Between Feminism and Pan-Africanism: A Charter’s Impossible Choice
Twenty African governments have now endorsed a document that promises economic independence and seed sovereignty while simultaneously moving to eliminate abortion rights and protections for queer citizens. The African Charter on Family, Sovereignty and Values presents those who champion both continental self-determination and gender equality with an impossible bargain: keep one principle, surrender the other.
Additional reference context is available at https://africasacountry.com/2026/08/between-feminism-and-pan-africanism.
The charter’s economic provisions are substantive. Article 8 directs African states to protect indigenous seed systems, reject uncontrolled genetically modified crops, and stop criminalizing the farmer-managed practices that have sustained the continent for centuries. It calls for 10 percent of agricultural spending to support these systems. Article 9 addresses the structural inequities that have long constrained African development: it names the debt trap, the dependence on selling raw commodities while importing finished goods, and the removal of tariff and non-tariff barriers to intra-African trade. The charter also documents a real frustration with how international agreements are negotiated, describing the late-night sessions and documents dumped on delegations in languages and timeframes designed to exhaust them, a dynamic that African diplomats have experienced repeatedly.
On these matters, the charter articulates positions that have animated pan-African advocacy for decades. It speaks directly to the continent’s right to determine its own economic future and to protect the knowledge systems and resources on which that future depends.
Then the document reaches for reproductive and sexual rights, and the word “sovereignty” transforms into something else entirely. Article 4 instructs governments to identify and repeal any legal instrument that undermines the family, as the charter defines it. This language targets abortion rights, the legalization of prostitution, what it calls the “autonomous sexual rights of minors,” and anything filed under “gender ideology” or the “LGBT agenda.” Article 7 goes further, reaffirming that there is no international right to abortion and directing states to reject every reference to sexual and reproductive health in every agreement they sign. Read plainly, this is an instruction to dismantle the Maputo Protocol, the African Union’s own instrument, which permits abortion when a pregnancy results from rape or incest or poses a threat to a woman’s mental, financial or physical health. The charter defines marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman and gender as binary, male or female, nothing else.
The origins of this document reveal the tensions it embodies. The charter was drafted alongside Family Watch International, an Arizona-based organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center designates a hate group. The organization’s president trains African legislators to lobby at the United Nations. The charter was championed by a president who has built his recent career on exporting anti-gay legislation. And in its own final article, the charter lists its inspiration: the Geneva Consensus Declaration, the Pompeo and Trump-era American project whose language on abortion it copies nearly word for word. This is the same declaration that Cameroon, Uganda, Senegal, Benin and others signed. A text claiming to defend African dignity against recolonization is itself an import, shaped by foreign anti-rights organizations and American policy priorities.
The adoption process has been opaque. Twenty governments endorsed the charter at a conference in Accra, but South Africa refused, stating the text could not be reconciled with its Bill of Rights or with the equal marriage rights it grants its citizens. Other states abstained. The full list of endorsing governments has not been published. The conference host and keynote speaker chairs the Conference of Speakers and Presidents of African Legislatures (COSPAL), the continental body now asked to adopt the charter. This same Speaker sent Ghana’s own anti-rights bill back for a tidier revote. When a text that claims to speak for the aspirations of African peoples cannot open its own guest list, you have learned something about whose will it is.
The charter presents a false choice. Banning toxic pesticides and gain-of-function research has never required policing a queer African’s body. Owning Africa’s minerals has never required a woman to die from a pregnancy that the law could have ended. These things should not be in tension. Someone needed them to be, so that others would trade one to win the other.
The question now is whether African citizens, particularly women and queer Africans, will be asked to pay the price for the continent’s assertion of economic independence. That price should never have been on the table.