The Myth of a Monolithic Past: Colonialism, Homophobia, and the Battle Over Africa's Sexual History

In the intensifying global struggle over LGBTQ+ rights, a deceptively simple claim has become a rallying cry: "Africa was never homophobic until the colonizers arrived." The assertion appears across social media, in activist speeches, and in parliamentary debates from Kampala to Cape Town. It contains a powerful kernel of truth—colonial powers did systematically criminalize same-sex relations across the continent. But as historians and scholars warn, the full picture is far more complicated than any slogan can capture, and both sides of Africa's culture wars are weaponizing a selective reading of the past.

The Evidence: Same-Sex Relations in Pre-Colonial Africa

The historical record, while fragmentary, is unambiguous on one point: same-sex relations existed across pre-colonial Africa in diverse forms, long before European contact.

The landmark anthology Boy-Wives and Female Husbands, edited by Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe, documented same-sex practices in more than fifty African societies spanning every region south of the Sahara [1]. Rock paintings from thousands of years ago in Zimbabwe depict sexual acts between San men. In ancient Egypt, the tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep—dating to roughly 2400 BCE—shows two men in an intimate embrace [2].

Among the Azande warriors of what is now the northern Democratic Republic of Congo, men routinely married adolescent boys in formalized arrangements that included bride price payments to parents [2]. In Angola, Portuguese ethnographers documented chibados—cross-dressing male diviners—whom Jean Baptiste Labat described as leaders who "dresses ordinarily as a woman and makes an honor of being called Grandmother" [2]. Among the Imbangala people, Andrew Battell observed men wearing women's apparel and living among wives without social stigma.

In what is now Nigeria, the Igbo and Yoruba did not assign rigid gender categories at birth; gender was understood as something determined later in life based on societal roles and personal attributes [2]. The Hausa term yan dauda described effeminate men and male wives. Among the Khoikhoi of South Africa, koetsire referred to men sexually receptive to other men. These were not hidden or marginalized identities—they had recognized vocabulary and social roles.

Perhaps most striking for the contemporary debate: Kabaka Mwanga II, who ruled the Buganda kingdom in what is now Uganda from 1884 to 1897, was an openly gay monarch—a fact that directly contradicts modern Ugandan leaders' claims that homosexuality is a Western import [3].

What Colonialism Actually Did

If same-sex relations were widespread and often tolerated, what changed? The historical evidence points clearly to European colonial legal systems as the mechanism that criminalized homosexuality across the continent.

The template was Britain's Indian Penal Code of 1860, whose Section 377 punished "carnal intercourse against the order of nature" with penalties up to life imprisonment [4]. This code became a model exported to every corner of the British Empire. When the chief justice of Northern Nigeria adopted the Queensland Penal Code in 1904, its sodomy provisions traveled with it. By 1916, a unified Nigerian criminal code based on the Queensland model was in force across the colony [4].

The pattern is unmistakable. A 2008 Human Rights Watch report, This Alien Legacy, traced how British colonial sodomy laws spread across Asia, the Pacific, and Africa—virtually everywhere the Union Jack flew [4]. The Nordic Africa Institute has noted that no anti-LGBTQ legislation predating colonialism has been found anywhere on the African continent [5].

The colonial disparity is statistically stark: approximately 66% of Commonwealth states still criminalized homosexuality as of recent years, compared to roughly 33% of countries predominantly colonized by France [5]. This difference traces to France having decriminalized sodomy in the 1790s during the Revolution, while Britain maintained its sodomy laws until 1967.

Source: Human Rights Watch / Nordic Africa Institute

Data as of Mar 15, 2026CSV

The Oversimplification Problem

Yet the narrative that pre-colonial Africa was uniformly tolerant of same-sex relations is itself a distortion—one that scholars increasingly caution against.

As political scientist Nic Cheeseman has argued on Democracy in Africa, both pro-LGBTQ and anti-LGBTQ advocates misuse history [6]. The claim that colonialism is solely responsible for African homophobia "oversimplifies a complex historical record," obscuring the fact that pre-colonial African societies held diverse views—not uniformly accepting or rejecting same-sex relations. Some communities tolerated or even institutionalized them; others frowned upon them, even if they did not criminalize them in the European legal sense.

The distinction matters. Tolerance is not the same as celebration. The fact that the Azande institutionalized boy-marriage does not mean all neighboring societies approved. The existence of vocabulary for same-sex practices in some languages does not prove universal acceptance across all of Africa's thousands of ethnic groups and polities. Africa is a continent of 54 nations and immense cultural diversity—reducing its entire pre-colonial sexual history to a single narrative does violence to that complexity.

Bright Alozie, writing for the African American Intellectual History Society, acknowledges the colonial origins of legal homophobia while noting that the historical picture requires nuance: "Pre-colonial African societies showed diverse attitudes toward same-sex relations: some tolerated or integrated them, while others condemned or punished them" [2].

The Colonial Paradox: How Anti-Gay Laws Became "African Values"

The deepest irony in the current debate is how colonial-era laws have been rebranded as authentic African tradition.

When Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni signed the Anti-Homosexuality Act in May 2023—one of the harshest anti-LGBTQ laws in the world, prescribing the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality"—he framed it as a defense of African family values against Western moral corruption [3]. Yet the foundation of Uganda's anti-gay legal framework is the Penal Code of 1950, a direct product of British colonial rule that Uganda retained after independence in 1962 [3].

The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) has identified this as a "carefully crafted narrative" in which Uganda "falsely attributes colonial-era criminalization to indigenous traditions while simultaneously denying current foreign influence" [3].

That foreign influence is substantial. In March 2009, American evangelical activists Scott Lively, Don Schmierer, and Caleb Lee Brundidge traveled to Kampala to deliver a series of talks warning of "the gay agenda" and "the threat homosexuals posed to Bible-based values and the traditional African family" [7]. Lively subsequently addressed the Ugandan Parliament, framing homosexuality as a Western disease targeting children. Within months, Uganda's first "Kill the Gays" bill was introduced.

The case of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) v. Scott Lively, filed in Massachusetts federal court, alleged that Lively's actions constituted crimes against humanity [7]. Although dismissed on jurisdictional grounds, the presiding judge affirmed that Lively's conduct violated international law. By 2014, evangelical nongovernmental organizations accounted for 20% of all nonprofit groups in Uganda and held an estimated $2 billion in assets—enormous influence in a country where nearly a quarter of the population lives on $1.20 a day [8].

The Current Legal Landscape

The tug-of-war between criminalization and decriminalization continues across the continent.

As of 2025, homosexuality remains outlawed in 32 of Africa's 54 UN-recognized states [9]. In several jurisdictions—southern Somalia, Somaliland, Mauritania, northern Nigeria, and Uganda in aggravated cases—it is punishable by death. The trend in some regions is toward harsher penalties: Mali criminalized sodomy in 2024, and Burkina Faso followed in September 2025 with a law prescribing two to five years in prison [10].

Yet counter-currents are flowing. Namibia decriminalized homosexuality in 2024, joining a growing list of African nations—including Botswana, Angola, Mozambique, and the Seychelles—that have struck down colonial-era sodomy laws in recent years [9]. South Africa remains the continent's outlier, having constitutionally banned discrimination based on sexual orientation in 1996 and legalized same-sex marriage in 2006.

Notably, several African countries never criminalized homosexuality at all: Benin, the Central African Republic, Djibouti, Côte d'Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Madagascar, Niger, and Rwanda [9].

Public Attitudes: A Continent of Contrasts

Pew Research Center surveys reveal the depth of anti-LGBTQ sentiment across the continent. In a 2013 survey, at least nine in ten respondents in Nigeria (98%), Senegal (96%), Ghana (96%), Uganda (96%), and Kenya (90%) said homosexuality should not be accepted by society [11]. Even in South Africa, where LGBTQ rights have the strongest legal protections on the continent, 61% of respondents said homosexuality should not be accepted.

Source: Pew Research Center

Data as of Mar 15, 2026CSV

More recent data shows similarly low support for same-sex marriage: just 2% in Nigeria and 9% in Kenya favor it [12]. These numbers underscore a reality that complicates all historical arguments: regardless of what pre-colonial societies practiced, contemporary African public opinion is overwhelmingly opposed to LGBTQ rights—a reality shaped by the interplay of colonial legal legacies, missionary Christianity, Islam, and post-independence political culture.

The Nordic Africa Institute identifies three reinforcing drivers: colonial legal inheritance, the influence of Christianity and Islam introduced by missionaries who "condemned all non-heterosexual sex practices as illegitimate, deviant, and criminal," and political homophobia—the strategic deployment of anti-gay rhetoric to distract from governance failures like corruption and economic mismanagement [5].

History as Weapon

The stakes of this historical debate extend far beyond academic scholarship. When African leaders claim homosexuality is "un-African," they invoke a version of history to justify present-day persecution. When LGBTQ advocates counter that Africa was a queer paradise before colonialism, they invoke a different—and equally incomplete—version.

The most honest accounting acknowledges several things simultaneously: that same-sex relations have deep roots across African societies; that European colonialism systematically criminalized them through imposed legal codes; that the relationship between pre-colonial tolerance and modern acceptance is not a straight line; and that contemporary homophobia in Africa is a product of multiple forces—colonial law, imported religion, evangelical influence, and domestic political opportunism—none of which can be reduced to a single cause.

As the Harvard Political Review has noted, Western commentary that frames African homophobia as simply "backward and barbaric" also erases this complexity, ignoring the West's own role in exporting the very homophobia it now condemns [13]. The path toward LGBTQ rights in Africa will not be paved by oversimplified history—from any direction. It requires confronting the full, contradictory record of a continent that is neither the tolerant Eden nor the repressive monolith that competing narratives demand it to be.