Across Africa, debates about cultural preservation and traditional values are increasingly being influenced by forces that promote conservative social agendas rooted in colonial and missionary legacies. These movements, often backed by generous Western funding, seek to impose rigid, exclusionary values that contradict the continent’s diverse and historically dynamic cultures.

A recent example of this dynamic played out last week in Nairobi, where the second Pan-African Conference on Family Values organised by the Africa Christian Professionals Forum sparked controversy by claiming to defend “traditional” African family values.

The event’s foreign supporters, including the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam) and Family Watch International, are known for their opposition to LGBTQ rights, reproductive health, and comprehensive sex education.

These organisations, some classified as hate groups by the United States-based Southern Poverty Law Center, often present their positions as inherently African, despite their deep connections to Western conservative funding.

This duplicity came to the fore ahead of the conference in Nairobi when it was revealed that the preliminary list of speakers consisted entirely of white men.

During the event, participants were urged to “resist growing trends that seek to redefine marriage, weaken the institution of family, or devalue human sexuality” and to rise up to defend the African family from a “new colonialism”.

Yet the fact is that the narrative of preserving tradition that was on full display at the conference is far from organic. Instead, it itself continues a pattern established during the colonial era, when imperial powers imposed patriarchal norms and strict social hierarchies under the guise of paradoxically both preserving and “civilising” indigenous cultures.

In doing so, missionary and colonial institutions both reimagined and reframed African social structures to align with Victorian ideals, embedding rigid gender roles and heteronormative family models into the social fabric and inventing supposedly ancient and unchanging “traditions” to support them.

The latter were themselves built on self-serving ideas of Africans as “noble savages”, living in happy conformity with supposedly “natural” values, trapped by petrified “culture”, and undisturbed by the moral questions that plagued their civilised Western counterparts from whose corruption they needed to be protected.

As the conference demonstrated, local political actors and governments often support these agendas, either for political expediency or due to genuine alignment with their conservative worldview. There is also support from some quarters of the NGO sector, which gives the movements a veneer of legitimacy while obscuring their colonial roots.

The Nairobi conference put the Kenya Red Cross Society (KRCS) in the spotlight when it was accused of endorsing the event by allowing it to be hosted at the Boma Hotel, which it co-owns. Though KRCS has denied any direct involvement in the event, pointing out that it was not involved in the day-to-day decisions of the hotel management, the controversy still highlights the challenges and dangers even well-meaning humanitarian organisations can face.

Humanitarian institutions have historically been complicit in the colonial enterprise, and it is perhaps not surprising that they struggle to see through narratives that seek to solidify colonial agendas under the guise of protecting indigenous values.

Part of the problem is that there is increasing confusion about what approach needs to be taken to address growing calls to “decolonise” the activities of the aid industry. One aspect of this process is a recognition of the primacy of indigenous values and local practices of mutual aid.

However, when organisations fail to critically examine whether the values coded as indigenous or, in this case, “African”, in reality reflect and embed colonial logics and assumptions about indigenous societies, they may inadvertently find themselves perpetuating harmful agendas.

That is why, when faced with narratives such as the ones propagated at the Pan-African Conference on Family Values, it is important to understand the difference between decolonisation and decoloniality.

Though related, the two frameworks are distinct. The first largely focuses on transferring power to the formerly colonised, while the latter deals with the logics and values that are the legacy of colonisation.

In the aftermath of the 1960s’ decolonisation, the failure to address coloniality left many African countries saddled with elites, states, and governance arrangements that upheld colonial frameworks and approaches. Kenya itself was a case in point.

In 1967, nearly four years after independence, Masinde Muliro, a prominent Kenyan politician, observed: “Today we have a black man’s Government, and the black man’s Government administers exactly the same regulations, rigorously, as the colonial administration used to do.”

Similarly, aid organisations focusing solely on empowering local actors could end up reinforcing the deliberate reframing of regressive, colonial-era values as authentic African traditions.

Confusing decolonisation for decoloniality risks legitimising harmful ideologies by allowing them to masquerade as cultural preservation. Recognising the historical roots of these supposed traditions is essential, not just for humanitarian agencies but for societies at large. Without this awareness, we risk enabling movements that use tradition as a weapon to oppress, rather than as a tool to heal and unify.

The lesson is clear: to genuinely move forward, we must be willing to constantly reflect on how colonial legacies continue to shape contemporary cultural and social norms and debates. Only then can we build a future rooted in genuine, diverse, and inclusive understandings of African identity.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.