Stonewalling Accra

My London Pride plans were killed off by some dodgy prawns or a dodgy oxtail-rice-and-beans combo - I still haven’t narrowed down what it was that had me doubled-up in pain on Oxford Street this afternoon.
I felt an almost desperate need to go all Stonewall in response to the violently regressive responses to pride parades in Accra, Jerusalem, Moscow…. the list of places where you’d still get bottled for being gay is pretty damn long.
I’m most bothered by Accra. Ghana has an oddly rich historical gay culture, which somehow managed to survive colonialism and all those sunburned, jowly governor general types with Mandingo complexes (another post, another day).
The backlash in response to a proposed LGBT conference has involved writing homosexuality out of the countries cultural history and criminalising it.
Until 2004, gay marriage was, by default, legal but underground; anytime one was public it drew the usual polemic. Accra was never San Fransisco.
The key thing for me is the fact that before the resurgence of fundamental religion in Ghana, the country was actually relatively liberal; nobody felt the burning need to kill the gays.
Then poverty intensified, the Anglican Congress, the Vatican and the Islamic Council got their claws in (third world desperation is a massive growth market) and the country goes into a regressive spiral.
Because in a country with a 5% HIV prevalence rate, people being imprisoned in hospital because they can’t pay their medical bills, and patchy economic growth, the real threat is a little girl-on-girl action.