Homophobia in African Nations

 

This chart represents pooled data from dozens of AfroBarometer surveys from 2014 to the present (waves 6-10). It is the mean response to a question about how you feel about having homosexuals as neighbors, ranging from strongly dislike (1), dislike (2), don't care (3), like (4), strongly like (5), so the higher mean, the less homophobic - more or less.

I've divided the countries into groups using the African union regions for Central (blue), Eastern (purple), Northern (red), Southern (Orange) and Western (Green). It is interesting that the island nations (ST, MU, SC, CV) are generally less homophobic than the continental nations. And that the West African nations are fairly routinely homophobic, while the Southern African nations are highly varied.

There are many reasons to take this data with a grain of salt, despite the reasonably large sample size of 207,784, with 1,155 to 10,895 respondents per nation. Foremost is that the surveys are conducted in a variety of languages, where the meaning of the overall question and its response options may have different valences. Also, it is a face-to-face survey, and thus may reflect some desire on the part of respondents to say what they think the interviewer expects to hear from them - this can lead to herding towards one end of the scale or the other. I am less concerned about representativeness of the respondents - AfroBarometer does a very good job of systematically sampling througout each nation, and of the demographic mix within each sub-national region of the country.