Bigotry courtesy of the British Empire

AFRICAN leaders such as Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe often use African culture to justify their homophobic policies.

But studies show that many of the anti-gay laws in 37 of the 55 African states have their origins in “sodomy” laws introduced in the colonial era.

The best known of these studies was published by Human Rights Watch in December 2008.

The study found that there were more than 80 countries around the world that still criminalised consensual homosexual conduct between adults, and that more than half of them were once British colonies.

It traces the origins of antigay laws to a law introduced by English colonists to the Indian Penal Code in 1860.

“Section 377 was, and is, a model law in more ways than one. It was a colonial attempt to set standards of behaviour, both to reform the colonised and to protect the coloniser against moral lapses. It was also the first colonial ‘sodomy law’ integrated into a penal code — and it became a model anti-sodomy law for countries far beyond India, Malaysia and Uganda. Its influence stretched across Asia, the Pacific islands and Africa — almost everywhere the British imperial flag flew,” reads the report.

The majority of the 37 African countries where homosexuality is illegal are former British colonies.

They include Botswana, Ghana, Nigeria, Swaziland, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

France, which had decriminalised consensual homosexual conduct in 1791, did, however, impose sodomy laws in Benin, Senegal and Cameroon during its rule. —