How ‘Defending African Values’ Masks a New Colonization

In quick succession, the weeks between 9 May and 16 May 2025 saw two conferences take place. One in Entebbe, Uganda, and the other in Nairobi, Kenya. To everyday citizens, both conferences went unnoticed. The Ugandan conference was dubbed the ‘Interparliamentary Conference on Family Values and Sovereignty’ and t he Kenyan one, the ‘Pan-African Conference on Family Values’. The conference in Uganda was the third in a series that has been happening since 2023. This time, the attendance was expanded to include Morocco, Gabon, Hungary and Gambia. It was also attended by the speakers of parliaments from Ghana, Malawi, Uganda, Morocco, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gambia, Eswatini, South Sudan and Gabon. Our African legislators were in their third year of drafting ‘An African Charter on Family Values and Sovereignty’. And if this evokes Donald Trump’s Project 2025 or the Make America Great Again campaign, you are not so far off because the same Christian and right-wing groups behind those efforts are also driving these initiatives in Africa.

What marked the differences between the conference in Uganda and the one in Kenya was their approach and reception. In Nairobi, organizers operated more openly than in Entebbe, where the Ugandan president and the state acted as proxies and offered an African face to what was a foreign far-right lobby. The Nairobi conference featured speakers and sponsors from organizations that have been exporting Euro-American conservatism globally. These included the Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture, C-Fam (Centre for Family and Human Rights) and Family Watch International, which has rebranded itself as Family Watch Africa in local contexts. Also represented were Alliance for Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council (formed by James Dobson in 1981, who also established Focus on the Family), the Foundation for African Cultural Heritage (FACH) in Nigeria led by Theresa Okafor, Christian Council International led by Henk Jan van Schothorst, and Family Policy Institute. These organizations have waged a nearly three-decade ideological war over what it means to be an acceptable human, and they have been winning. Several have been designated as hate groups by the American legal advocacy organization, Southern Poverty Law Center, at various points in their existence. Their strategies now inform the politics of the current president of the United States, Donald Trump, and multiple right-wing politicians across Europe.