Burkina Faso’s War on the Gays: Passes Law Banning Homosexuality, Punishable by 2–5 Years in Prison

The West African nation, Burkina Faso's military government has made homosexuality a crime, passing a law that punishes consensual same-sex intimacy with two to five years in prison and fines. The measure, announced by Justice Minister Edasso Rodrigue Bayala on state broadcaster RTB, will also see foreign nationals deported under the law.

The decree was unanimously approved on Monday, Sept. 1 by the country’s transitional legislature–71 unelected officials installed after Captain Ibrahim Traoré’s 2022 coup.

Bayala justified the law as a moral safe ground, criminalizing what he called “bizarre behavior.” Official pledged a nationwide campaign to enforce and “popularize” the law.

The legislation takes affect immediately.

Burkina Faso is not alone. More than half of Africa’s nations criminalized homosexuality, with punishments ranging from prison to death. Neighbor Mali adopted its own ban in 2024. Uganda’s infamous Anti-Homosexuality Act imposed life sentences and even a death penalty provision or so-called “aggravated homosexuality.” Ghana continues to advance its own draconian bill.

Each of these laws is draped in the cloth “tradition” and “sovereignty,” a claim that resists what leaders describe as Western imposition. But beneath that cloth lies a colonial ghost. Anti-gay legislation across the continent largely descends from European penal codes impose during colonization. That inheritance is now being wielded as if it were indigenous, as if queerness were not always already part of African life.

President Ibrahim Traoré rose to power under the banner of Pan-African liberation. He invokes Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary leader who wants declared, “We must stay to invent the future.” Yet Traoré’s government has chosen not invention but erasure –turning queer Africans into enemies of the state.

This contradiction is not incidental; it is the rot inside the rhetoric. To proclaim Black sovereignty while legislating against queer existence is to misunderstand liberation itself. Freedom cannot be selective. A nation cannot call itself emancipated if it cages its daughters for loving each other, its sons for walking hand-in-hand, its non-binary kin for refusing the colonial binary.

Homophobia is not a side issue to African liberation; it is a direct enemy of it. Each law that criminalizes queerness tightens the grip of authoritarianism, not loosens it. Each body jailed is a reminder that the state’s promise of freedom is a lie.

Burkina Faso is in crisis. Violence from Islamist insurgencies has displaced millions, poverty and food and security deepen, and the military government, unelected and unstable, faces international scrutiny for human rights abuses.

In this context, the anti-gay law functions as distraction and scapegoat. By painting where people as a threat, leaders deflect attention from their failures to govern. Homophobia becomes a cheap currency –traded for popular support, wielded to consolidate power.

This is not sovereignty. It is borrowed authoritarianism, mirroring the same colonial playbook once used against Africans themselves.

For queer Burkinabè, the law is not an abstraction. It is the threat of a neighbors suspicion, a police raid, a cell door clanging shut. It is the impossibility of living openly, the necessity of secrecy, the constant question of whether love is worth the risk.

It is also exile. Already, LGBTQ Africans flee from Uganda, from Ghana, from Nigeria. Now, Burkina Faso joins the list of unsafe homes, forcing yet another generation into diaspora.

Liberation cannot be proclaimed in one hand and denied in the other. To use Sankara’s name while criminalizing queer life is to desecrate his legacy. To speak of African unity while legislating exclusion is the fracture the very people you claim to defend.

This law does not protect Burkina Faso, it weakens it. It is not rude self in tradition, it uproots it. And, it is not African pride, rather it is colonial mimicry. Any liberation movement that demands silence from its queer children is no liberation at all.

Queer Africans have never stopped existing, never stopped resisting. From underground networks to public protest, from art to advocacy, they carry for a radical truth, which says, we belong.

The burden, however, cannot fall on them alone. Allies across Africa and the diaspora must hold leaders like Traoré accountable, challenging the myth homophobia is culture, that criminalization is sovereignty.

If the language of liberation is to mean anything, it must include every body –every shade, every gender, every desire. Otherwise, it is not liberation; it is just another prison.