Africa’s Rising Tide of Anti-LGBTQ Laws: Unmasking the Myths Behind the politics

“However long the night, the dawn will break.” African elders have repeated that proverb for generations, in seasons of famine, war, and colonization. It is a proverb of patience — but also of certainty. It insists that no darkness is permanent. Today, that promise is being tested in a new way: in parliament chambers from Kampala to Dakar, where lawmakers stand to applause after declaring that an entire category of their own citizens should not exist.

Since 2022, at least half a dozen African nations have passed or hardened laws criminalizing same-sex relationships — Uganda in 2023, Mali in 2024, Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Niger between 2025 and 2026, and Senegal doubling its penalties in March 2026. Today, roughly 32 to 34 of Africa’s 54 nations criminalize consensual same-sex relationships in some form, with Uganda, Mauritania, and Somalia allowing the death penalty. This is not a scattering of unrelated events. It is a wave, and it deserves to be named, understood, and questioned — with honesty, and without cruelty toward anyone, including the lawmakers who believe they are protecting their people.

A Convenient Enemy

Look at what these countries actually need. Youth unemployment. Girls pulled out of school for early marriage. Maternal mortality. Rape and female genital mutilation still practiced in silence. Healthcare systems stretched thin. Climate shocks pushing farmers off their land. These are the emergencies. And yet, again and again, governments have found it easier to legislate against a minority than to answer for these failures.

There is a bitter logic to it. A vote against “un-African” homosexuality costs a government almost nothing and buys it a great deal — applause in parliament, pulpits preaching in its favor, and a population momentarily united against an invented enemy rather than turned toward the leaders meant to serve it. Scapegoating is cheap. Governance is expensive. Unfortunately many governments have chosen the cheaper path.

The “Un-African” Argument, Examined

The claim that homosexuality is a Western import doesn’t survive contact with history. Precolonial societies across the continent — from the Ndebele courts of Zimbabwe to age-set unions among the Azande in Congo, to female husbands in parts of Nigeria and Kenya — documented forms of same-sex intimacy long before European missionaries arrived. What did arrive with colonizers were the penal codes: Britain’s Section 377 and its clones, copied into law books from Lagos to Kampala to Nairobi, and never fully removed. Uganda’s 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act and its cousins are not a return to precolonial tradition. They are, in a real sense, colonial legislation being renewed and expanded by African hands.

Nor does the “protecting children” argument hold up under scrutiny. Criminalizing consenting adults does nothing to protect a child from abuse — it does the opposite. It drives LGBTQ+ people, including LGBTQ+ youth themselves, away from healthcare, away from reporting violence, away from any authority that might otherwise protect them. Uganda’s own health officials warned that the 2023 law would set back the country’s fight against HIV; Senegal’s National AIDS Council said the same about its 2026 law, warning that three decades of progress against the epidemic were now at risk. Public health experts are near-unanimous: driving a population underground makes it harder, not easier, to reach them with prevention, testing, and care.

Words That Cannot Be Unsaid

In March 2026, as Senegal’s National Assembly voted 135 to 0 to double the prison sentence for same-sex relations, lawmaker Diaraye Ba took the podium and declared: “Homosexuals will no longer breathe in this country. Homosexuals will no longer have freedom of expression in this country.” Her colleagues applauded.

It was spoken inside a chamber built to protect the dignity, freedom, and safety of every citizen of Senegal — spoken by someone elected to represent all of them, including the ones she was condemning. Those “homosexuals” she named are Senegalese sons and daughters. They are nurses, students, market traders, and — in all likelihood — some of the very people who voted for her, trusting her to build a Senegal where everyone could live and thrive. To wound them is not to wound “the West.” It is to wound Senegal itself. As the Ubuntu philosophy at the heart of so much African moral thought teaches: umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu — a person is a person through other persons. There is no version of that philosophy that ends with “except these ones.”

A Bishop’s Answer

Uganda lost one of its bravest moral voices this July, when retired Anglican Bishop Christopher Senyonjo died at 94, after two decades spent standing beside LGBTQ+ Ugandans that his own church had turned away. He knew what it cost to say what he said. Stripped of his title by the Church of Uganda in 2006 for refusing to abandon LGBTQ+ people, he kept speaking anyway.

“It is so sad that some people still believe that LGBT+ people should be killed like criminals,” he once said. When politicians reached for scripture to justify cruelty, he had an answer ready: “It is terrible, but I believe God is telling us that we should love. If we need to survive on this planet, love is the key! Religion without love means very little to me.”

That is not a soft sentiment. It is a challenge — to every lawmaker who has invoked God’s name while writing a fellow citizen out of the human family, and to every one of us watching from the outside, deciding whether we will look away.

Choosing the Dawn

None of this means the fight is hopeless. Mauritius decriminalized same-sex relations in 2023. Namibia’s courts did the same in 2024. Kenyan and Namibian courts have, at moments, stood on the side of dignity even as their parliaments moved the other way. Change is possible, and it has African authors — activists, lawyers, clergy, and ordinary citizens who refuse to let their countries be defined by who they exclude.

The proverb endures for a reason: however long the night, the dawn will break. But dawns do not arrive on their own. They are built – by people willing to say, clearly and without apology, that no child of Africa should have to earn the right to breathe.