An anti-gay, anti-sex-ed conference supported by the American religious right is coming to Cape Town next year. It will be as awful as you’d imagine.
The Africa Christian Professionals Forum (ACPF) has announced that the 3rd Pan-African Conference on Family Values will convene in Cape Town from 12 to 15 May 2027, hosted locally by Errol Naidoo’s Family Policy Institute.
Delegates will gather, in the organisers’ words, to “defend the sanctity of human life, strengthen families, safeguard religious freedom, and promote Africa’s biblical and indigenous values”.
Every word of that mission statement is dishonest.
“Pan-African”
The previous edition of this conference, held in Nairobi in May 2025, initially advertised a speaker line-up that did not contain a single African.
It consisted of white men from the Family Research Council, Living Hope Ministries and Poland’s Ordo Iuris, flown in to instruct Kenyans on the authentic values of the African family.
Kenyans on social media noticed. “White men flying in to tell us about our families? The irony is suffocating,” one wrote.
The ACPF’s own website lists its partners: the Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation, Family Watch International, Ordo Iuris, Alliance Defending Freedom International, Christian Council International, and the Institute for Women’s Health.
That is a roll-call of the American and European religious right. The Family Research Council’s own house organ described the Nairobi gathering as resistance to a “new colonialism” from the West – apparently without a flicker of self-awareness that a Washington lobby group bankrolling a continental campaign to rewrite African laws sounds awfully like a new colonialism, which, like the original, comes dressed in missionary robes.
Whatever this conference is, “pan-African” it is not.
“Indigenous values”
The nuclear family the conference wishes to enshrine in law – two married adults of opposite sexes and their offspring, a self-contained cell of Victorian respectability – is traditional in the Judaeo-Christian West.
It is not traditional in or indigenous to Africa. Pre-colonial African societies were built on extended kinship networks, polygamous households, age-set structures, and child-rearing distributed across grandparents, aunts, uncles and clans.
It takes a village, as the saying goes.
It was colonial administrators and missionaries who set about compressing this rich diversity into the monogamous nuclear mould, inventing “African traditions” to suit, as Patrick Gathara has argued.
Today’s African families remain gloriously varied: extended, blended, single-parent, grandparent-led, adoptive, and sometimes same-sex.
“Strengthen families”
Regardless of tradition, any configuration of family in which people love, provide and care for one another deserves the same rights, freedoms, respect and social recognition as every other.
That principle is clearly implied in South Africa’s Constitution, and ought to be enshrined in any legal framework based on individual freedom and equal rights.
It is perfectly fine to express the view that a nuclear family is an ideal structure to support child-raising and social cohesion. In many cases, it does. In many other cases, that same nuclear family is the source of childhood abuse, sexual repression, and lifelong mental scars.
So, it is not fine to make that preference a legal onus on everyone else.
A conference that anoints one family configuration as legitimate and condemns the rest as pathological, and preferably illegal, is not strengthening African families. It is defaming them.
And it is certainly not defending freedom, whether religious or otherwise.
“Promote”
Then there is “promote”. At the Nairobi conference of 2025, discussions focused on aligning national laws and treaty obligations with faith-based principles. The movement is now pushing a Draft African Charter on Family Sovereignty and Values upon the African Union, designed to write same-sex families out of the definition of family and roll back rights relating to gender, sexuality, comprehensive sex education, and reproductive decisions.
This is not to “promote”. It is not mere evangelism. It is a lobbying campaign intended to enact the tenets of one religion as binding law upon everyone.
Religious values
Here we arrive at the heart of the matter. Regular readers will know that I am not a Christian, and object to many aspects of religion. However, I bear Christians no ill will, and do not deny their freedom to worship, to preach, to raise their children in their faith, and to order their own households by their own lights.
But that is precisely the point: religious values bind only the religious. They oblige those who subscribe to them, and nobody else.
These pressure groups talk about “religious freedom”, but what they mean is the freedom to impose their religious values upon everyone else through legislation. That is not “religious freedom”. That is religious oppression.
The moment a faith reaches for the machinery of the state to impose its moral code upon citizens who believe differently, or not at all, it ceases to be a freely-exercised religion and becomes a theonomic tyranny.
This is a tyranny of the majority that is every bit as corrosive of freedom and individual conscience as the Muslim theocracies these same Christian conservatives profess to abhor.
There is no difference in principle between enforcing Biblical sexual morality by statute and enforcing Sharia law by statute. The only difference is whose ancient commandments are enforced.
Public schooling
Nowhere is this imposition more insidious than in public schooling, where the state holds a captive audience of other people’s children.
The conference movement campaigns explicitly against comprehensive sexuality education, with Naidoo’s FPI running a “Campaign to Stop CSE” in favour of abstinence-centred alternatives.
Teaching children only what Christian doctrine sanctions – abstinence until marriage, and nothing else – is not moral instruction. It is wilful neglect. Teenagers explore their sexuality whether preachers approve or not; they always have. Denying them accurate knowledge of contraception, consent and disease prevention does not produce chastity. It produces pregnancy and HIV.
And in a country where sexual violence is endemic and many girls are not even free to say “no”, building policy on the fantasy that abstinence is merely a matter of choice, of self-denial, of virtue, is a cruelty dressed up as morality. Abstinence-only education for such a girl is a lecture on temperance delivered to someone being force-fed.
Homosexuality
The same logic applies to the conference’s core obsession: homosexuality.
Tolerance of how other people choose to live their lives, provided they harm no one, is the first civic virtue of a free society. It is therefore perfectly legitimate – indeed, salutary – to teach children that homosexual relationships are as valid and respectable as heterosexual ones, and that there is nothing wrong with non-binary gender expression.
That is not “indoctrination”. It is instruction in the equal dignity of their fellow citizens, which our Constitution takes as foundational.
No child has ever benefited from being taught that they are abnormal or sinful, and no gay child has ever been argued straight by a pastor. Such teaching does not produce fewer gay people. It produces more broken ones.
Religious conservatives will protest that they don’t hate gay people; they merely object to having their sexuality “flaunted” in public.
This is a motte-and-bailey fallacy. The bailey – the expansive territory they actually want to hold – is public policy denying LGBTQ+ people equal rights in marriage, adoption, education and public expression.
The motte – the defensible tower they retreat to when challenged – is distaste for the raunchier displays at Pride marches. But one can disapprove of lewd public behaviour, as many gay people themselves do, without extending that disapproval to the great majority of gay people who simply want to live, love and be left alone.
Objecting to a crude parade float is not a licence to legislate against perfectly decent people and their families.
“Traditional family values”
So, the “traditional family values” that will be on offer in Cape Town next May are not traditional, not African, not for all families, and not values in any sense a free society should recognise in law.
Like Christianity itself, they are a colonial import. That is fine. Imports often enrich us. But an import demanding legal supremacy over every competing belief, is not fine at all.
The programme is illiberal, prejudicial, and hateful towards everyone who declines to conform to fundamentalist Christian mores, and it wraps all this in a flag of popular authenticity to which it has no claim.
“Religious freedom”
Does the conference have the right to convene on South African soil? Absolutely. Freedom of speech, belief and assembly protect views we detest, or they protect nothing.
I will not join calls to ban it, and those tempted to do so should remember that censorship is a weapon that changes hands.
But the right to speak is not a right to go unchallenged, and it is certainly not a right to enact the beliefs of their specific religious faction as law that binds a dozen religions, and the irreligious alike.
The flipside of free speech is that speech may be answered, criticised, ridiculed and condemned – and this speech richly deserves to be condemned.
The delegates arriving in May 2027 will find themselves in a constitutional democracy that protects their freedom to gather precisely because it refuses to dictate to anyone what they must believe.
They are welcome to enjoy the irony, but we should be free to condemn the threat to South Africa’s liberal constitutional order that their mission to influence public policy poses.
To the conference organisers, I say this: your religion binds you, not all of us. If it were otherwise, we would not have the religious freedom which you claim to hold so dear.
[Image: Errol Naidoo.webp
Caption: Errol Naidoo, founder and CEO of the Family Policy Institute and board member of the Africa Christian Professionals Forum, which is organising the 3rd Pan-African Conference on Family Values in Cape Town in May 2027. With him is his wife, Arlene. (Photo: Family Policy Institute.)]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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