Digital Strategies and African LGBTI Organizing

Abstract

African lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) organizing has become transnational in scope, partly due to the efforts of activists who use digital strategies to bring international attention to LGBTI human rights violations and to generate wider visibility for their plans. These digital strategies have succeeded in eliciting international concern about political homophobia and anti-LGBTI discrimination and violence. However, international interest in African LGBTI organizing has generated unwanted consequences for activist organizations; these consequences include anti-LGBTI backlash and draconian anti-gay legislation. In other cases, using digital strategies has put some LGBTI activist organizations in positions that allow them to marshal international influence and to pressure government officials to capitulate to their demands. Scholars have raised ethical questions about the transnational dimensions of African LGBTI movements’ digital strategies. By publicizing local LGBTI human rights abuses, activist campaigns contribute to the image that African nations are by and large homophobic, a cause for concern. In addition, when activists in the global North become involved in transnational campaigns that draw attention to discrimination and violence against LGBTI people in different African countries, there is a risk that Northern activists can hijack online petitions and campaigns for their own ends (Gunkel 2013). In this chapter, we discuss the merits of and drawbacks to African LGBTI activists’ use of digital strategies and analyse how mobile technologies and digital tactics can betray activists’ intentions. We use several case studies to explain the contours of LGBTI movements’ deployment of digital strategies in different African countries.