The Culture Wars Come to Zambia

On a visit to Zambia in February 2012, the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called on African countries to stop treating LGBT people as less than human or as second class citizens. He explicitly asked Zambian lawmakers to stop discriminating against people on the basis of sexual orientation.

Zambia had just emerged from a heated election where politicians promoting anti-LGBT laws were defeated at the polls. But Ban’s words backfired and the speech fanned the anti-gay embers back into flame. Politicians and religious leaders rose up with anti-gay invective. The U.S. Christian Right-trained pastor and opposition leader Nevers Mumba challenged the newly elected Patriotic Front government to make clear its position on homosexuality. Member of Parliament Felix Mutati argued in the Lusaka Times that “the country must be allowed to be guided by biblical principles and the existing law against homosexuality…. Zambia is a Christian nation and Christianity is against homosexuality.” Elias Chipimo, Jr., the president of Zambia’s National Restoration Party, blamed Western countries and called on them to stop promoting homosexuality. “The insistence of foreign nations donating aid conditioned upon the active promotion of gay rights is nothing other than the battle for the soul of our nation and our way of life,” he said.¹

“Mr. Ki-Moon’s [sic] statement was aimed at forcing Zambia to accept homosexuality,” said Rev. Pukuta Mwanza, executive director of The Evangelical Fellowship of Zambia (EFZ), in the London Evening Post. “His message of gay human rights…is not appropriate to Zambia because our laws do not allow homosexuality.”

Only two years before, Uganda’s draconian Anti-Homosexuality Bill—the “Kill The Gays” bill— made international headlines. The global campaign to forestall the bill singled out the true instigators of this hateful legislation: U.S. Christian Right figures including the internationally prominent Baptist pastor and bestselling author, Rick Warren; Scott Lively, the anti-gay, Holocaust revisionist; and Lou Engle, head of the revivalist group, The Call, and a leader in the right-wing New Apostolic Reformation movement. Warren, and later Lively, spoke out against the Ugandan bill, and the legislation was tabled soon after.

Many African leaders who followed American conservatives’ anti-gay teachings felt betrayed and abandoned.² However, while Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill was blocked, similar anti-gay measures passed in Malawi, Nigeria, and Liberia. Uganda reintroduced the anti-gay bill in each parliamentary session since 2009. The international outcry did little to improve the climate of tolerance of sexual diversity on the continent. In fact, the opposite happened: Amnesty International reports, “Instances of harassment, discrimination, persecution, violence and murders committed against individuals because of their sexual orientation or gender identity are increasing across sub-Saharan Africa.”³ The speed and fervor of African anti-gay sentiment in recent years has mobilized Western activists and politicians alike.

But almost every Western leader who has spoken out on behalf of the rights of LGBT people have faced the same backlash as Ban, including U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (see sidebar) and British Prime Minister David Cameron. Cameron threatened to cut funding to African countries that persecute LGBT people during the Commonwealth Heads of Governments Meeting in Perth, Australia in October 2011. African religious and political leaders not only condemned Cameron’s move as immoral but used it as evidence to feed the myth that homosexuality is a new form of Western imperialism aimed at destroying Africa.⁴

Be it in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Zambia, or Malawi, the sentiment was the same. Both independent and government news media houses reacted with indignation: “Ghana tells off UK over threat on gays” (Daily Nation, Ghana); “Is the West still colonizing Continent,” (Tanzania Daily News, Tanzania); and “UK’s Cameron Touched Wrong Button on Gays” (The Observer, Uganda). “Amoral and horrendous culturally imperialistic,” said Mobhane Matinyi of Tanzania’s The Citizen of Cameron’s move. Most viewed the prime minister’s position as imposing homosexuality on the continent.

Many political leaders on the continent eagerly use these Westerners’ statements as a rallying point for votes, challenging the human rights efforts as neocolonial forays into African sovereignty.⁵ During the 2011 election in Zambia, politicians brought the issue of homosexuality, which had historically remained at the margins of political life, into a prominent role.

Imposing a “Christian Nation” on a Secular State

Zambia’s charged Christian Right politics didn’t start with the 2011 election. The late Frederick Chiluba, a Pentecostal influenced by the U.S. Christian Right and Zambia’s second president, declared the country a “Christian Nation” to be governed by biblical principles when he came to power in December 1991. He appointed many conservative Christian pastors to senior government positions.⁶

But Zambians’ embrace of this American version of Christianity can be traced back even earlier. Since its independence in 1964, Zambia had been a secular state. But in the last quarter of the twentieth century, Zambia’s separation between church and state began to dissolve. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. Christian Right partnered with young African religious leaders across sub-Saharan Africa in an attempt to “fight” the perceived communism of Pan-Africanist leaders, including Zambia’s first president, Kenneth Kaunda. During this time, the number of U.S.-founded churches on African soil increased, and U.S. conservative evangelists of all persuasions exported their teachings to Africa—many in concert with the Reagan administration. The CIA under the Reagan administration supported Christian conservatives in strategic countries to fight what they claimed were Marxist guerillas and terrorists. Conservative Christian missionaries went to Zambia, as well as Angola and South Africa; their charge was to stop the growth and spread of liberation theology.⁷

Backed by the CIA and funded by U.S. right-wing churches and other international organizations, Chiluba ousted Kaunda and within three months of coming to power declared Zambia a “Christian Nation.”⁸ Chiluba’s brand of Christianity was rooted in Pentecostalism, an evangelical movement that sees the Bible as inerrant, with heaven waiting for the born again and hell for those who are not saved. Pentecostals believe God’s spirit continues to work in the world through the gifts of prophecy, speaking in tongues, and faith healing. Homosexuals are seen as possessed by demons who must be cast out. While many of these beliefs have spread to other Christian denominations as part of the charismatic revival of the past decades, Pentecostalism is traditionally in direct conflict with mainline churches, such as Anglican and Roman Catholic denominations.

Following Chiluba’s election in 1991 and his subsequent thanksgiving service, or what scholars Paul Gifford and Isabel Phiri call his “anointing service,” these beliefs found fertile ground in Zambia.⁹ Consequently, human rights for sexual minorities started to deteriorate.¹⁰

As Human Rights Watch noted on issues of LGBT rights, “Zambia is a center for the activities of North American-based fundamentalist Christian evangelists: their approaches and language were invoked in debates. Traditionally, Zambians were not anti-gay; in fact…one Zambian newspaper simply reprinted materials from Exodus International, an American anti-gay religious organization, to support the idea that “‘Christian counseling’ could cure homosexuals and return them to the fold of society.”¹¹ U.S. evangelical media outlets such as Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) and Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) took root and began broadcasting to a wide audience throughout the country. In 1995, U.S. Christian Right minister and media star Pat Robertson—himself a charismatic evangelical and former faith healer—called Chiluba the model president not only for “Africa but for the rest of the world.”¹²

Opposition to Homosexuality

Zambia is overwhelmingly Christian—the Pew Research Center lists it as 98 percent Christian, with 92 percent of both Zambian sand Zambian Christians opposing homosexuality. Even Zambia’s traditional and tribal leaders base their opposition to homosexuality on the Bible, a Western product. A tribal counselor to Chieftainess Lesa named Danny Kakunka told us, “I know that homosexuality is not a taboo among the Westerners. But our traditions are opposed to it. Even the Bible does not allow it.”

Unlike many African countries, only a somewhat small portion of Zambians are reported to still hold traditional beliefs. But even in countries where a larger portion of the populace follow traditional beliefs and incorporate those practices into Christianity, as in neighboring Malawi, traditional leaders root their understanding of homosexuality in the Bible. Take, for example, 80-year-old John Robert Mangani, the senior chief of the Kadewere-Chiradzulu district of Malawi, who could not find traditional reasons to oppose homosexuality; he relied solely on the Bible. Mangani told us, “Our culture does not accept same-sex marriages. It is against human dignity. Let us go to the book of Genesis: God created man and woman that they should live together. God knew that man has sperms and these sperms are aimed at fertilizing ova in a woman. If we hear that there are some people advocating for same-sex marriages, as chiefs, we are totally against. Frankly speaking, it is an abomination in our country.”

Paramount Chief Lundu concurred, “At the beginning God created Adam and his wife Eve, it is very strange to see that these people who are promoting homosexuality have wives and they do not encourage their children to follow homosexual acts. If we go to scriptures Genesis 19:1-22, it states how Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed due to homosexual acts. As chiefs we will not allow such acts to continue in our country, it is an abomination. We will not accept this. It is better to remain poor than to accept same-sex marriage.”

That even “traditionalists” echo U.S. Christian Right biblical interpretation would be no surprise to the authors of the 1996 book Exporting the American Gospel: Global Christian Fundamentalism. They noted that American Christian fundamentalism, the Protestant evangelical movement of militant biblical literalists, had taken hold across much of the developing world. In Africa, they argued, U.S. fundamentalists invested heavily in transforming Christianity on the continent. They warn that this fast-growing African Christianity “is fundamentalist and American. Through its [American Christian Right] resources, personnel and technology, it may be exerting influence on every bit as the colonial Christianity of the last century.”¹³

This American style of Christianity is especially evident in Zambian Christian attitudes towards homosexuality. Influential Zambian Bishop Joshua Banda of Northmead Assembly of God asserted that homosexuality was “alien to the Zambian society.” Despite his bishop title (a common honorific Africans ascribe to religious leaders), Banda practices an American form of Pentecostalism and is no stranger to anti-gay religious teachings—his doctoral advisor was Canon Dr. Chris Sugden, executive secretary of the breakaway group Anglican Mainstream International, which parted ways with the Episcopal Church USA over inclusion of sexual minorities. In addition to studying at Trans-Africa Theological College in Kitwe, Zambia, which was founded and funded by U.S. Christian conservatives, Banda is a graduate of Northwest University in Kirkland, Washington, a Pentecostal institution. While scholar Adriaan S. van Klinken associates Banda’s positions on homosexuality with “the church’s gender politics, specifically with regard to men and masculinity,” Banda’s anti-gay arguments are rooted in U.S. conservatism. In fact, Banda’s church is a product of a Western Christian mission, founded by the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada (P.A.O.C.) Mission in the 1970s with no Zambian members.¹⁴ You can hear this influence within Banda’s sermons on Fatherhood in the 21st Century; as quoted by van Klinken: