vote.
The consequences of this could be devastating. The U.S. State Department has expressed its strong disapproval of the bill and warned that its adoption would harm bilateral relations as well as damage Ghana’s economy and international reputation. The World Bank and IMF have also suggested that their aid and loan packages might have to be reconsidered—and European Union countries could react similarly.
LGBTQ rights are as much a domestic political issue in the United States as they are in Ghana, though. Somehow, at some point soon, they could force a reckoning for both countries that their leaders had never imagined and are not prepared to confront.
In the past, most frontal clashes between the international security interests and human rights values of the United States have usually occurred in countries that Washington deems economically or strategically vital (say, Saudi Arabia, for historically restricting the rights of women) or Israel (which the United States has long avoided publicly pressuring over the rights of Palestinians).
But if Ghana begins jailing people for being gay, this would amount to such a clear violation of human rights that the United States could be obliged by law to sever much of its support for the country and would find it much more difficult to avoid doing so.
One must not lose sight of Ghana’s choices in this matter. It is not, as some claim, an issue of simply complying with American values or demands. Civil society groups in Ghana and even the country’s Catholic bishops have denounced the legislation, which one opposition politician, Samia Nkrumah—the daughter of Ghana’s first president—has called a “brutal, harsh, unjust” law. It is unclear how much weight voices like these will carry in the debate.
In a number of African countries, politicians have demagogically promoted the persecution of LGBTQ people on the specious basis that homosexuality was introduced by colonizers (who were, in reality, often the ones who introduced the idea of punishing it). This is a clear fallacy, though, meant to appeal to a bogus form of nativism.
The best reason for Ghana to oppose this law is not foreign pressure at all, even though it could have damaging consequences. The real reason is bound up in the ideals of the continent’s independence movements of seven decades ago: All of Africa’s people are fully-fledged human beings and should be allowed to live in freedom.
