Ibrahim Traoré’s Gay Ban: Why Burkina Faso’s First Sodomy Law Betrays Its Own Revolution
A consensual same-sex act now carries up to five years in prison—proof that breaking colonial tanks is meaningless if you keep the colonizer’s penal code.
Our African brother Ibrahim Traoré has secured state freedom, state resources, and has massively improved the infrastructure of Burkina Faso. Those are huge material wins for the country. That in no way gives Traoré and Burkina Faso permission to criminalize love. They just put in place a law making it a crime to be homosexual or bisexual. This attack on the LGBTQ+ community is completely unacceptable.
On September 1, 2025, Burkina Faso’s Transitional Legislative Assembly unanimously adopted a new Persons and Family Code that, for the first time in the country’s history, criminalizes consensual same-sex relations. Anyone found guilty faces two to five years in prison plus fines; the same article punishes “behavior likely to promote homosexual practices,” a clause broad enough to outlaw NGOs, health workers, or even private conversations. Justice Minister Edasso Rodrigue Bayala calls the measure “respect for cultural values,” but culture is not a suicide pact: the code breaches the African Charter and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, both ratified by Burkina Faso. Botswana, Mauritius, and Namibia have already struck down identical laws; their courts ruled that criminalizing love is not “African values”—it is unconstitutional violence. Claiming this is the unavoidable “price of independence” is historically illiterate: Burkina Faso never inherited a colonial sodomy law, so the junta is volunteering to put on chains that were never there.
A revolution that violates human rights is not a revolution; it is a transfer of oppression. That means prisons too.
Consensual sexuality is not a crime; therefore it must never be caged. This is where the intersectionality of two human rights violations is occurring. Burkina Faso, for all the great progress it has made, has failed to fully break the chains of its colonial oppressors. The oppression is not just a physical break from French colonialism but also an oppression of the mind. France did not bring prisons to Burkina Faso for liberty and justice. The modern nation-state prison arrived in Africa by way of the colonial oppressors to silence Africans who resisted or were unruly under their oppression.
A truly free Africa cannot exist if all Africans are not free.
A sovereign nation is cool, but sovereign people are cooler. If the focus is to bring a nation free of its colonial oppressors, we have to stop the leaders of that nation from oppressing the people as well. The mindset has to change—to worry more about the people than the nation-state; and not just in this instance.
If we look inward at our own country, it is easy to see what is meant. Even though the tools and scales used are different, America has parallels to Burkina Faso. America as a country is in fact one of the freest countries on the planet. There is nothing this country cannot do and no power that can challenge it in an oppressive way. The American people, on the other hand, are not free. Trans Americans have some of the most restrictive rights in the world. The life expectancy of a Black trans woman is between 33 and 36. A group of humans expected to live less than half as long as their straight white cis counterparts—and with a 47 percent chance of being incarcerated in their lifetime—are the outcome of oppression, not freedom. If Traoré signs this code, Burkina’s queer children will inherit the same death by policy, only with African signatures on the warrant.
Traoré’s government can still choose to be remembered as the regime that threw off French tanks but kept French-style penal codes against queer life, or as the one that understood decolonization is unfinished until the most marginalized African is safe from African hands. A revolution that replicates the master’s prison is not liberation; it’s renovation. Tear down that wall too, or admit the chains were never fully broken—they were just re-forged in local foundries.
Stay woke,
Loc
Sources:
Human Rights Watch, Burkina Faso Criminalizes Same-Sex Conduct, 3 Sept. 2025, https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/09/03/burkina-faso-criminalizes-same-sex-conduct.
National Black Women’s Justice Institute, Black LGBTQ+ Women, Girls, & Gender-Expansive People Disproportionately Impacted by Criminal-Legal System, 10 June 2024, https://www.nbwji.org/post/black-lgbtq-women-girls-gender-expansive-people-disproportionately-impacted-by-criminal-legal-s.
Pulitzer Center, Lift Our Voices: The Black Trans Community’s Pursuit of Education, https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/black-trans-communitys-pursuit-education .
