Public Lecture: The New “Magic” of Power? Freemasonry, Postcolonial Homophobia, and Struggles for Decolonization in Central Africa

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14 September 2021, 3:00-4:30 pm UTC via Zoom

Speaker: Rogers Orock, University of the Witwatersrand

Abstract:

We live in an age of suspicion and conspiracism. This talk links current struggles over homosexuality in Francophone Africa to popular suspicions and conspiracy theories about Freemasonry, a global (though originally Western-based) esoteric or secret society with a significant presence across Africa. By analysing rumours and conspiracy theories about homosexuality and Freemasonry as forms of political accusations against elites in Cameroon, I underline their connections to broader debates on sexual citizenship and decolonization in Francophone Africa today. I discuss how these accusations allege a sexual and political recolonization of postcolonial states in Francophone Africa through the role of Western secret societies like Freemasonry. In the end, these rumours about Freemasonry and homosexuality represent popular anxieties about elite power amidst widening social inequalities in these countries as well as anxieties about the outsized and dominant influence that France continues to have in Francophone states in Central and West Africa.

Rogers Orock is a senior fellow of MIASA and a senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand. His scholarship focuses on elites, leadership, and political imagination in Central and West Africa. He is most recently the co-editor (with Wale Adebanwi) of Elites and the Politics of Accountability in Africa.

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