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Beyond our Trauma: A Reflection on Queer Activism in Ghana

Updated: Feb 29


As part of the build-up to June’s Safer To Be Me Symposium, we are proud to be sharing our Safer To Be Me: Global Voices blog series, showcasing LGBTQ+ themes from around the globe, written by ReportOUT volunteers.


This week’s blog comes from ReportOUT researcher, PK from Ghana, whose emotional personal story serves as a reminder to all of our communities to seek joy in our fellowship and not to allow ourselves to be defined by our trauma, as demonstrated by the Ghanian LGBTQ+ community


At the end of 2022, I sent my best friend a 3-page list of my New Year’s Resolutions. In our 8 years of friendship, this has evolved to become a tradition where we exchange new year goals and ensure we hold each other accountable for achieving them. For the first time in the 8 years we have been practicing this tradition I received a criticism on my goals, they were too lengthy.


One thing about resolutions is that they have to be equally balanced; too few or too many and you end up losing the drive to pursue them. In the criticism my best friend sent me, he urged that I take a second look at my goals and lump them into 4 to 6 thematic subjects. When I took a closer look the most obvious but obscured theme stood out, my entire 107 bullets 3 paged new year resolutions were wholly centred around being happy. In 2022, I had fought institutions, the government of Ghana, homophobic Ghanaians so much that I had not given myself the space and length to take a breath, be happy, and bask in the warmness of the love of my queer siblings who surround me and hold a loving space for me.


‘How Ironic That It Was Our Murders That Brought Us Help’


It is so easy for a young intersex gay activist like me living in Ghana to lose myself in misery when all I have known is homophobia and abuse. When the pain of myself and every queer person has been commodified and marketed as us and we have not been seen or heard beyond how much abuse we endure.

In the late parts of 2021, a Global North human rights donor confided in activists that the main reason donor funds was being given to Ghanaian organizations was because donors were just seeing how much homophobia queer people were experiencing following a spree documentation of physical attacks, corrective rapes, and murders that had accompanied the introduction of Ghana’s draconian Anti-LGBTIQ+ bill. Prior to this, organizations had severely been underfunded and understaffed to the brink of collapse and queer activists had almost given up on seeing any monumental changes in our lifetimes. How ironic, that it was our murders that brought us help.


When I sat down at the end of 2022 to write my new year resolutions, I remember how exhausted I felt. I had received so many opportunities; writing, panels, speakerships and almost all of these had centred and forced me to relive my trauma bare over and over again. In the last panel in December, I had silently prayed for a question on my happiness, relationships, love, but all 6 questions asked were solely centred on my abuse, tears, and wounds I had almost died trying to heal and make whole.


No Choice To Deny Who I Am



Human Rights Watch published ‘No Choice To Deny Who I Am’, a first of its kind national research on living as a member of the LGBTIQ+ community in Ghana in 2018. One notable but unsurprising find was almost all the queer people who were interviewed had experienced a certain level of violence, harm, rape, family abandonment, or forced conversion therapy. This was even further corroborated by Outright’s 2022 publication on the exponential harm the LGBTIQ+ community had been exposed to following a series of homophobia and misinformation tirades that accompanied Ghana’s Anti-LGBTIQ bill.


After interviewing 44 queer Ghanaians, researchers from Outright concluded that the introduction of the bill had created a hostile environment for queer people where homophobes unabashedly committed harm to the community without fear of consequences. What these two research works, and countless other research, documentaries, podcasts, and news coverage have done has been to inspect and see us through a lens of sympathy, pain, and punishment for who we are.


Bonds Unbreakable By Any Oppressor

Members of the LGBTIQ+ community in Ghana have been beaten and bled but in this suffering we have created a community, a safe space that belongs to us for us. To outsiders this may be nothing, but to queer people this is everything. Older queer people have opened their doors to mentor younger queer people, information on homophobic hotspots are shared on community safe online pages, and queer people are partnering and embracing with so much more love than my gay childhood ever dreamt of seeing. In our oppression, we have made and built unbreakable bonds that is far from the reach of any of our oppressors.


We have knitted the trauma of suffering and abuse into creativity, siblinghood, and have embraced one another in love and warmth. This deserves to be highlighted too. Ghanaian queers are not our trauma, we are not the constant pain and endurance. We want to be seen by queer children who are afraid of living their truth because of what they see and what the mainstream media tells them will happen to them.


We want to discuss our love, our bond, our shared creativity, and our spirited push for equality. Above all we want to be recognized for a humanity that isn’t tied to and centred around our wounds. We are not our trauma.

Bibliography


1. “No Choice but to Deny Who I Am” Violence and Against LGBT People in Ghana – Human Rights Watch


2. “We Deserve Protection” Anti-LGBTIQ Legislation and Violence in Ghana - Outright Action International


PK's blog is part of ReportOUT’s Safer To Be Me: Global Voices series, in support of the Safer To Be Me Symposium, a joint ReportOUT-University of Sunderland project, which will take place on 22nd June 2023 at Sunderland University in the North East of England. The symposium will create a safe space where some of the most important issues facing international LGBTQI+ human rights can be explored and discussed in great detail, as well as encouraging a call to action where all involved can identify meaningful ways to be proactive and make a powerful impact.


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