Freemasons, homosexuals and corrupt elites in Cameroon: Inside an African conspiracy theory
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.alternet.org/freemasons-africa/
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.alternet.org/freemasons-africa/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
