With President Obama planning to make a three-country stop in Africa this week, LGBT activists, diplomats and party officials are all expressing concern about just how far he can and will go in denouncing the treatment of millions of people living there, reports ABC.com. The President plans on visiting South Africa, Senegal and Tanzania. The latter two jail its citizens for being gay. “I asked the ambassador whether Obama would discuss the issue when he goes to Senegal,” said Claver Toure, who attended a private reception in the Ivory Coast and is executive director of the gay and lesbian group, Alternative Cote d’Ivoire. “It will be very important for him to talk about us with African leaders, and also in his speeches. It will give us strength to let us know that we are not alone.”
Toure, who was referring to a recent reception held in that country’s U.S. diplomatic embassy, was joined by about two dozen members of the LGBT community. The low-key event barred reporters and the only mention of it was a small blurb on the embassy’s Web site posted a full week after the event. The delicate manner in which it was treated is emblematic of Obama’s approach to LGBT civil rights in a deeply conservative continent where nine out of ten people polled believe that homosexuality should never be accepted. “Given that African societies tend to be very conservative, it’s a difficult issue,” Philip Carter, the U.S. ambassador in Ivory Coast, told The Associated Press. “The question for us is, how do we advocate effectively and advance the human rights agenda for the LGBT community, or any other community that is in a difficult position? And sometimes the headlong assault isn’t the way to do it.”
The President has taken a strong stand on human rights in Africa and other parts of the world. In December of 2011, he issued a memorandum to all federal agencies to be effective agents of change in helping the LGBT community. Since then diplomats, ambassadors and the like have pressed officials to do more to protect the rights of members of the LGBT community. Currently, in Mauritania, northern Nigeria, southern Somalia and Sudan the punishment for homosexuality is death.
And because President Obama is immensely popular there, his words tend to carry weight, offsetting leaders of nations that advocate for the punishment of the LGBT community. “When Obama is talking about democracy, it means that we all have the same right —the right to do what we want,” Naty Noel, a communications consultant in Abidjan. “So maybe we can accept them.” The flipside, however, is that the President, by sheer virtue of geography, reinforces the notion that homosexuality is a Western construct unsuited for the political, social and religious values of a continent steeped in, what many people argue, a medieval worldview.
