Dr Koku Adomdza, President of GREAT Trust, a UK-based civil society group, has slammed the decision of a Kentucky church to ban inter-racial marriages as a classical example of afrophobia and racial bigotry directed at Africans.

Referring to the action of the Gulnare Freewill Baptist Church, he said: “It further demonstrates evidentially how ingrained racial prejudice, especially afrophobia, is in the mentality and consciousness of humankind and to the degree that this version of afrophobia stems from a Clergy of a Church, is telling indeed,” he stressed.

He said in a statement copied to the Ghana News Agency in Accra on Friday that “200 years after the abolition of the Slave Trade Act and decades of anti-racism legislation and civil rights activism has surely torn down some walls of anti-African prejudice, but there is still a long way to go”.

Stella Harville, 24, and her fiancé Ticha Chikuni, 28, are the couple at the centre of the controversy. Harville is Caucasian and Chikuni is African.

The couple met at Georgetown College in Kentucky where both went to school and are scheduled to marry in July 2012. Harville is in graduate school in Indiana and Chikuni is working at Georgetown College.

The statement said Harville’s parents Cathy and Dean Harville have been members of the church for decades.

Cathy has taught Sunday school at the church and Dean was a deacon and currently the church’s secretary.

In June Stella and Chikuni participated in a church service by singing and playing the piano for a hymn.

The family was shocked when Pastor Thompson approached them after the service to alert them about his objection to inter-racial marriages.

The Harville family has formally requested the congregation to reconsider the interracial ban.

A copy of the recommendation, obtained by GREAT Trust reads: “The Gulnare Freewill Baptist Church does not condone interracial marriage. Parties of such marriages will not be received as members, nor will they be used in worship services and other church functions, with the exception being funerals. All are welcome to our public worship services.

“This recommendation is not intended to judge the salvation of anyone, but is intended to promote greater unity among the church body and the community we serve.”