OUR AFRICAN FAMILY, CULTURE & VALUES
Reclaiming Our Stories, Our Lineages, Our Futures
Across Africa, a quiet but dangerous war is being waged on African culture, values, and ways of being. Beneath the glossy surface of “Pan-African family values” campaigns and cultural protection rhetoric lies a well-financed, western-orchestrated project: to erase, flatten, and rewrite who we are as African people. These anti-rights, anti-African movements claim to defend African tradition, yet they are far from indigenous. Their roots lie in transnational ultra-conservative networks that export Christian fundamentalist narratives, moral panic, and gender control across the Global South. From Nigeria to Uganda to Ghana, they infiltrate our legislatures, our schools, our pulpits—and most insidiously, our public imagination. At the core of these anti‑African campaigns is a sleight of hand: they conceal regressive politics in moral, cultural, and even “human‑rights” rhetoric. Three recurring tropes do the heavy lifting:
- Harmful narratives targeted at children, seeking to hinder children’s sense of liberty, restrict their self-actualisation, and breed stigma and violence-induced environments where children across all facets of society feel unsafe.
- Framing gender justice and the essence of Ubuntu as a “Western import”, in a bid to erase the existence of gender diversity and the spirit of community that is enmeshed in African history, while also receiving funding and being led by foreign far-right evangelicals.
- Insisting on nuclear family structure as the sole family structure with the aim of erasing centuries-long practices and diverse African family structures that are communal, matrilineal, polygamous, and queer.
Together, these narratives manufacture moral panic, obscure our histories, and justify laws that strip away bodily autonomy and cultural self‑determination. This conference is not just an event. It is a call to arms for all those invested in African liberation, knowledge, and becoming. It is a gathering for thinkers and healers, movement-builders and historians, feminists and freedom-seekers who refuse to let our futures be defined by coloniality. We invite you to join us for “Our African Family, Culture & Values”, a cross-disciplinary, cross-movement convening aimed at reframing public discourse on tradition, family, gender, and sexuality from a rigorously African, unapologetically decolonial lens. Together, we will:
- Dissect the rise of anti-rights ideology and its global architecture
- Recover precolonial kinship systems, ethics of care, and spiritual cosmologies
- Rethink what family means when we centre queer, feminist, and communal African lives.
- Reimagine an Africa where bodily autonomy, cultural self-determination, and radical solidarity are the foundation of our values, not their exception
Contribute to the richness of the conference by submitting an abstract in line with our themes, or register to attend the conference by clicking either of the links below.
Click here to learn more about submitting your abstract
Click here to Register
Call +234 813 435 7704 or email info@initiative4equality.org for enquiries.