What sparked the moral panic in Cameroon?
On Christmas day in 2005 the archbishop of Yaoundé, Cameroon’s capital, the famously homophobic Victor Tonye Bakot, surprised the nation with a sermon attacking the national elite. He accused them of spreading homosexuality by forcing anal sex on young men eager to get a job.
The sermon was all the more surprising since the archbishop spoke in the Yaoundé cathedral with the nation’s leaders right in front of him, including then president Paul Biya. It offered a new variation of the Catholic church’s attacks on Freemasonry.
Freemasonry is a male-only organisation that engages in secretive rituals and promotes a moral order but is not a religion. It emerged around 1700 in Scotland when liberal thinkers joined old guilds of masons. A Grand Lodge was established in London in 1717. Freemasonry then spread to France and French colonies.
In France, Freemasonry was fiercely attacked by the Catholic church, worried by the increasingly secular tendencies of the brotherhood and its supposedly central role in the French Revolution. So, even though the 2005 attack by the Cameroonian archbishop was nothing new, it hit like a wave in this specific context and created a conspiracy theory that lives on today.
Only a month after the sermon, several newspapers started publishing lists of “supposed” or even “prominent” homosexuals. (The so-called Affaire des listes – the list affair).
They named ministers and other politicians, sports and music stars, and even some senior religious leaders. Denouncing the elite as homosexuals corrupting the nation had become an outlet for people’s dissatisfaction with the regime.
The elite did not know how to defend itself against this attack. At first Biya asked for respect for people’s privacy. But when new rumours and hints were published, the government launched a witch-hunt against supposed homosexuals.
Same-sex practices had been criminalised by presidential decree in Cameroon in 1972. But until 2005 this was seldom applied. Since then, however, people suspected of such “criminal” behaviour have been harassed by arbitrary arrests and imprisonment.
Since 2000 homophobia has been on the rise on the African continent but, as Cameroonian sociologist Patrick Awondo emphasised, its “politicisation” takes different forms in each country. In Cameroon – and to a lesser extent Gabon – the homosexual targeted by popular outrage is politicians and the elite. The supposed omnipresence of Freemasonry and other global associations in higher circles is a key factor here.
You view this as a conspiracy theory?
Our analysis of this powerful attack as a conspiracy narrative addresses what might be one of the major challenges for academics today: how to deal with the tsunami of conspiracy theories that haunt politicsglobally.
These range from Trump and QAnon to the “street parliaments” in the early 2000s in Côte d’Ivoire (well-known public spaces used to defend the rule of President Laurent Gbagbo).
Academics used to see it as their first task to refute such conspiracy theories, but there is an increasing realisation of the futility of such an approach. Supporters may resent claims of scientific knowledge as superior and stick all the more to their convictions. Sociologists have noted it might be more urgent to first try to understand why these often improbable stories can gain such power.
We propose in our book that historicising conspiracy theories might be an answer. That is, studying them as products of specific historical settings.
So what is the historical background of the panic?
The first chapters of our book deal with the histories of masonism and anti-masonism in European and African settings. We try to understand why views that Freemasonry is tied to same-sex practices remained particularly resistant in French-speaking Africa.
We also consider the changing balance between the secrecy of the brotherhood and public display in post-colonial Africa. A good example is the leaked 2009 video showing the inauguration of Gabon’s president Ali Bongo as the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Gabon.
Going public like this is quite exceptional for a Freemason. Bongo probably hoped to impress his numerous adversaries by boasting of his access to special forms of power. But it also showed him as a neocolonial stooge as he was being led by representatives of the Grand Lodge Nationale de France.
Of course, linking homosexuality to Freemasonry strengthens the claim – now made by many in the continent – that homosexuality is un-African and imposed by colonialism. But for Cameroon and Gabon, there are hard-to-ignore signals that this was not the case.
Take, for example, the work of German ethnographer Günther Tessmann. He worked among the Fang people on the border between Cameroon and Gabon just after 1900, before the establishment of colonial authority. A recurring concept is biang akuma (the “medicine” of riches), which to Tessmann’s surprise was associated with sex between men. He highlighted in 1913 already two dimensions of popular perceptions of homosexuality in many African contexts: the association with “witchcraft” and also with enrichment.
This last element came out strongly from our comparisons with Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal and Nigeria. The idea of the anus as a source of enrichment has a long history in Africa. This puts the complaints of present-day Cameroonians that they live under anusocratie (rule of the anus) in a broader perspective.
It also helped us to contribute further to debates about the need for further decolonisingqueerstudies.
Clearly, to understand the complexities of the puzzling links between Freemasonry, homosexuality and illicit enrichment, we must move beyond ideas of fixed identities.
A crucial contribution to the debate on homosexuality that exploded after 2005 came from Cameroonian anthropologist Sévérin Abega. He insisted that to understand the perceptions of it one has to take into account a local belief among some communities in Cameroon that every person has a double.
Thus Abega foreshadowed recent debates by Cameroonian scholars like Francis Nyamnjoh on African personhood as incomplete and Achille Mbembe on the return of animism.
Another decisive factor in understanding why linking Freemasonry to homosexuality became such a hot political issue after 2000 is the internet. Internet access was a watershed, bringing relief for LGBTIQ+ people in Cameroon and Gabon. But it also strengthened a backlash against ideas of a gay identity associated with the west. (In a twist to these developments, Biya’s daughter, Brenda Biya, caused fierce debate by coming out as lesbian in July 2024.)
What do you hope readers will take away?
The book offers insight into the role – as omnipresent as it is understudied – of Freemasonry and similar global orders in Africa. It adds to studies of the association of same-sex unions with “witchcraft” and illicit enrichment in west Africa.
Such aspects are mostly absent from activist-oriented studies – no doubt for good reasons – but essential for understanding the popular debates and struggles over same-sex issues in Africa today.
But the main contribution of the book might be in our attempt to analyse a powerful conspiracy narrative, not by trying to refute it but by historicising it. The question is whether African visions of the person as fluid and frontiers as porous – also when it comes to sexuality – can overcome the tendency to think of identities as fixed.
Peter Geschiere, Professor Emeritus of African Anthropology, University of Amsterdam and Rogers Orock, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies, Lafayette College
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