conspiracy narratives from postcolonial africa: freemasonry, homosexuality, and illicit enrichment

Decoding conspiracy thinking at the nexus of sexuality, Freemasonry, and the occult.

In this book, anthropologists Rogers Orock and Peter Geschiere examine the moral panic over a perceived rise in homosexuality that engulfed Cameroon and Gabon beginning in the early twenty-first century. As they uncover the origins of the conspiratorial narratives that fed this obsession, they argue that the public’s fears were grounded in historically situated assumptions about the entanglement of same-sex practices, Freemasonry, and illicit enrichment.

This specific panic in postcolonial Central Africa fixated on high-ranking Masonic figures thought to lure younger men into sex in exchange for professional advancement. The authors’ thorough account shows how attacks on elites as homosexual predators corrupting the nation became a powerful outlet for mounting populist anger against the excesses and corruption of the national regimes. Unraveling these tensions, Orock and Geschiere present a genealogy of Freemasonry, taking readers from London through Paris to francophone Africa and revealing along the way how the colonial past shapes present-day anxieties linking same-sex practices to enrichment.

Rogers Orock is assistant professor of African and African American studies at Louisiana State University and a research fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is a coeditor of Elites and the Politics of Accountability in Africa. Peter Geschiere is professor emeritus of the anthropology of Africa at the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University. He is the author of several books, including Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust: Africa in Comparison, also published by the University of Chicago Press.