Kenya LGBTQ+ activists try switching role of religion from oppression to empowerment

KISUMU — Every Sunday in the Kenyan port city of Kisumu, an HIV-prevention group gathers dozens of gay and bisexual men for a service to help maintain their physical and spiritual health.

Standing in rows under a tin roof, a group of 50 men sing in Swahili, clapping along to the church service. They take their seats on broken plastic chairs, most of them layered two or three on top of each other to maintain stability.

A preacher asks for prayer intentions. One man thanks God for having found a job. Another says his friend just got out of surgery after being beaten for being gay.

“He’s still not speaking, so I’m seeking your prayers,” the man says.

The Canadian Press travelled to Kenya as part of an investigative series looking into a global backslide in LGBTQ+ rights and the consequences for Canada, including the role of religion.

Anza Mapema runs one of hundreds of small-scale churches across Africa that are trying to shift the role of religion from a tool of oppression against gender and sexual minorities, into a source of strength and resilience.

“They preach love; they preach that everyone is equal, in the eyes of the Lord,” said Anza Mapema head Duncan Okall.

Groups like his rely on support from progressive Christians in countries like Canada to push for social change, which often comes at a high cost.

It is an uphill battle in a country where clerics hold large sway over how people vote and how they view social issues.

In Kenya, priests and imams have been at the forefront of campaigning for the Family Protection Bill, which would drastically reduce rights for gender and sexual minorities.

The legislation was proposed by Kenyan MP Peter Kaluma, who told local media that the bill is needed to ban “all activities that promote homosexuality” including wearing rainbow colours.

The bill has attracted scrutiny from constitutional scholars, as it proposes having the public undertake citizen’s arrests in homes and hotels where they suspect homosexual acts are taking place.

Kaluma has said he’s targeting “LGBTQ+ perversion” to uphold Christian, Muslim and tribal beliefs in Kenya. He praised last month’s U.S. presidential election of Donald Trump, saying it will be easier to enact the bill.

Godfrey Adera, a queer cleric and theologian in Nairobi, said that’s a powerful talking point in a country that has spent decades trying to rout colonial influence.

“The narrative has been that LGBTQ+ identity is un-African,” Adera said. “In our spaces, we want to say, ‘no, it is truly African. We do that from a religious point of view, but also an African cultural point of view.”

Every week his interfaith church called the Cosmopolitan Affirming Community welcomes more than a hundred people. They worship with traditional music and ceremonies that integrate Christianity with tribal beliefs, such as the use of chanting or the importance of specific sites in nature.

In Kisumu, a man in his forties named George, who requested that his last name not be published due to safety concerns, said he comes to the Anza Mapema service to experience a sense of community.

“It encourages us; it gives us hope in life. We become motivated when we come to church here, because we feel like we are also human beings,” he said. “Here, we are free. We are not neglected.”

The group has also connected him to LGBTQ+ resources, like training on how to avoid violence.

George also comes to the Sunday service for the carton of milk and two buns the organization provides. The food is paid for through HIV-prevention grants, since drugs that suppress the virus only work when a patient is consuming enough calories.

Many attend for the food — Okall said sometimes it’s the only food they’ll get that day — others use the outdoor shower. Some sleep through the service.

Okall used to worry about that, fretting that they distracted other participants, or that the religious programming lacked meaning. But a pastor told him that the service might be the only time where some men feel safe enough to get some rest.

The program has subsisted on a series of grants for HIV prevention and donations from individuals in Europe and North America, particularly individuals affiliated with the United Church of Canada, which is known for LGBTQ+ inclusive congregations.

Jane Thirikwa, who co-ordinates the United Church of Canada’s global advocacy for LGBTQ+ people, says these grassroots projects are crucial to reversing the oppression imposed by colonization.

She works with the United Church’s central leadership to facilitate partnerships between grassroots LGBTQ+ Christian groups and mainstream church leadership in places like Mozambique, Colombia and the Philippines.

In other places like Kenya, Thirikwa’s colleagues are doing more incremental work, trying to convince senior Christian leaders to speak out about violence against LGBTQ+ people. She said the goal is to “reduce the fundamentalist threat and the social damage that is being created” by conservative theology.

“This is what we are encouraged to do, to live in our discipleship in the world by being bold and speaking up for the people who do not have a voice,” she said.

Edwin Gumbe, the activity coordinator for Anza Mapema, said the church service is one of the hardest programs to fund, because it doesn’t have a direct tie to physical health or employment.

Yet he said “an affirming, spiritual space” is one of the best mental-health supports out there, and a way to counteract harmful narratives.

“Religion in Kenya has been used as an oppressive tool, to make us feel that our community — that being queer, being gay is a sin,” he said.

Along Kenya’s coastline on the Indian Ocean, where communities have large Muslim populations, LGBTQ+ activists are taking a different approach by seeking integration into mosques. Pema Kenya, an LGBTQ+ group based in Mombasa, has spent a decade hosting workshops to introduce imams and preachers to gender and sexual minorities.

“In Kenya, faith and religious leaders are very influential,” said Maxine Kidali, the group’s program officer for faith engagement. “The rest of the society follows what they do, because they think the religious leaders are role models.”

The group started approaching clerics through workshops aimed at raising awareness around HIV. As part of a weeklong workshop, religious leaders would undertake tasks with strangers, whom they learned at the end of the week to be LGBTQ+ or involved in sex work.

“Then when those people start to give their stories, that would touch the hearts of the religious leaders,” said Kidali.

“Most of the time, people would look at a gay man or a queer woman, and all they think is sex. So it is high time that we define people by who they are, and not what they do in their bedrooms.”

Kidali said these workshops have led to a shift, where some religious leaders embrace LGBTQ+ people and include them in ceremonies. Others have changed their messaging in sermons, by continuing to call same-sex activity an abomination, but stressing that LGBTQ+ people shouldn’t be attacked or ostracized.

Kidali said these workshops have blunted what had been an annual spike in hate crimes during Ramadan.

“Engaging religious leaders has changed a bit of the narrative and people’s attitudes,” Kidali said. “They might not be supportive, but at least they will not harm.”

Pema Kenya also hosts weekly prayers for LGBTQ+ Muslims, though the group’s focus is on integrating these minorities into mainstream religious congregations through dialogue.

“We grow up very bitter,” said Kidali, who identifies as a queer person. “You need to help them reconcile their sexuality and religion for them to have the confidence to walk into those spaces.”

Kidali argues that’s a more effective approach than having LGBTQ+ run their own religious programs based on precarious funding, with little impact on what gets said in mainstream churches and mosques.

Still, religious leaders who support LGBTQ+ people can find themselves as targets.

Kidali said some leaders have been excommunicated from their congregations, and pushed away by relatives for supporting LGBTQ+ people.

Mark Odhiambo Odieny, the pastor who started the Kisumu church program a decade ago, fled to the U.S. after his LGBTQ+ activism prompted angry mobs to come after him. One burned down his house.

He said spiritual initiatives are crucial for LGBTQ+ people to stop feeling that they must abandon the community and connection that religion provides.

“You cannot abandon who you are, but you can abandon a religion that is trying to make you be somebody who you’re not,” he said.

Adera said he has been “invisibilized” by other clerics, who no longer formally recognize him at religious events, and have removed from a messaging app group.

He said the situation in Kenya is more volatile since meeting with The Canadian Press in July, with cyber bullying and public harassment of openly gay people. He asked to withhold certain details of his experience conveyed in the interview, based on the rising security concerns.

Adera’s own church group has moved every few years since it opened in 2013, each time after locals have interrupted services or protested outside the premises. His lowest point was watching a landlord tear down the building they used to use.

“It was devastating to see our physical structure being demolished because of bigotry, because of hate that we got from the neighbourhood,” he said.

Gumbe said religion was how many sentiments and laws against LGBTQ+ people first got a foothold in Africa, and so it’s one of the best tools to reverse those sentiments.

“People use religion a lot to defend or to spread hate. So if you don’t address issues around that area, then there’s only a little progress we can make,” he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 8, 2024.

This is the seventh story of an eight-part series investigating a backsliding of LGBTQ+ rights in Africa and the consequences for Canada as a country with a feminist foreign policy, which prioritizes gender equality and human dignity. The reporting in Ghana, Cameroon and Kenya was written with financial support from the R. James Travers Foreign Corresponding Fellowship.

Dylan Robertson, The Canadian Press