In James Baldwin: From Another Place, Baldwin argued that the categories society uses to divide people: race, sexuality, and other identities, are often tools of control. ; “Homosexual question is what we call a racial question. Nobody, no man and no woman, is precisely what they think they are. Love is where you find it. And you don’t know where it will carry you. And it is a terrifying thing, love. It is the only human possibility, but it’s terrifying. And a man can fall in love with a man, a woman can fall in love with a woman; there’s nothing anybody can do about it. It’s not in the province of the law; it has nothing to do with the church [religion]. And if you lie about that, you lie about everything. And no one has a right to try to tell another human being whom he or she can or should love.”
As LGBTQ+ communities and their allies mark Pride Month in celebration of the community’s history, culture, and ongoing struggle for inclusive rights and dignity, a contrasting reality unfolded across parts of Africa. Even as progress continued in some parts of the world, new waves of repression emerged on the continent, adding to a growing pattern of restrictions on LGBTQ+ rights.
In Ghana, it started in 2021 with the initial introduction of the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill. It was introduced by a cross-party coalition of eight Members of Parliament, fronted by Samuel Nartey George (MP for Ningo-Prampram). An LGBTQ+ resource centre Ghana had opened and was shut down following an intense religiously-motivated outrage. In response to this event, the parliament had passed the anti-gay bill (as it was commonly called), and it imposed a sentence of up to five years for “promoting” the rights of queer people. The bill was passed in 2024 when Ghana’s parliament voted unanimously in support of the bill, but met its end in the reluctance of Ghana’s former president, Nana Akufuo-Addo, who declined to sign it into law on the basis of the legal challenges the bill had inspired and the risks of financial loss which the bill could cause. The bill eventually came to an official end with the formal dissolution of the parliament at the time.
However, in March 2025, lawmakers reintroduced the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill. This time, led by an expanded group of 10 Members of Parliament, jointly championed by Reverend John Ntim Fordjour (New Patriotic Party – NPP) and the original lead sponsor, Samuel Nartey George (National Democratic Congress – NDC). On the 29th of May, 2026, the parliament passed the bill. It now awaits presidential assent.
Amongst the provisions of the bill, the bill provides a prison sentence of up to three years for anyone who identifies as a person of queer or an ally to such a person. It also provides a prison sentence for engaging in consensual same-sex acts. Additionally, the bill goes on to create a prison sentence of three to ten years (depending on the severity) for the promotion or support of LGBTQ+ activities, and it bans the operation and financing of institutions that advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. The bill also includes a surveillance feature: the duty to report. With this duty, citizens have an obligation to monitor and report anyone suspected of being queer or an ally.
But Ghana is not the only African country that has been recently hit with a new wave of anti-queer repression. As Culture Custodian noted in an earlier article, in March, Senegal recently stepped up the heat of its stifling anti-LGBTQ+ laws. Through a new amendment to Article 319 of its Penal Code, Senegal expanded and stiffened its anti-queer laws. The law doubles the penalties for same-sex acts, increasing the prison sentence to 10 years, increasing fines to 10 million CFA ($17,600), and extinguishing judicial leniency for such offences. It similarly designs punishments (of three to seven years) for publicly supporting or promoting LGBTQ+ initiatives in the country.
In 2025, Burkina Faso, for the first time in the nation’s history, the country’s Transitional Legislative Assembly officially voted to criminalise homosexuality. In a similar repressive fashion, the bill stipulates lengthy jail terms and massive financial fines for similar ‘offences’. Out of the 54 internationally recognized countries in Africa, 31 countries criminalize consensual same-sex relationships.
Firstly, there are significant problems with the laws. They are, first and foremost, indictments of the basic values and rights we hold dear as human beings. We have long since passed the age of debating it — man is a free being. And laws such as these, which chip at the inherent freedom of beings, are antagonistic and oppressive. Most of these laws are vestiges of colonial laws and imports of Western values. However, the colonial countries that imposed these laws in our legal system have eliminated them from their own legal system, leaving us to founder in a backward age of repression and ignorance.
Apart from this, the provisions of these laws are harmful, and capable of engendering societal harms and social imbalance, especially the obligation to report. Already, citizens in various African nations routinely take the law into their own hands, subjecting queer people to severe victimization and brutal mob violence. Codifying a mandatory duty to report transforms neighbours into state informants, effectively giving a legal stamp of approval for the public to escalate their persecution under the guise of civic duty. In Nigeria, cases of kito are on the rise. And as it appears, law enforcement agencies are unwilling to tackle this danger even though it has led to the death of queers in Nigeria. Many others are living in perpetual fear of this barbarism.
In the argument of one of the groups that propounded arguments for the elimination of anti-homosexual laws from the legal system of the United Kingdom, the Wolfenden Committee. It was the argument that the offence of homosexual engagements between consenting adults should be decriminalized because it could engender blackmail and other maliciously motivated vices, as was the case when these laws held sway in England and Europe. The same is more likely than not to be the case in an environment already hostile to queers.
The argument that LGBTQ+ or queer culture are “imported Western cultures” cannot stand on any leg. In addition to being false, it is hypocritical and dishonest. The imposing religious practices (Islam and Christianity) in Nigeria and much of Africa today are not indigenous to Africa. They were imported, or better still, rode into Africa on the backs of colonialism and jihad conquest. They are alien cultures. On the other hand, queer culture and behaviours are not imported.
Diverse expressions of gender and sexuality are deeply woven into the pre-colonial historical fabric of the continent, existing long before European ships or Arab caravans arrived. In Northern Nigeria, the Yan Daudu (men who act like women) of Hausa society have for generations occupied a distinct, culturally accepted niche as biological men who adopt feminine roles and dress. Similarly, woman-to-woman marriages were legally and socially recognized institutions among the Igbo of Nigeria, in the Kingdom of Dahomey (modern-day Benin), the Nandi of Kenya, the Nuer of South Sudan and the Lovedu of South Africa, allowing women to head households and inherit ancestral property together. Further south, 17th-century Portuguese records document the Chibados of the Ndongo Kingdom in present-day Angola where biological men who lived as women and were deeply revered as powerful spiritual shamans and royal advisors.
This legislative onslaught is part of a carefully orchestrated echo of the Western Christian conservative movement, which has increasingly weaponized the continent as a testing ground for its radical ideologies. Having lost the culture wars on marriage equality and reproductive rights in the Global North, far-right American evangelical networks have redirected their vast financial and strategic resources toward vulnerable African legal systems. Organizations like the Fellowship Foundation and Focus on the Family have invested heavily in sub-Saharan Africa to systematically manufacture moral panic.
These groups exert immense control over domestic policies by organizing high-profile strategic summits, such as the African Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Family and Sovereignty, which was held in Accra, Ghana, precisely to build momentum for the passage of the 2026 anti-queer bill. By funding local religious actors and feeding them anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience, these Western instigators have found a backdoor to codify theocratic governance into the legal system and governance of African countries. And far from protecting “African culture,” these groups are merely working as proxies for insidious and ingenuous Western fundamentalists who care nothing for African sovereignty, but everything for global ideological dominance. As Culture Custodian earlier argued, “there are more pressing issues in Africa to focus on, and people’s sexualities should not be treated as a crime” when they are not. More than ever, Africa confronts virulent waves of poverty, terrorism. In many respects, the continent continues to bear a disproportionate burden of the social, economic, and humanitarian challenges confronting the modern world. If foreign groups genuinely wish to extinguish the fire razing Africa to the ground, then they should go after the infernos noted above, rather than expending time and resources on a problem that exists largely in the imagination of pseudo moral warriors.
To quote James Baldwin again, “a man can fall in love with a man, a woman can fall in love with a woman; there’s nothing anybody can do about it. It’s not in the province of the law; it has nothing to do with the church [religion]. And if you lie about that, you lie about everything. And no one has a right to try to tell another human being whom he or she can or should love.”
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