When was the last time imperialists draped in the cloak of morality set foot on the African continent? Wasn’t it just before they forcefully took our land, our resources, and our lives?

Today, their spiritual descendants gather once more—this time cloaked in Pan-Africanism—to teach us how to be “moral.” But we know the script. We recognize the costumes. And this time, we refuse to play the role they’ve written for us.

It is well established by countless historians that the centuries-long plundering of the world was not initiated by African families or people. We were not the ones who left our continent to loot, kill, rape, and destroy entire civilizations in the pursuit of shiny trinkets and imperial greed.

Yet, in a strange and insulting twist of events, a conference that desecrates African history is being held in Nairobi, Kenya—ironically, the land of an anti-colonial resistance like the Mau Mau fighters. This gathering, branded as the Pan-African Family Values Conference, is led predominantly by men from the far-right evangelical movement in America and Europe. Their mission? To defend, as they claim, “the institution of the family as willed and made by God in the Garden of Eden.”

But in the spirit of the Akan people’s tradition of Sankofa—to return to the past in order to move forward—we know that African families, and African people in general, have never been a point of care or interest to the imperial core or its foot soldiers. In truth, African lives were always viewed as obstacles standing in the way of empire’s endless hunger for the richness of our land.

Because of this, African people have endured generations of systemic erasure: through enslavement, genocides, colonial holocausts, apartheid, mutilation, and the deliberate destruction of our family systems and community networks.

Were it not for the resistance of our ancestors—like the Mau Mau, Queen Muhumuza, Thomas Sankara, Winnie Nomzamo Madikizela-Mandela, and many more whose names echo across time—we would not be here.

The intention to erase and control did not end with the lowering of colonial flags. It has simply evolved into more elusive forms. At this conference, it re-emerges—not as a roomful of imperialists at the Berlin Conference, but as foreign agents co-opting the language of African liberation. Imperialists and colonisers are mimicking the talk of liberation but we shall know them by their intentions.

In this piece we unmask 5 intentions of these neo-colonialists that have one goal in mind, to curb African dignity and stall and hinder our liberation. This is what the imperialists want to do;-

1. Erasing Africa’s Rich Diversity of Families

This conference promotes the notion that the “nuclear Christian family” is the only legitimate African family model. However, this structure is not rooted in African traditions—it is a foreign imposition. Historically, African family systems have been diverse: communal child-rearing, extended kinship networks, and fluid relational structures were—and remain—commonplace. Enforcing a singular, rigid model erases the richness of our heritage.

At the heart of this Eurocentric familial agenda is the intent to dismantle self-sustaining family systems and replace them with isolated nuclear units—units that are more easily exploited and rendered economically dependent on capitalist structures. This model also creates masses of vulnerable individuals—those who are excluded and rejected within the nuclear family structure. Stripped of familial support, their destitution becomes fertile ground for exploitation, serving the ends of neocapitalism through cheap, disposable labor or as shock absorbers for failing capitalist systems.

Professor of Sociology, Mwizenge S Tembo explains this well in their paper The Traditional African Family

 

2. Waging War on African Sexual and Gender Minorities

By promoting the marginalization of sexual minorities under the guise of “values,” the conference fuels policies and social attitudes that endanger Africans who are sexual minorities and gender expansive. These identities are neither un-African nor inhuman—such populations have existed within African societies long before colonial borders were imposed. What is truly un-African is the violence and exclusion now justified through imported religious and cultural narratives—narratives designed to serve imperialist goals of control and conformity.

The war waged on African sexual and gender minorities is, in truth, a war waged on Africans themselves—an extension of empire’s insatiable thirst for African blood and erasure through mass death. As if the four-century holocaust of massacres, land theft, the transatlantic slave trade, and the brutalities of settler colonialism were not enough. We must remember: the “undesirables” of empire—those it labels inhuman—are defined not by morality, but by convenience, shifting according to where its interests lie. We must resist the manufactured consent that justifies the persecution and killing of people of African descent.

Prof Sylvia Tamale has researched and written extensively about the humane ways that African traditional societies treated people of varying sexual and gender minorities in her book African Sexualities

 

3. Undermining African Women’s Autonomy

Beneath the rhetoric of “morality” lies a calculated assault on the rights of African women and girls to make decisions about their own bodies and lives. These agendas are heavily financed by global right-wing actors who seek to restrict access to sexual and reproductive health care, deny bodily autonomy, and reassert patriarchal dominance—thinly veiled as moral concern.

The ultimate aim is clear: to return women and girls to the patriarchal dream of a defenseless gender—rendered into an endlessly exploitable beast of burden and beast of pleasure on which neoliberalism and capitalism can thrive. This assault undermines decades of hard-won progress by African feminist movements and is driven by nothing more than a desire to reinforce power structures that benefit the few at the expense of the many.

Boris Bertolt writes expansively about this in, Thinking otherwise: theorizing the colonial/
modern gender system in Africa as well as Professor Sylvia Tamale in Decolonisation and Afrofeminism

4. Reviving Missionary Colonialism in New Clothes

Rudyard Kipling, in his poem titled “The White Man’s Burden,” writes, “Your new-caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child”—a reference to the racist European belief that Africans were perceived as both childlike and devilish at the same time. This infantilisation and demonisation of African people was used to justify the invasion of the continent through religious missionaries who came to take up this so-called “White Man’s Burden.”

The religious forces driving this conference mirror those that once colonized Africa—bearing crosses in one hand and chains in the other. Today’s far-right evangelical movements continue that legacy, repackaging spiritual coercion and social control as “faith.” Their goal is not spiritual growth but ideological domination: to silence pluralism and reimpose Western moral hierarchies across African societies.

History reminds us that missionary colonialism was one of empire’s most potent tools for capturing African bodies, lands, labor, and mineral wealth. Its purpose was to sever African people’s ties to their homeland—redirecting their focus to an afterlife, severing their bonds with each other by manufacturing kinship and loyalty to empire through religion, and sowing enmity through religious differences. It sought to extinguish the spirit of resistance through the doctrine of “forgive and forget.”

In Partition of Africa, Ugandan professor Ssempebwa writes, “Tucker, a British Missionary interpreted the 1900 Buganda Agreement to the regents of Kabaka Daudi Chwa II. This led to loss of political, economic and social powers to the British protectorate government. Sir Harry John stone who signed on behalf of the British government confessed that;

“I John stone shall be bound to acknowledge the assistance offered to me by the missionaries especially the CMS. Without their assistance on my side, I do not think Uganda’s chiefs would agree to the treaty which practically places their country and land in the British hands.”

 

5. Distracting from Real Exploitation and Crisis

While they pontificate on “values,” the Global North continues to plunder Africa—extracting minerals, displacing communities, and exploiting labor. 

Our African continent has been gutted and disembowelled to get critical minerals to fund development in the west, families have been forcefully displaced by mega-corporations and companies taking over native land to build industries that benefit the waste, our land and water sources are steaming and bubbling with toxic waste from the Global North’s industry led extraction. African families are being exterminated systematically every day, every year. 

The moral panic stoked by this conference is a deliberate distraction from a sinister evil. It diverts attention from land grabs, economic imperialism, and environmental devastation, keeping us embroiled in manufactured culture wars while our futures are quietly sold off.

Read how How Europe Underdeveloped Africa By Walter Rodney (2018)

The world is not falling apart because of African family values—it is falling apart because of imperialism and its glaring absence of human-centered values.

We urge African people to stay focused and not be misled by white agendas cloaked in Black faces. Join the resistance by sharing these consciousness-raising truths