Categories: AFRICA

Inside the Fight for LGBTQ+ Rights in Africa


Read Time: 5 minutes

By Efemia Chela

The National Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (NGLHRC) gained a historic win at the Kenyan Supreme Court on February 24, 2023. It was finally able to register as an official nongovernmental organization (NGO), after a 10-year legal battle in a country where homosexuality is outlawed. However, the LGBTQ+ community’s celebrations were cut short by a wave of backlash. A day later, local organizations reported an immediate increase in “verbal and physical attacks,” and in coastal cities, large anti-LGBTQ+ demonstrations were held.

Similar battles are currently being waged across Africa over what count as legitimate ways of loving and whose persecution is justified. Queerphobic rhetoric is used by politicians for narrow political gain. Ghanaian anti-LGTBQ+ campaigner Sam George said that “Ghanaian culture forbids homosexuality” and Kenyan MP Farah Maalim characterized existing as a person who is LGTBTQ+ as being “worse than murder.”

Old colonial laws that criminalized same-sex activity and gender variance were left intact after countries gained independence. Many Africans remained ignorant about precolonial Africa where queerness was present and regularly celebrated, because those histories were maligned. Today these colonial-era laws are still used to oppress LGBTQ+ Africans, who receive no state support and also find their attempts to support each other hindered by bigotry.

In the 21st century, Western influence has intensified state-sponsored homophobia in Africa. This form of neocolonialism mimics the initial colonization of Africa through Christian missionaries. Since 2007, at least $54 million from right-wing U.S. churches has flooded the continent to fight “against LGBT rights and access to safe abortion, contraceptives, and comprehensive sexuality education.” Prominent anti-LGBTQ+ politicians such as Ugandan Minister of State for Trade, Industry, and Cooperatives David Bahati have received $20 million to campaign heavily for more draconian legislation. It is perhaps no surprise then that in Uganda on March 21, 2023, a new law was passed that will “make homosexual acts punishable by death.”

Other sources of money are being levied positively to support LGBTQ+ people. The Trans and Queer Fund (TQF) is a hopeful example of grassroots organizing grounded in socialist and abolitionist values in Nairobi, Kenya. The fund was founded in March 2020 by Mumbi Makena, a feminist writer and organizer whom I spoke to two days after the NGLHRC win. She formed TQF with her friends during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Among left working-class movements in Nairobi, some TQF team members noticed many viewed “queerness as a distraction” from other socioeconomic issues and there was repeated hostility toward queer and women organizers. While weakening economic growth in Africa affects everyone, mainstream organizations were not ready to grapple with how LGBTQ+ identity further marginalized some Kenyans, nor reach out to them specifically.

However, TQF was committed, and it initially set up a mutual aid system to provide relief funds for LGBTQ+ people whose livelihoods disappeared due to mandated lockdowns. Makena explained that many queer and transgender Kenyans work in the service and hospitality industries, which are more accepting of them. During the pandemic, LGBTQ+-friendly NGOs were constrained by donors and could not repurpose previously allocated funds to COVID-19 relief. However, TQF was able to be agile and responsive from the start, working in an unbureaucratic, nonhierarchical way. TQF works on a volunteer basis online through Twitter and Instagram accounts and distributes funds through mobile money.

Over three years, TQF has raised and disbursed an impressive $50,000 and assisted over 1,000 individuals. It supports its community in inventive ways—covering bus fares for people to attend marches and managing furniture donations for those creating transgender safe houses. The ease of accessing the Trans and Queer Fund means LGBTQ+ people have somewhere to turn if they get disowned by their families or need money for medical treatment after experiencing homophobic violence. The mutual aid relies on contributions coming largely from individuals within Kenya, but also from Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. It describes its initiative as “working toward a future where all people are free from imperialism, capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy and ethnonationalism.” It encourages everyone who comes into contact with TQF to try to understand it as a commons, a collective resource. The next step for the group, Makena says, is political education, so both fundraisers and beneficiaries can “start to form radical analyses of what is happening in the world.”

NGOs have been instrumental in achieving some successes on behalf of LGBTQ+ Africans. For example, they spearheaded advocacy that led to the decriminalization of homosexuality in Botswana and Angola, in 2019 and 2021, respectively. But the law has its limitations. Without a shift in social attitudes, societies like South Africa, home to what is described as “the most progressive constitution in the world,” still suffer from homophobic violence and discrimination. In 2019, NGOs tried to get the Kenyan Supreme Court to rule that sections 162 and 165 of the Penal Code, which criminalize homosexuality, were unconstitutional, but the legal petition was unsuccessful.

As Makena points out, solely changing the law doesn’t automatically make LGBTQ+ people safer. She warns against narrowing queer liberation to a liberal rights framework that does not address the everyday realities faced by working-class LGBTQ+ people. Makena remarks, “We must forge greater solidarities within left movements in Kenya but also with LGBTQ+ people overseas who are often notably silent on the intersections between anti-imperialism and our fight for queer dignity and safety.”

A ripple effect of homophobic laws is that they can eliminate support for those with HIV/AIDS and sex workers, two groups that sometimes overlap with the LGBTQ+ community. Any outreach may be misrepresented as promoting homosexuality, and in the case of the new Uganda law, anyone “abetting homosexuality” will be punished. With a continent already facing the repercussions of the ‘global gag rule’ that decreased overseas funding for sexual and reproductive health and rights, this will certainly affect health care for both LGBTQ+ and heterosexual people alike.

Due to the severe consequences of foreign interference, it becomes even more crucial for African countries to fund their own welfare systems. While intolerance of LGBTQ+ Africans endures, efforts to organize to meet their needs through initiatives like mutual aid endure. TQF encourages others to set up similar mutual funds to strengthen community. “Long-term,” Makena says, “we don’t want LGBTQ+ people to only be passive beneficiaries of the funds or deradicalized; we want people to reflect on TQF and be active participants in their own liberation, collectively defining the agenda.”

It is long past time that African communities learned to be more accepting of diversity and acknowledged that all our fates are linked. It is worth “returning to the source” to rediscover Indigenous African cultural traditions around gender variance to enable more flexible responses to gay and transgender people today. Freedom in its fullest sense includes the right to privacy, and the right to love and build family structures of one’s choosing. LGBTQ+ Africans, like every other group, should be allowed to organize for their own freedom. We will continue to despite the daily challenges to our humanity.

Source: Globetrotter

Author Bio: This article was produced by Globetrotter. Efemia Chela is an editor and researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research who manages publishing at Inkani Books. She has an MA in development studies from the University of the Witwatersrand and bylines in publications including the Continent and the Johannesburg Review of Books.

Tags: Activism, Community, Human Rights, Gender, Politics, Social Justice, Identity Politics, Social Benefits, Women’s Rights, Law, Criminal Justice, Africa, Africa/Kenya, Africa/Ghana, North America/United States of America, Europe, Europe/United Kingdom, Africa/Uganda, North America/Canada, Africa/Botswana, Africa/Angola, Africa/South Africa, GOP/Right Wing, Religious Freedom, Religion/Spirituality, News, Opinion, Time-Sensitive


Godfred Meba

View Comments

  • I intended to create you one very little observation in order to give thanks over again just for the lovely advice you have discussed on this page. It has been particularly generous with people like you in giving extensively what most of us would have distributed as an e-book to make some bucks for themselves, specifically given that you could possibly have tried it if you decided. These tips in addition served to become good way to know that some people have similar zeal like my very own to know lots more pertaining to this condition. I'm certain there are lots of more enjoyable opportunities in the future for many who scan your blog post.

  • Whats Taking place i'm new to this, I stumbled upon this I have discovered It absolutely useful and it has aided me out loads. I'm hoping to give a contribution & assist different customers like its helped me. Good job.

  • I’d have to check with you here. Which is not one thing I usually do! I take pleasure in reading a put up that can make folks think. Additionally, thanks for permitting me to comment!

  • Thanks so much for giving everyone an extraordinarily spectacular chance to read articles and blog posts from this site. It is always very brilliant plus full of a great time for me personally and my office fellow workers to search the blog particularly 3 times a week to find out the fresh stuff you will have. Not to mention, I am just usually satisfied for the remarkable concepts you serve. Selected 4 ideas on this page are undeniably the best I have ever had.

  • Thanx for the effort, keep up the good work Great work, I am going to start a small Blog Engine course work using your site I hope you enjoy blogging with the popular BlogEngine.net.Thethoughts you express are really awesome. Hope you will right some more posts.

  • With the whole thing which appears to be developing within this subject matter, your viewpoints are generally fairly radical. Nonetheless, I beg your pardon, because I do not subscribe to your whole suggestion, all be it stimulating none the less. It looks to everybody that your comments are not entirely rationalized and in fact you are yourself not even entirely certain of your assertion. In any event I did enjoy reading it.

  • At this time it sounds like Wordpress is the top blogging platform out there right now. (from what I've read) Is that what you are using on your blog?

  • You actually make it seem so easy with your presentation but I find this topic to be actually something which I think I would never understand. It seems too complicated and very broad for me. I am looking forward for your next post, I’ll try to get the hang of it!

Recent Posts

“It makes aid conditional on political and military aims. It makes starvation a bargaining chip.”

TRIAL International has filed legal complaints in Switzerland, urging an investigation into the Swiss-incorporated Gaza…

13 hours ago

MINREX summons the U.S. Chargé d’Affaires in protest of his disrespectful conduct

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned the U.S. Chargé d'Affaires on Friday, June 30 to…

13 hours ago

Deepening China-Africa Infrastructure Cooperation for Shared Technological Advancements

(by H.E. Tong Defa, Ambassador of China to Ghana) There is a famous saying about…

14 hours ago

Moroccan high official eliminated from UN Mandela Prize after strong objections nelson mandela

Amina Bouayach President of CNDH Thu, 05/29/2025 - New York (UN) 29 May 2025 (SPS)-…

2 days ago

It’s unethical and dishonourable – Martin Amidu blasts Godfred Dame over CJ Petition

Former Special Prosecutor Martin Amidu has taken a strong swipe at former Attorney-General Godfred Yeboah…

3 days ago

Nana Kwasi Gyan-Apenteng, distinguished journalist, passes on

Nana Kwasi Gyan-Apenteng, distinguished journalist, passed away in London yesterday after a short illness with…

3 days ago