On Hijackings and other Colonial Tropes

On 27 October 2011, dozens of independent African activists and organisations released a statement on the threat of Britain’s 'aid cut' to African countries that violate lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex (LGBTI) rights. This letter came on the heels of a widely reported story that the UK was to stop funds going to countries that were reportedly ‘anti-gay’ and was signed by 56 organisations and 86 individuals self-identified as African social justice activists. Anyone that has attempted to write such a well-written co-authored letter knows how much time and effort would have gone into this endeavor long before we saw its release. The letter carefully outlined the problematic assumptions that undergird Britain’s proposed aid cuts, such as its:

•         assumptions ‘about African sexualities and the needs of African LGBTI people’;
•        ‘disregard [for] the agency of African civil society movements and political leadership’;
•        potential to ‘exacerbate the environment of intolerance’;
•        ‘reinforce[ment of] the disproportionate power dynamics between donor countries and         recipients’;
•        ‘further[ing of] the divide between the LGBTI and the broader civil society movement; and
•        support of ‘the commonly held notion that homosexuality is “unAfrican” and…that countries like the UK will only act when “their interests” have been threatened’, disregarding the colonial legacies of the British Empire in criminalizing same-sex practices in Africa, as well as the prevalence of homophobia in contemporary Britain itself.

Throughout, the authors draw out the ways in which such threats play out old colonial legacies that bolster the role of the UK in making economic decisions for African countries, and further instantiate their imagined place at the head of the global regulation machine. In what couldn’t be a more ironic turn, this message was quickly picked up coopted by similar aggrandizing voices within the UK gay movement.

On 22 November 2011, the Peter Tatchell Foundation issued a press release claiming that Peter Tatchell presented the Secretary of State for International Development Andrew Mitchell with the letter. In this characterisation of the events, the Tatchell Foundation seems to suggest that they were working collaboratively with the African social justice activists in this regard. This is blatantly not the case. Although the authors have not publicly released their own opinion on this offensive portrayal, many of the signatories have good reason to keep their distance from the Tatchell Foundation.  

Furthermore, other gay activist groups in attendance participated in a problematic cooptation of the letter’s original intent. After the Minister claimed that aid would not be ‘cut’ but euphemistically ‘redirected’, the Kaleidoscope Trust entered into a full-blown endorsement of the plans, releasing a statement that actively collaborated with the UK government’s agenda. The Director of the Trust stated that:

Andrew Mitchell clearly understands the importance of setting LGBT rights into a wider context and of avoiding any risk of harm to those that British policy is designed to help. We are fortunate to have a government that takes these issues seriously and is prepared to speak out when necessary.

What’s more, in their complimentary releases both the Tatchell Foundation and the Kaleidoscope Trust failed to question the UK’s assumed position as a primary funding agent for African programs aimed at poverty reduction and human rights violations, out rightly ignoring the signatories’ main concerns.

As such, within a month of the release of the powerful African activists’ statement, as one of my comrades pointed out, the original intent of the letter had been effectively ‘hijacked’. Of course, hijackers are always portrayed as brown and black ‘terrorists’ of various kinds, ruining white people’s holiday vacations/providing the introduction to every Tom Cruise action movie when they seize control of an airplane. However, this scenario offers an important alternative perspective on the history of hijacking - one that predates human flight. This is the old colonial trope of cooptation.

While we’re wheeling and dealing in the realm of colonial legacies, let me point out that the Oxford English Dictionary defines hijacking as the action of illegally seizing something in transit and forcing it to a different destination. In this case, my comrade was spot on. The letter was in transit, carrying a message of autonomy and anti-colonialism to eyes and ears around the world but re-routed by the self-authorised voices of the UK gay liberation movement. Rather than reflect upon and absorb the transformational message of the letter, these organisations ignored and then buried it under their panicked effort to prioritize their own interests. In a situation almost too ripe with colonial legacies to be believable, we need not ask ‘can the subaltern speak?’, but rather, ‘can the colonizers please shut up?'.