When Ugandan authorities arrested two young women for sharing a Valentine’s Day kiss and charged them with offences related to homosexuality and indecency, they upheld a law written and imposed by the colonisers. When colonisers departed, they left behind legal systems that criminalised same-sex conduct, a burden the colonised were made to carry long after independence. Given the size of the empire and the height of its power, British law did not merely travel; it calcified, embedding itself into the legal DNA of nations that would later become their own tradition. A recent wave of conservatism has swept across Africa, with activists decrying an assault on LGBTQ+ rights, especially in East Africa. Half of all countries worldwide where homosexuality is outlawed can be found in Africa, according to a global review by the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association (ILGA), a statistic that reflects the uniformity of colonial legislation. In some countries, offenders are punished by death or lengthy prison terms, enshrined in statutes drafted in colonial capitals.
This column traces how laws enforced by the colonisers have been weaponised into a modern instrument of oppression, and what it means for the millions living under its shadow. It does so in five parts: first, the historical origins of anti-sodomy legislation and how it travelled; second, what pre-colonial African societies actually recognised about sexuality; third, how this inheritance is being actively reinforced and expanded today; fourth, how a second and more contemporary wave of imported intolerance is compounding it; and fifth, the human cost of both.
The historical development of anti-sodomy laws
In 1534, under the reign of Henry VIII, British law took its first legislative aim at homosexual acts. The legislation punished ‘… the detestable and abominable Vice of Buggery committed with mankind or beast.’ The word ‘abominable’ was taken from Leviticus. The term buggery traces back to ‘bougre’ or ‘heretic’ in Old French, and to the Latin ‘Bulgarus’ for ‘Bulgarian’, a reference to Orthodox Christian heretics. ‘Heresy’ was a common euphemism in the Middle Ages for a group of sexual sins, so the 1534 wording was not innovative. Derived from ecclesiastical law, the religious character of this criminalisation was hardly new. A criminal law prohibition based on Leviticus travelled through early Christianity, Roman law, and ecclesiastical law to become a standard non-religious criminal offence in Europe, including Russia. The Protestant Reformation ended the church Courts in much of Europe, requiring them to be handled by secular law. This uniform pattern was broken by the Napoleonic Penal Code of 1810, which drew no distinctions between homosexual and heterosexual acts, a legal innovation adopted by the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, resulting in only British colonies having inherited the prohibition. In Asia and Africa, the legacy of 1534 is now hidden behind the language of the 19th-century Indian Penal Code (IPC), imposed on colonial India in 1861, before it travelled to parts of Africa.
The most telling illustration of colonialism’s uneven legal afterlife lies in the diverging fates of s. 377 of the IPC. Drafted by Thomas Babington Macaulay, the section stated that “whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal” would be punished with imprisonment or fines. It travelled with the empire, exported to colonies across Asia and Africa as a standardised instrument of moral policing.
The empire that exported this moral code was slow to reckon with it on its own soil. In 1966, the year before partial discrimination through the Sexual Offences Act, 1967, some 420 men were convicted of gross indecency in Britain; by 1974, that number had surged to 1,711, a rise of over 300%. Full reform did not arrive until the Sexual Offences Act of 2003, meaning that for 470 years, England and Wales maintained a criminal code that penalised gay sexuality, the same code it had spent centuries exporting. Scotland’s anti-LGBTQ+ laws were not repealed until 2013. India, inheritor of the same provision, did not strike down s.377 until 2018, over 150 years after it was imposed. The slowness of the coloniser’s own reform is not incidental; it is precisely what made the inheritance so durable and so devastating for those on whom it was imposed. Their survival after independence reflects not only legal continuity but also the willingness of postcolonial governments to deploy them in the service of nation-building, moral politics, and claims of cultural authenticity.
Sexuality in Pre-Colonial Africa
Colonialism shaped the archives through which Africa came to be understood: same-sex intimacies were frequently ignored, misrepresented, or relegated to the margins of colonial records, creating silences that continue to distort contemporary understandings of Africa’s sexual past.
The claim that homosexuality is ‘un-African’ collapses under the weight of the historical record. Long before colonial law arrived to declare it criminal, same-sex relationships and gender-nonconformity were documented across more than 40 pre-colonial African societies. Among the Langi of northern Uganda, effeminate males known as ‘mudoko dako’ were treated as women and could marry men. In Angola, the Chibados male diviners were believed to carry female spirits and occupied recognised spiritual roles within their communities. Woman-to-woman marriages were equally documented, a practice so perplexing to European travellers that it provoked, in the words of one Portuguese soldier writing in 1681, accusations of ‘sodomy’ and ‘filth’. What unsettled the colonisers was not deviance, but the difference they had no framework to understand. As legal scholar Sylvia Tamale of Makerere University puts it, “it is not homosexuality that is alien to Africa, but homophobia.”
The deployment of African culture as a shield against LGBTQ+ rights is not a natural outgrowth of the continent’s traditions; it is a political construction with a familiar precedent. When Mobutu Sese Seko built his decades-long dictatorship on the ideology of authenticité, he justified it by reference to African culture, ‘Democracy is not for Africa,’ he said, ‘there was only one African chief.’ Yet paradoxically, Mobutu was not recovering African tradition but deploying European colonial stereotypes about it, borrowing from colonial predecessors the very ideas he claimed to reject. The same logic is now deployed against sexual minorities, with homophobia dressed as heritage. Yet the historical record tells a different story. In ancient Egypt, same-sex intimacy was, at certain periods, legally recognised. Among the Azande of pre-colonial Sudan, male same-sex marriage was legally acknowledged, with dowry paid to boy-wives and damages awarded for infidelity. African culture was never homogeneously heterosexual; it was diverse, varied, and far more accommodating than the colonial legal code imposed upon it. What is rarely acknowledged is that the homophobic rhetoric currently rising across Africa is not organically domestic; it is funded and sustained by Western, specifically American, conservative campaigns, making it contemporarily manufactured. As historians Murray and Roscoe conclude, the colonialists did not introduce homosexuality to Africa but rather the intolerance of it, and systems of surveillance and regulation for suppressing it.
Contemporary Africa: The Inheritance Enforced
The scale of inheritance is telling. Across Africa, 32 of 54 countries, according to ILGA, criminalise same-sex relations, a uniformity that reflects colonial standardisation. What is more alarming than the number is the direction of travel; these laws are not relics being passively retained, they are actively being reinforced, expanded, and, in several cases, made more severe.
Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2023 stands as the most egregious example, imposing life imprisonment for homosexuality and the death penalty for ‘aggravated homosexuality,’ while organisations found guilty of ‘promoting homosexuality’ face fines up to USD 266,000 and permanent suspension of their licenses. Senegal amended its Penal Code as recently as March 2026, increasing prison terms for ‘acts against nature’ from one to five years to five to ten years, and separately criminalising the funding of any activity deemed to promote homosexuality.
The Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni, has called on African leaders to reject the promotion of homosexuality, believing it to be a real danger to humanity and a big threat to the procreation of the human race. Across Africa, so-called ‘family values’ conferences have proliferated, bringing together international organisers, local lawmakers, and faith leaders under the banner of defending traditional family life, a banner that, on closer inspection, doubles as a coordinated campaign against LGBTQ+ existence and abortion rights. In Uganda, the Catholic church has become the institutional reference point for political leaders wishing to speak against homosexuality, with government ministers publicly arguing that it is alien to Ugandan culture and a threat to the country’s traditions. What is presented as cultural sovereignty is, upon examination, a colonial inheritance, one that the coloniser quietly set down while the colonised were left to enforce it.
A Second Wave
Ironically, what goes largely unacknowledged is that Africa is also the target of a more contemporary importation of intolerance. In 2009, American evangelical pastor Scott Lively travelled to Kampala at the invitation of the Ugandan Parliament, briefing lawmakers on how to address homosexuality, a visit widely regarded as a catalyst for the Anti-Homosexuality Act that followed. He was not an isolated actor. Family Watch International, led by Sharon Slater and “described as a hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Centre, has sponsored trips for politicians from Kenya, Uganda, and beyond, training them on what activists “describe as an extremist anti-LGBTQ+ agenda.” In April 2023, the organisation hosted an inter-parliamentary conference in Uganda, attended by leaders from 22 African countries, after which a Kenyan MP vowed to table an anti-gay bill in parliament. “There is nothing organic about the wave of anti-homosexuality bills we are seeing,” said Muthoni Ngugi of the East Africa Legal Service Network. As Dr Kapya Kaoma concludes, these organisations are losing the culture wars at home and seeking quick gains elsewhere.
The Human Cost
“It is crucial to acknowledge that these challenges faced by LGBTI people in Africa extend beyond the realm of legality, encompassing a profound struggle for the hearts and minds of societies. However, the abuse of law has undoubtedly heightened their vulnerability and underlines the urgent necessity for coordinated regional and international intervention,” observed Samira Daoud, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for West and Central Africa.
The evidence bears her out with devastating precision. In January 2011, David Kato, Uganda’s most prominent gay rights activist, was beaten to death at his home in Kampala, weeks after a local tabloid published his name and photograph under the headline ‘Hang Them.’ He had just won a court case against the publication. Kato’s murder was not an isolated act of violence but a consequence of a climate that legislation actively creates. In Burkina Faso, following the junta’s criminalisation of homosexuality in September 2025, LGBTQ+ people report living in fear of a ‘witch hunt,’ with photographs shared on social media as evidence and lists of meeting places passed to authorities. “With this law, people will feel they have a mission: to hunt down homosexuals,” testifies Quentin, a gay Burkinabe man living in Ouagadougou.
The consequences extend beyond persecution into public health. Criminalisation drives LGBTQ+ people away from healthcare, creating conditions in which HIV thrives invisibly. Rates are estimated at 27 times higher than for other men in eastern and southern Africa and 199 times higher than for other men in western and central Africa. Anti-LGBTQ+ policies, which strengthen stigmatisation and control of people living with HIV/AIDS, undermine progress towards mitigating the epidemic. The COVID-19 pandemic compounded these vulnerabilities further, as restrictions on public gatherings, diverted resources and heightened surveillance. These laws thereby put Africa’s fight against HIV in ‘great jeopardy.’ In Uganda alone, police raided shelters for homeless LGBTQ+ youth, arresting dozens and subjecting some to forced anal examinations, a practice Human Rights Watch has “described as cruel, degrading, and constituting torture.” In August 2021, 54 civil society groups were indefinitely suspended. Sexual Minorities Uganda, which had provided education and healthcare advocacy for LGBTQ+ people since 2004, was ultimately banned entirely. Behind every statute and every amendment, a person is paying the price for someone else’s imported conviction.
Conclusion
The two women arrested for sharing a Valentine’s Day kiss in Uganda did not violate an ancient cultural prohibition. They were caught in the machinery of a legal code drafted in a foreign capital, exported across an empire, abandoned by its authors, and then handed down as tradition. That is not heritage. That is inheritance, and inheritance, unlike tradition, can be refused.
Across the continent, some are refusing it. Namibia decriminalised same-sex relations in 2024. Botswana formally removed the colonial prohibition from its penal code in 2026. These are not concessions to Western pressure; they are corrections of a Western imposition. The demystification of homophobic pseudo-history and the detachment of homophobia from African-ness are, therefore, a necessary first step in the promotion of LGBTQ+ rights, not as a foreign agenda, but as a reclamation of what the continent’s own history has always shown to be true. In Botswana and Namibia, the government has recognised that enforcing the private moral views of a majority does not justify criminalising another’s freedom. That criminalisation itself is a public health failure, one that bars LGBTQ+ populations from accessing the treatment and care they are owed.
But for the millions still living under laws they never chose, written by hands that have long since washed themselves of them, and now reinforced by a second wave of foreign moral entrepreneurship, the weight of the inheritance remains. It is measured in raids, in bans, in bodies, and in the quiet daily cost of living under a law written for you by someone who never asked. The first wave of intolerance arrived with the coloniser’s penal code. The second arrived with the missionary’s chequebook. Both called it tradition. Neither was.
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