Homosexuality In Africa?

Like everyone else with an email inbox some very odd stuff lands, seemingly by itself, for me to read. Often what lands are petitions for rather woolly Liberal concerns.

But some of what comes in has some logic behind it.

Homosexuality-homosexual behaviour and identifying as homosexual, lesbian or trans is illegal in 70 of the 198 countries in the world.

The African continent consists of 56 countries. In over 30 of those countries homosexuality is illegal which makes 'Africa' a juicy target for liberal white folk and for some Africans who believe that they can reach out beyond their own continent, to where homosexuality is legal.

The defence that those countries that ban homosexuality have is less a defence of homophobic custom, e.g. repugnant norms such as men sexually assaulting lesbian women to 'make the women heterosexual', and more a challenge to those asking them to change.

Those with homophobic laws condemn their critics with phrases like 'New liberal colonialists', which make decriminalising being gay sound retrogressive whilst defending old colonial laws which the new free Africans adopted, never knowing what sort of laws they were.

The argument back, for anyone who wants to make it- is that Civil liberties are indivisible for full citizenship; if these free African countries want to throw off all the colonial legacy, as part of their autonomy, then they should throw off the logic of the toxic science of the Empires of old-their social divisions based on eugenics.