Junta-run Burkina Faso has passed a law banning homosexuality and instituting punishments of up to five years in jail, the latest in a clutch of African nations to pass anti-gay legislation.
“The law provides for a prison sentence of between two and five years as well as fines,” Justice Minister Edasso Rodrigue Bayala said on national broadcaster RTB.
“If a person is a perpetrator of homosexual or similar practices, all the bizarre behaviour, they will go before the judge,” he said, adding that foreign nationals would be deported under the law.
i’m not familiar with precolonial burkina faso, did they have this bigotry? sometimes the homophobia is brought by the christian colonizers and wasn’t present prior.
I can’t speak to Burkinese culture but I read a paper on LGBTQ history in pre-colonial Africa in general a while back and a lot of groups there had long histories of openly queer people being part of the community, gender fluidity being widely accepted, and IIRC many gender based pronouns.
That’s a good point. I’m purely making speculations based of off generalities.