Researching homosexuality in Ghana and its implication on the researcher: reflections from the field

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses methodological reflections based on an empirical research project on gay rights advocacies in Ghana. It engages the possibility of emotional harm on researchers in the fieldwork that may not be inherently captured by universities’ ethical procedures. In the event that ethical procedures consider harm to the researcher, the word ‘harm’ is often defined within the parameters of physical injury and not emotional ones. This paper concludes that researchers dealing with ‘vulnerable’ participants should be better equipped in terms of building emotional fortitude. This could be attained by making emotionality a part of research ethical processes. This would help deal with the attendant emotional rollercoaster researchers experience on the field. This is important because being conscious of emotionality shapes the way researchers perceive and relate to the underlying emotions that accompany the narrations of research participants in the quest to be reflexive.

KEYWORDS:

• Homosexuality
• Ghana
• methodology
• Africa
• gay

1. Introduction

As a researcher with human rights law background, I set out to answer these research questions: what are the complications of gay rights advocacies in Ghana? what are the complications of the resistances to gay rights advocacies? The purpose of that research was to tease out these complications with the critical scrutiny they deserve. The motivation stemmed from the fact that this important area is under-researched reflecting the silences and the taboo tag that engulf homosexualities in Ghana. Ethnographers and anthropologists with foreign names like Robert Rattray (1923); Wolf Bleek (1976); James Christensen (1954); Jack Goody (1956 and 1967); Sean Hawkings (2002) and Stephen Miescher (2005) did extensive studies in different parts of Ghana. None of them discusses homosexualities in detail (for a rare exception see O’Mara, 2007, 2013). Wolf Bleek in particular wonders why scholars before him barely mention homosexualities in Ghana and so he was ‘always attentive’ to the possibility of its practice and spoke to students about it (Bleek, 1976, p. 50). Yet he manages to provide only one paragraph on homosexualities out of his brilliantly articulated three hundred and forty-three pages (1976, pp. 50–51). He concludes that ‘homosexuality among boys is extremely rare, so rare that they hardly have any idea of it’ (p. 50). Possibly, Bleek like the others before him missed the realms of unnaming and unspokenness that regulate homosexualities, particularly amongst males.

Ghanaian academics who can appreciate and understand the context barely write about the subject. To provide examples, an important book by Oppong et al. (2006) discussing ‘Sex and Gender in an Era of AIDS’ with tons of first-hand accounts and data from the field overlooks the subject of homosexualities. Anarfi & Owusu (2010) study the ‘The Making of a Sexual Being in Ghana’ but does not engage homosexualities. The word ‘lesbian’ appears twice and the phrase ‘men who have sex with men’ appear once (p. 7). Both are given a peripheral mention without in-depth analysis in that important article.

As a citizen of Ghana, it made academic, ethnographical and anthropological sense to study this important area to provide the nuance it deserves. My background, ability to speak the languages, local knowledge and understandings massively paid off as that influenced my appreciation of the sensitive nature of the topic and the human subjects I dealt with. This provided a comparative advantage over a researcher who might be new to the terrain. I knew that I had chosen a sensitive and daunting topic that involves the theoretical interplay of queer, postcolonial, race, human rights, and gay and lesbian. Yet it was not the theoretical complexities that took me by surprise or became the most challenging part of the research journey. I was prepared for that. It was rather the ups and downs that accompanied the data gathering procedures which involved speaking to stakeholders in the field including gay men. For instance, my expectation to be welcomed as an insider because I am Ghanaian and appreciated the context was dashed as I found that my straightness and being a bɔga necessitated a more complex approach to ideas of ethnographic and anthropological ‘insider-ness’.¹

The purpose of this paper is therefore to present some methodological reflections and challenges drawn from my engagement with gays and those who work for and against them in the specific context of Ghana as a researcher and how that impacted me and my emotions. It discusses the deficiencies of the ethical protocols in preparing a black African to research homosexualities in an African country. Finally, it provides recommendations for the issues raised.

Before going on to tell the story and lessons from the field, let me clarify a point on terminologies. I use and interchange words such as ‘gays’, ‘homosexuals’, ‘homosexualities’ and ‘lesbians.’ This paper acknowledges they have diverse meanings over different periods and in different contexts (McConnell-Ginet, 2011). Dealing with those is not the focus here. Nor is it the intention to discuss homosexualities in detail here. I simply used the words to reflect the empirical side and for easily recognition purposes, and not because I endorse the cultural, social or political (and at times the derogative) meanings they imply. In Ghana, the people and press reports use such terms mundanely to describe same sex relationships and expressions (see e.g. Ghanaweb, 2010).

2. Background: current state of affairs for gays in Ghana

In the words of a founding official of gay rights advocacy group in Ghana, gay rights advocacies are about the respect for freedom of choice and sexual rights as well as the demand for cultural and legal recognition:

We advocate that sexual rights are human rights … We demand that stigma and discrimination toward gays and lesbians should stop … We encourage and educate gays and lesbians to know their basic rights … We demand legal representation of accused gays and lesbians (Interview, CEPEHRG, 20.11.15).

A respondent who self identifies as a gay man in his quest to define gay rights advocacies relates them to the principle of equality and non-discrimination:

I do not know the freedom that people want but to me, I am thinking we should be treated equally like how the straight people are treated … They should not discriminate because it is not fair … We are all humans (Interview, Ntow, 04.12.15).

From the above, gay rights advocacies are demands or claims individuals or groups make to governments and/or civil society for favourable policies, favourable legal changes and favourable attitudinal changes for and on behalf of gay people. The demands for rights and recognition for gay people entered into the public domain in the year 2006. That year was the watershed year that challenged the silences and inconspicuousness around homosexualities in Ghana. The gay community faced the press and answered questions about gayness. For instance, Ghanaian advocates like Mac-Darling Cobbinah and Patrick MacDonalds have since 2006 actively engaged the Ghanaian press and politicians with various demands (see e.g. Cobbinah, 2014; Ghanaweb, 2006a). Since that year, there has been pressure by advocates (both local and international) to change or update the Ghanaian ‘sodomy laws’ which are organised around loose words neither blatantly condemning nor recognising same-sex desires. There is also a demand for specific rights and protections for homosexuals notwithstanding the fundamental human rights enshrined and guaranteed in the 1992 Constitution of Ghana. Yet, Ghana not unlike many formerly colonised states defends the retention of ‘anti-gay laws’.

My research established three main complications associated with gay rights advocacies in Ghana. The first is the ‘complications of politicisation’ where gay rights demands have been inadvertently politicised. In Ghana, there are tensions between national and international stances on gay rights. As international advocates mainly seek reforms in the Ghanaian laws to favour gays amongst other demands, national detractors dismiss their demands as colonial and imperial. The second is the 'complications of silencing and polarisation'. Gay rights advocates assume that gays are a universal category who should ideally manifest in certain ‘approved’ ways often reflecting the idea of being proud and out of the closet (Massad, 2007). This then implies that gays face similar challenges that could be remedied with the proliferation of new (gay) rights and activisms. But as these characteristics may not be present in all societies for manifold reasons, gay rights advocates are criticised as inadvertently projecting Western understandings of sexualities (Epprecht, 2013). Hence detractors dismiss gay rights as Western inventions with little or no contextual relevance to the rest of the world.

I call the third the ‘complications of prioritisation’ where advocates project gay rights to the detriment of other important areas. That is, despite the sheer poverty many Ghanaians endure, critics argue that gay rights advocacies overlook the socio-economic disparities between countries (like the UK) that propose gay rights and Ghana that reject them as not priorities (Kennedy, 2013; Oquaye, 2011). In other words, as gay rights advocates highlight the hierarchies found in sexualities, their opponents constantly bring to their attention the hierarchies and disparities within the global economic redistribution.

All in all, as advocates trumpet gay rights, the Ghanaian public confronts them with stiff resistances thereby stoking tension.

3. The place of emotions and researcher’s involvement in ethnographic research

An unexpected aspect of the process of data gathering was to do with the emotional roller-coaster I experienced. The emotional imbalances encountered during the study were neither given any consideration by me nor captured by the university’s ethical processes. As a black African researching gay rights, I was faced with several personal and intimate questions regularly. My immediate family, colleagues, friends and research respondents often asked and wondered why I have dedicated years of my adult life studying homosexuality (of all subjects) and spending a lot of human capital in the process. Others put their questions quite bluntly. I lost count of the number of times I was asked either jovially or seriously this question: ‘Are you gay?’ When I answered in the negative, their natural next question was ‘Why are you doing this research?’ I also lost count of the number of times people associated or linked me directly to the topic by asking if I was promoting or against gay rights.

I am a Ghanaian. Yet to many other Ghanaians, I am also a bɔga. This implies to them that, I have been ‘westernised’, and hence they externalised me to foreignness. Whenever I mentioned gay rights, Ghanaian friends, acquaintances, interviewees, and survey respondents thought I was promoting gay rights. In England, being a black African male studying gayness meant something different. I was often approached with two options. The first was that I was aligned with Africans who challenge gay rights by reifying cultural positions. The second was that as an African, now ‘westernised’ by the mere fact that I know England and have studied in English universities, I was perceived as seeking to promote gay rights in my country of origin. In both cases, it took several conversations (and at times still failed) to convince some people that I sought to do none of the above.

It could be seen here that I turned a participant in my research not from the point of view of participant observation but as a person being researched by all manner of people including my research respondents. This experience evoked different emotions. The initial feeling was that of anger and frustration for being made to answer questions to an area that I was hitherto exploring had no emotional attachment to. I later learnt that it is very common that those who work on sexualities are linked directly to the subject of enquiry. One of my elite interviewees relayed to me that ‘people who work in a professional environment that involves gay people are often stigmatised and called names although they may not self-identify as being gays’ (Interview, Ama, 21.2.15).

This however revealed a more complex dynamic about me as a researcher than I had anticipated. For instance, would I have been emotionally drained if I were gay? It revealed a normalised journey of homophobia that I had hitherto not considered which then made me uncomfortable. Moreover, my claim that the research was purely academic, and an objective exercise was problematic. That is, it became apparent that amid the messy legacies of colonialisation, racism and westernisation in Ghana my claim to objectivity only maintained normalised systems of (male, ‘African’, straight) privilege. This partly explained the different emotions of anger, frustration and guilt that I experienced.

The sense of my powerlessness in the face of real challenges hit home when one of the interviewees (a young Ghanaian gay man) asked what I could do to help him. Almost all the gay men I interviewed recounted the harshness of their everyday lives. Most of their stories had underlying economic issues. The sheer poverty witnessed could make the toughest of persons concerned. To me, it was an academic exercise. To them, it was time to pour out some of the frustrations that went beyond my research demands. This pointed out my relatively privileged position of being able to live my everyday life studying and travelling between England and Ghana without such socio-economic pressures. Hopefully, the academic exercise embarked upon influences international and local stakeholders in Ghana to find meaningful solutions to some of the issues that were raised in that research. Yet one immediate concern addressed directly to me and framed in a rather simple question of what I could do to help to date remains unanswered.

Fortunately, these made me appreciate the emotional distress my research subjected the participants to as discussed by Bourne (1998) and Mitchell & Irvine (2008). The emotions involved did not just make me appreciate the lived realities of participants but also offered a greater understanding of the area of research thereby leading to enhanced interpretation and elucidation of the data gathered (Howarth, 1998; Watts, 2008). This is what Clarke et al. (2015) call ‘researching with feeling’ and Mclaughlin (2006) terms ‘the feeling of finding out: the role of emotions in research’ where emotions, thinking and research are inextricably intertwined and important to our epistemological quest.

Like me, the university ethics processes did not recognise these issues let alone prepare a black straight male scholar to conduct sensitive research on gay rights in an African country. There is close to nothing on emotional wellbeing within the ethical procedures. Several meetings were held with the ethical review committee to think through the ethical issues thrown up by a study of this kind and how to adequately resolve them but nothing of this (emotional) sort was on the agenda. This paper, therefore, posits that the emotional well-being of the researcher is key to data gathering and should be given consideration in the ethical guidance of research institutions. Vincett (2018, p. 44) advances a similar point:

institutional ethics policies or research training programmes may not provide guidance, yet emotions are an integral part of research, particularly for ethnographers immersed in the field or those working with sensitive topics or vulnerable or marginalized people.

4. Methodology, ethical considerations and my reflective account

I used a qualitative methodology. The specific method employed was a case study where data was gathered through the conduct of interviews and a survey. The interviews and survey allowed grasp not only of what people say or do but also the reasoning behind the reactions, rhetoric, politics, and expressions (Babb, 2012; Kvale, 1996; Yin, 2003). I had to find out from the people who are in the position to offer insightful thoughts on the demands for gay rights and the resistances such demands face. Elite interviews proved essential for this quest.² The main challenge was that there are not many elites specifically working on gayness and gay rights in Ghana. This is due to the ‘societal stigmatisation that comes with the job’ as explained by one of them (Interview, Ama, 21.2.15). For the same reason, even the few elites involved were hesitant in granting interviews. Another possible explanation is the silences that overshadow discussions about homosexuality in general. Hence, many of the elites did not want to talk. In the end, I spoke to former and current senior officials of government agencies like the Ministry of Health, the Ghana Aids Commission, the Ministry of Justice and Attorney General, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The second part of the interview targeted Ghanaians who self-identified as gay men. This category of people was harder to identify. This is because, even when it was whispered to me that someone could be gay, it was difficult to approach them with personalised questions on their sexuality. Again, as I later learned, most gay men in Ghana are not used to answering interview questions reflecting the regime of don’t ask, don’t tell governing sexualities in Ghana. In the end and not unlike the elite interview, it was through the snowballing technique that I got in contact with all the gay men I interviewed. Unlike the interviews that targeted experts and gay men, there were no criteria attached to the selection of respondents for the survey. All Ghanaians were eligible to complete the survey, which garnered one hundred and twenty-two responses at the end. Respondents were reached through internet contacts like Facebook and emails.

The nature of the research topic made ethical considerations one of the most important aspects of the data gathering processes. These included the respondent’s right to know; right to protection; right to privacy; right to confidentiality and anonymity; and accurate reporting of results (Gregory, 2003; Iphofen, 2009). Within the social sciences, minimal or no physical harm is expected on participants and researchers compared to the physical sciences (Babbie, 2013). Yet the socio-cultural context within which the chunk of the data was collected presented various challenges. Tension builds up as soon as the word ‘gay’ is mentioned in conversations. There was also the potential for stigmatisation, discrimination, loss of jobs, and other harms. On behalf of the interviewees, there were significant considerations toward beneficence or the avoidance of harm (Burnham et al., 2008, p. 286). For instance, a self-identified gay man I spoke to told me that he did not want anyone to hear him discussing gay rights and offered to talk only in a secluded place at a particular time. I had to keep trying until he secured a location he deemed safe enough for him to speak freely. The constraints within which some of the interviewees found themselves put them in distressing moments, particularly when recounting their (gay) stories. I used varied means to avert fears and assured them about the safety of the information they were providing and the protection of their identities.

Reflexivity brought to mind that my ideology, sexuality, background, and socio-economic disposition were crucial to the knowledge that I sought to produce.³ The insider/outsider dilemma dynamics forced me to self-confess my inclinations and biases, none so prominent than my sexuality. I had to constantly remind people of who I am and my sexuality. As argued by Adkins (2002), it became necessary for me to confess and out myself as proof of my reflexivity. This ‘outing’ of myself partly informed how my respondents related to me. Some of my respondents seemed enthusiastic about the prospects of my research topic and were keen on a black African man researching on gay rights in Ghana. The feeling was that at last, they had a Ghanaian researcher who is interested in their sexuality and their lives and can appreciate their language and context. They, therefore, spoke freely intermixing the Twi language with English and pidgin. They also used common Ghanaian slangs/terms and they knew I understood them well.

Others (especially some of the gay men and the pro-gay activists) were ‘disappointed’ with my sexuality and saw me as an outsider. They held that mostly it is gays who tend to study gayness. Some claimed that gays might appreciate the issues better than someone who was not gay. And that my ‘straightness’ might influence my position on the subject area. Although these contentions were far from my intentions, they made me mindful of my tendency as a researcher to have ideological leanings on the gay/straight dichotomy and how I mitigate it. For example, apart from the theoretical grounding that required familiarising with several pages of queer, gay and lesbian and sexuality literature, I listened to interviews by Ghanaian gay men, watched pro-gay-rights videos, followed (gay) events in Ghana, and observed gay websites to enhance my understanding of the case under study.

5. Conclusion

In this paper, I have discussed methodological reflections based on an empirical research project on gay rights advocacies in Ghana. To reiterate, on the one hand, advocates demand cultural and legal recognition of gay people in Ghana. On the other hand, detractors resist the demands vehemently thereby stoking tension. The tension is not only felt by those involved in the advocacies and the resistances but also those who research the area.

This work establishes that the researcher’s emotional well-being which is an integral component of fieldwork is largely overlooked and not innately captured by universities’ ethical procedures. This situation could be averted by paying attention to researchers and the potential harm that could befall them. Harm should not be seen only in the light of physical harm but also the emotional and psychological challenges that the researcher could face. This is particularly necessary when researchers are dealing with ‘marginalised’ groups.

The point is not to compare my experiences to the realities of my research respondents to establish equivalence and similarity of experiences to make a case for researchers at the expense of respondents. As established, my privileged position cannot be compared to the harsh realities of some of the people I interviewed. What I wish to foreground is that once emotionality becomes part of perceived harm that could befall a researcher, such considerations become given and/or enhanced for respondents. After all, it is researchers who sit between the ethical bureaucracies and respondents and the emotions the former feel can affect their actions and the action of the latter. This study like others (see Caetano, 2015; Holland, 2007; Solberg, 2014; Suen, 2015) concludes that emotions are integral to our epistemological pursuits as researchers as they add force to our quest to understand, analyse, and interpret data.

It is important to consider the ‘emotionality of the research encounter’ to borrow from Woodthorpe (2009) who argues that recognising ‘emotional responses can both contribute and distract from the research process.’ It is encouraging to see that recent studies from authors such as Granek (2017) are paying attention to the tremendous amount of mental, emotional, or physical energy and their potential effects on the researcher’s well-being. Although there are few exceptions (like Melville & Hincks, 2016) I must add that such studies have been overly concentrated on the health sciences and that same scholarly attention could be granted to the social sciences.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nana Kwame Kyeretwie Agyeman

Dr Nana Kwame Kyeretwie Agyeman is a Lecturer in Law and Programme Lead for Law & Criminology at Leeds Trinity University. He is an expert in international human rights law, public international law and public law. He sits on the research advisory board of ‘Modern Marronage’, a project that aims at exploring ‘the pursuit and practice of freedom in the contemporary world’ at the University of Bristol (England). His research interests lie broadly in human rights law, international law and the intersection between law and sexuality.

Notes

1. Bɔga is a Ghanaian term/slang used to describe a Ghanaian who is returning from a Western country (Neilson, 2015).

2. ‘Elites’ in this sense are people who occupy important professional or political positions and can provide well-informed data on gay rights and gayness (see Babb, 2012, p. 301).

3. Several definitions have been given for the term ‘reflexivity’ (see Finlay, 2002; Hertz, 1997). The one given by Yip (2008) was particularly relevant to this work as he defines the term in broader terms as follows: ‘reflexivity refers to the researcher’s commitment to producing situated, unalienated, and reflexive knowledge that is sensitive to her ideology and partial location, as well as the presence and working of power in the research process, particularly between the researcher and the researched, and other associated ethical considerations that structure the production of knowledge.’