The Proper Family Values

An old woman wakes before dawn to braid a child who is not her granddaughter. Parliament is debating whether this counts.

Chorkor Landing Beach, Accra — 04:17am

The sea is still dark when Comfort rises. The ECG bill arrived last Thursday; she has read it twice and placed it face down under a bag of dried fish, as though shame could be managed through inversion. She moves through the two rooms by memory: past her eldest, fourteen, folded into sleep; past the curtained corner where her dead sister's child has kicked off his sheet again.

In the main room, her aunt is already awake. Sixty-eight and humming something from a woman twenty years dead, she sits on a low stool, working through the girl's hair in the half dark.

Nobody gave Comfort a certificate. No politician described her household as the foundation of a great nation. And yet every morning at 4:17am, something that functions unmistakably as a family assembles itself in the dark; structured around obligation, held together by love that has metabolized into something more durable than the word usually implies.

This is the family that does not appear in the speeches.

In the Ghana of official rhetoric in parliamentary debate, Sunday sermons, and radio broadcasts, the family looks different. Father, mother, legally married, biological children, under the same roof. Heterosexual. The unit upon which civilization rests, and under threat. What is curious is the history this rhetoric draws on, because the “tradition” it invokes was, in significant measure, manufactured — installed over an older and far more interesting arrangement it has since erased.

I. The Invented Tradition

The Akan say onipa na ohia onipa: a person needs people. Not which people, or under which roof.

Pre-colonial Ghanaian kinship bore little resemblance to the nuclear unit now presented as ancestral. Among the Akan, lineage and inheritance ran through the mother's blood — the abusua. Property travelled sideways, from a man to his sister's children, not downward to his own. Husbands and wives often lived in separate lineage compounds. An isolated nuclear household would have struck an eighteenth-century Akan elder as a sign that a family had failed to embed itself in anything larger.

Among the patrilineal Ewe, Ga, and Mole Dagbani, the domestic unit was still expansively extended. Twi preserved this generosity in its grammar — a mother's sister is also maame, mother; a father's brother is also papa, father. The concept of a child with no structural claim on anyone was inconceivable.

Basel and Wesleyan missionaries conditioned church membership, mission education, and access to a modernising economy on adopting the Western nuclear arrangement. The British codified it. The Marriage Ordinance of 1884 created a legal superclass of monogamous, state-registered marriages that conferred property rights unavailable under customary law. The nuclear family was not discovered in Ghana's past. It was installed.

When a politician speaks of defending “traditional Ghanaian family values,” whose tradition are they actually defending?

II. What the Census Knows

This question would be easier to dismiss if the gap between the idealised family and the existing one were philosophical. It is statistical.

Approximately 55% of Ghanaian children aged 0–17 live with both biological parents, according to the 2021 Population and Housing Census and the 2022 Ghana Demographic and Health Survey (GDHS). 30% live in single-parent households. Between 16% and 23% live with neither biological parent, raised by grandparents, aunts, older siblings, or through informal guardianship. This is not a breakdown. In most cases, it is the continuation of a structurally ancient practice under modern economic pressure.

These numbers describe young couples in Accra sharing a rented room for years, unable to afford a customary ceremony — too heterosexual to criminalise, too informal to champion. The woman from Tamale leaving her children with her mother to carry loads at Kantamanto, remitting via Mobile Money. The modern metabolism of the abusua.

III. The Vocabulary of Threat

“Family values” entered Ghanaian political discourse in the 1990s, centred on Western media corrupting youth. The architecture changed in the mid-2000s, when the World Congress of Families and aligned Western organisations formed institutional alliances with the National Coalition for Proper Human Sexual Rights and Family Values. Cultural anxiety was sharpened into a legislative instrument.

The Pentecostal and Charismatic churches contributed the theological reframe: the extended abusua rebranded as the source of “generational curses,” witchcraft, and financial drain. The aunties and uncles who once constituted the safety net became demonic vectors. The nuclear family was framed as spiritually superior.

By 2021, this had crystallised into the Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill. Passed by Parliament in February 2024 with bipartisan support, declined by President Akufo-Addo on constitutional grounds, dismissed by the Supreme Court as premature, reintroduced under President Mahama in 2026; text unchanged and contradictions intact.

Clauses 3 and 6 criminalise not acts but identities: a person who merely “holds themselves out” as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or as an ally faces two months to three years. Clause 16 requires parents and schools to report suspected violations. Clause 19 amends the Extradition Act to include offences under the bill, meaning violations could become extraditable under Ghana's international treaties. The bill's stated purpose is to protect families; its mechanism requires families to surveil each other. These provisions cannot coexist with Article 15(2)(b)'s prohibition on cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

IV. The Economy of Virtue

Why does the legislative push for moral clarity arrive precisely at moments of acute economic pain?

The cedi's volatility has become background noise. IMF structural adjustments. Dumsor. Youth unemployment between 12% and 19%. Landlords demanding two years' rent upfront. A government that cannot deliver material stability can still deliver moral clarity. Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Act bore rhetoric traced to American evangelical organisations whose strategies travelled a long distance to be presented as indigenous culture. The grammar in Accra is identical.

The deepest paradox: the extended kinship networks that might cushion economic shocks are themselves contracting under the same pressure the bill ignores. Families are becoming more nuclear — not because a legislature willed it, but because there is not enough left to share. The legislation celebrates an outcome economic strangulation had already arranged, then blames the casualties on a community that had nothing to do with it.

V. The People the Speeches Erase

The market women at Makola and Kejetia run susu circles; pooling contributions weekly, taking turns receiving the lump sum. When one woman's child is sick and she cannot cover the doctor's fee, the others cover it. No lawyer, no ordinance. Entirely real.

The grandparents in the Upper East, Upper West, and Northern Regions are raising grandchildren on subsistence agriculture, negligible pensions, and remittances from Accra or London. They are the living continuation of the fostering tradition. Invisible in a conversation that is not about what families do but what they should symbolise.

And then there is the category the legislation specifically targets. Queer Ghanaians have, under conditions of escalating legal threat, built kinship networks: mutual housing when biological families expel, financial coverage when employment is impossible, continuity across the fractures hostility creates. These networks perform precisely what the historic abusua performed: absorption, protection, the refusal to leave a person entirely alone. Organising such a network, under the proposed legislation, carries up to five years.

A procedural detail may prove more consequential. Article 108 of the 1992 Constitution prohibits a private member's bill from imposing charges on the Consolidated Fund. The Family Values Bill mandates state-funded medical interventions and specialised custodial arrangements. It was introduced as a private member's bill. The flaw may allow the Supreme Court to strike it down without touching the human rights questions. The World Bank has projected $3.8 billion in donor funding risks. The cost of moral clarity has a precise number.

Chorkor Landing Beach, Accra — 07:52am

By the time Comfort returns from the beach, the school bus is gone. Her aunt is in the courtyard washing clothes with the economical competence of fifty years of mornings. Comfort opens the ECG bill, looks at it, and places it face down again. Not yet. Her aunt begins to hum the nameless thing.

Nobody voted on whether Comfort's household is a family. No pastor blessed it. Its legitimacy was established through the accumulation of small acts — the braiding, the bus fare, the fish, the tea — that no legislation can create or destroy, only refuse to name.

Laws do not have to be constitutional to cause harm. They cause harm on their way to being overturned. A police officer who knows a law is on the books has a tool; a community that knows it has a climate. The families feeling this climate first are those already navigating invisibility — the informal cohabitants, the fostered children, the susu circles, the queer Ghanaians whose mutual care will be the first named illegal and the last mourned.

The word abusua describes a network of mutual obligation traced through blood but sustained through action. Missionaries rebranded it as spiritually dangerous. The economy is quietly dismantling it from the other direction. The legislation celebrates what both forces have already produced and calls the result tradition.

When the law has run its course, when the Supreme Court has ruled or declined to, Comfort's aunt will still wake before dawn to braid a child who is not her granddaughter.

The question is not whether that household is a family.

The question is what kind of country keeps deciding that it is not.

–
Brown is an activist and an advocate for change.

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