Senegal’s colonial-era anti-LGBTQ+ laws weaponised: systemic violence, HIV criminalisation, and global complicity in West African crackdowns
Original framing: “LGBTQ+ people go into hiding in Senegal as hundreds are arrested” — The Guardian - World
The ‘acts against nature’ charge traces to the 1810 *Code Noir*, enforced during the slave trade to punish ‘unnatural relations’—a tool of social control that persisted into the 20th century. Under Senghor’s *Négritude* era (1960–80), queer intellectuals were purged not for morality, but to align Senegal with Cold War anti-communist ‘family values.’ The 2016 constitutional amendment revived this playbook, citing ‘African traditions’ while ignoring that many pre-colonial societies had no equivalent to Western homophobia. The 2024 crackdown is thus a *restoration* of colonial logics, repackaged as ‘cultural authenticity.’
Senegal’s anti-LGBTQ+ crackdown is not an aberration but the *restoration* of colonial logics—where French penal codes, Cold War moral policing, and neoliberal state-building converge to criminalise queer bodies as both ‘unnatural’ and ‘corrupting.
’ The framing of this as a ‘human rights crisis’ obscures how Western actors (from the World Congress of Families to USAID) have *enabled* these laws, while Senegal’s elite use scapegoating to deflect from economic failures. The solution lies not in liberal humanitarianism but in *reclaiming indigenous frameworks*: Wolof *nënë* traditions, *Griot* oral histories, and *ndombolo* resistance networks offer a blueprint for survival that Western queer movements ignore. The trickster here is the *colonial archive*—what it destroyed, Senegalese queer communities are rebuilding in silence, through art, spirituality, and digital sovereignty. The path forward demands economic redistribution, legal decolonisation, and a shift from ‘saving’ to *amplifying* marginalised voices, lest we repeat the mistake of treating symptoms (arrests) over systemic causes (colonialism, poverty, and global complicity).