Down with the Donkey, by Rahmane Idrissa – 4 March 2026

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Notes on Decolonial Homophobia

In Africa, homophobia has taken on a peculiar character. It is no stronger or more virulent than elsewhere, but it has acquired an emotional resonance that seems unique to the continent. This is because it has become bound up with the narrative of national liberation that now dominates African intellectual circles, trapping them ever more firmly in the colonial past—a past they never cease to denounce and lament, yet from which, paradoxically, they seem unwilling to break free. (Though perhaps the two things are connected.)

In Burkina Faso, back in happier days, I met a young woman who had set her heart on making a film about homosexuality—or rather, a film in defence of homosexuality. This was in the mid-2000s, before the wave of homophobic propaganda that has since swept through Burkina Faso’s public sphere, particularly on social media. At the time, the idea seemed perfectly feasible. The young woman was not a lesbian herself and knew little about gay circles. Her film was to centre on a young gay man who had agreed to appear in it. Different times, different attitudes, one might almost say. She showed me some rough footage. To put it mildly, the result was, shall we say, counterproductive.

Her portrayal of the young gay man—an effeminate boy of the flamboyant, camp variety—was a loud caricature that betrayed her complete lack of understanding of what she claimed to be defending. She had turned him into a freak-show attraction, dressing him inappropriately and having him wiggle his barely covered backside around the family courtyard, shouting obscenities in front of his relatives, who endured his antics with dismayed patience. The idea was to emphasise the character’s “rebellious” nature, but she had based him on her own idea of what a gay man was like—an idea drawn not from personal experience, of which she had none, but from the attitudes prevailing in mainstream Burkinabè society: a scandalous, offensive creature, a man who behaved not merely like a woman, but like a woman of ill repute; someone who perhaps did not deserve to be thrown into prison, but certainly deserved to be shunned by society.

I asked her why she was so keen to make this film. Her answer took me by surprise. “Because,” she said, “people are suffering.” By “people”, she did not mean gay people, but homophobes.

What struck her, in other words, was the way “people” worked themselves into all sorts of states simply because there were other people somewhere in the world who, as far as they were concerned, ought not to exist. The rage and other negative emotions associated with homophobia seemed to her a form of suffering, one she hoped to cure by showing that gay people were perfectly “normal” and should really be met with indifference.

A laudable idea, I told her. But I made no secret of the fact that her gay character hardly came across as “normal”, and was more likely to stir up precisely the negative emotions she wanted to soothe. I have no idea what became of the project, but fortunately, it never came to fruition.

Nevertheless, her idea of homophobia as a form of suffering, almost an illness in need of a cure, struck me as remarkably perceptive.

A phobia is, after all, a pathological condition. Wikipedia defines it in terms of fright, fear and revulsion: an “excessive fear of a particular object or situation, rooted in subjective feelings rather than rational causes”. [1] A psychiatrist, Paul Denis, speaks of an “unreasoning, irrational fear triggered by a harmless circumstance”, and describes phobia as “probably the most widespread psychopathological symptom”.

In Africa, homophobia begins with a feeling of disgust and revulsion that develops into a paranoid fear. Fear of what? That homosexuality might spread—which seems rather contradictory for something supposedly so disgusting and repellent.

The first expression of African homophobia I can remember came from an interview with the musician Koffi Olomidé in Jeune Afrique Magazine, sometime in the late 1980s. Olomidé declared that homosexuality was a crime against humanity. When the journalist asked him to explain, he replied that if homosexuals were allowed to carry on as they pleased, they would spread their ways, men would turn to other men, children would no longer be born, and the human race would die out. QED.

I was a bookish teenager at the time, and was struck by how closely this resembled an opinion expressed by Voltaire in his Philosophical Dictionary: “How could it be that a vice which, if it became universal, would destroy the human race, an infamous offence against nature, should nevertheless be so natural?” Voltaire’s answer to this question was so muddled that I could not make sense of it at the time. When I reread it years later, I realised that it was homophobic, though intellectually less honest than Olomidé’s reasoning.

Both views, at any rate, rested on the assumption that homosexuality was a matter of choice, rather than a natural feeling or an innate condition (despite Voltaire’s description of it as “natural”, which is part of what makes his text so confusing). As such, it could be passed on, like a contagious disease, as though it possessed some irresistible power of seduction and attraction that had to be contained and suppressed at all costs.

I seem to remember that Olomidé added that he had nothing against gay people, but that he wanted to save the human race. Perhaps he saw homosexuality rather as one might see drug use: something undesirable, but all the more contagious for that. (Voltaire, for his part, concluded that he did not believe “there has ever been a civilised nation that made laws against morals”, by which he meant that homosexuality should not be outlawed, though he offered no solution to what he nevertheless regarded as a problem.)

People of a liberal-humanist persuasion tend to see homophobia as a form of cruelty. Objectively, it is cruel. But subjectively, that young Burkinabè woman was right: it is a form of suffering.

This homophobic view of homosexuality is universal, but in Africa it helps explain the notion, widespread across the continent, that homosexuality is a practice of which Africans knew nothing until it was introduced among them by “the West”, which supposedly spreads it by bribing those who engage in it and corrupting those in power.

Two years ago, two African students taking a course I was teaching at a European university expressed strong reservations about the concept of human rights. When I asked them to explain, they told me that the West was using human rights to spread homosexuality in Africa. I pressed them for examples of this campaign, making it clear that hearsay would not do. One of them then told me that she had seen with her own eyes USAID workers engaged in this sinister enterprise, notably by paying gay people.

When I asked for concrete details, it turned out that she was referring to public health awareness campaigns in which USAID workers distributed condoms and anti-HIV medication and organised training sessions on preventive measures and medical treatments. Participants in these sessions did indeed receive daily allowances.

I pointed out to her that, from what she had just told me, it was hardly USAID that had converted these people to homosexuality, since USAID had sought them out precisely because they were already gay—and, as such, were considered an at-risk population. But I could see why she had failed to grasp something so obvious. She was following a phobic logic, and a double one at that. Her phobia of gay people had led her to turn a harmless activity—public health awareness campaigns—into an existential threat: the spread of the homosexual “drug” through African society by its sworn enemies, Westerners. Her phobia of “the West” (I use quotation marks because, as we shall see, what is really at issue is not so much the West as the liberal-humanist movement, which is indeed stronger in the West than elsewhere) had reinforced this distorted reasoning. USAID’s humanitarian work had been recast as a criminal enterprise.

And, as with any pathological condition, they were suffering. They were stressed, anxious and angry. But there was a curious twist. When I asked them one final question to round off our discussion, they told me that they both knew gay people and did not consider them dangerous in themselves. They simply could not understand how such people could exist—and therefore felt that they should not exist.

Homophobia has become so pervasive in certain parts of Africa that the subject now seems to crop up in conversation far more readily than it did ten or fifteen years ago. Another effect of social media, no doubt. During my last visit to Burkina Faso, in January, I had a long conversation—though perhaps “conversation” is too strong a word, since I did little more than listen—with a pleasant older gentleman who was full of positive ideas and aspirations, and who also loathed what the puffed-up dictator Ibrahim Traoré was doing to his country. When it came to the West, however, he was entirely of one mind with Traoré: it was the Enemy.

I liked the man, and since I found his anti-Western fixation a little excessive, I tried to get him to see things in a different light.

Incidentally, I can understand, and sometimes even sympathise with, an “anti-Western” stance. The geopolitical West’s response to the Zionist crusade against Iran is certainly not going to ease my misgivings about that bewildering part of the world. (As I write, Emmanuel Macron has just accused Iran of being “the root cause” of its own misfortunes—another case worthy of the La Fontaine fable [2] from which this essay takes its original title, Haro sur le baudet.) What troubles me, however, is when anti-Westernism becomes, on the one hand, systematic and indiscriminate, and on the other, a way of explaining everything through a single cause: as though the West were responsible for everything and its opposite. The result is that one stops looking at what is happening around oneself, or questioning one’s own role in it—a fatal mistake.

I pointed out to him that “the West” did not exist as some fixed essence and therefore could not, as he claimed, be deliberately plotting to dominate and destroy us. He brought up Mudimbe, which, of course, took us straight back to the never-ending story of colonialism. Then, when I seemed less than persuaded by this august authority, he brought out the familiar claim that the West was spreading homosexuality. I probably should not have been surprised, but I was. My fondness for him had led me to see him as a humanist in the truest and deepest sense of the word: homo sum et nihil humani a me alienum puto—I am human, and nothing human is alien to me. [3]

Without much hope of persuading him, I tried giving him a little history lesson, pointing out that in this place we call “the West”, it was only very recently that gay people had begun to be treated as human beings. There was a time when they were burnt alive; later, people settled for locking them up in prisons or psychiatric hospitals. Herr Hitler sent them to the death camps. And even today, not everyone in the West agrees that they should be treated with any particular consideration. One need only look at some of the influential figures surrounding Mr Trump or Madame Le Pen.

There was something rather odd about my argument. I was, in effect, defending the West by pointing out that, until not so very long ago, it had been capable of far greater homophobia than Africa. But what I was really doing was showing this gentleman that he could find allies for his homophobic cause in the very West he so despised. The trouble was, they were all fascists—which rather gave the game away: the real enemy, in this case, was not “the West” but its liberal-humanist wing.

During that same visit to Burkina Faso, I also heard about the recent misadventure of Nkululeko Zani Dlamini, better known by his nickname, the “King of Squats”. A South African former footballer turned fitness coach, he specialises in the art of the squat. Shortly before my visit, he had been due to come to Ouagadougou to promote his techniques, as he had already done on a previous occasion. But in the meantime, the country had passed a law criminalising homosexuality, and this had given the forces of organised homophobia wings.

Now, the “problem” is that Dlamini has an exceptionally large backside—an attribute reserved for women, at least in the Sahelian view of things.

So the idea took hold in Burkina Faso that he owed his extraordinary backside to his squat exercises; that he had developed it specifically to attract men; and that he was coming to spread his diabolical secrets in Captain IB’s supremely virtuous Faso. A campaign of opposition was mounted, so relentless and furious that the organisers of the event at which the King of Squats was due to appear eventually cancelled it, despite their efforts to explain what it was actually about. The man did make it to Ouagadougou, but had to content himself with giving a few cheerful interviews on television.

As the friend who told me about this thoroughly grotesque episode remarked, it is curious that a man’s buttocks should be seen as a danger and a threat by people who profess such intense disgust and revulsion towards homosexuality.

But the fact is that any collective phobia eventually creates opportunities for those who have the idea, and the means, to exploit it. And so, in certain parts of Africa, at the beginning of the twenty-first century of the Common Era, homophobia has become a rallying point for the continent’s conservative ideologies—religious and identitarian alike—all wrapped up in the deceptive packaging of anti-imperialism.

Who but an African would take to the podium of the United Nations to deliver a speech defending homophobia, in the stirring, tragic tones of a struggle for freedom, as a Burkinabè minister did a few years ago? Senegalese lawmakers invoke the same rhetoric of freedom—freedom, of course, from what is presented as the diktats of the West.

Conservative movements are objectively cruel because, to survive, they always need a scapegoat—an ass, in the sense of La Fontaine’s fable: a victim whom no one considers worth defending, and who cannot defend itself. Such a victim provides a convenient outlet for every anxiety and every ugly impulse, in an act that restores the fixed order of things so vital to the conservative mind.

At first, in the Sahel at least, the chosen victim, the indispensable scapegoat, was women.

To make a whole section of the population seem unworthy of defence, you have to vilify them, turn them into something scandalous and offensive. This is what happened to women across the Sahel with the rise of the religious backlash (which academics preferred to call “reform” or “revival”) around the turn of the 1990s. There were “controversies”, now largely forgotten, such as the one in Niger between the “wrapper-wearers” and the “skirt-wearers”. Women who wore skirts were regarded by those who wore traditional wraps as Trojan mares [4] of the West, bent on undermining “our values” and “our identity”. In Maradi, then the epicentre of the Islamic religious backlash in Niger, zealots attacked women wearing skirts or trousers, sometimes even stripping them in public by tearing off their skirts.

But although these prayer-bead-clutching male chauvinists had succeeded, to some extent, in portraying women as unworthy of defence unless they accepted the narrow place allotted to them in their vision of the social order, they could not stop women from defending themselves. And they had to do so largely on their own, since local feminists found precious few political allies among the men around them. On their own, then, but with courage.

This resistance made the struggle rather less appealing to conservative activists, draining their energies and gradually eating away at their political capital. The “discovery” of gay people as a much easier prey offered a convenient alternative, which quickly turned into a veritable populist goldmine for conservative leaders and organisations. Take Laurent Badot, a Burkinabè identitarian who, like Koffi Olomidé before him, accuses gay people of committing a crime against humanity. Or the religious-reactionary NGO Jamra in Senegal, which set up an “anti-gay watchdog” in 2018 and has been the driving force behind the campaign for repressive legislation that is now beginning to bear fruit in Dakar.

To spread fear and alarm through homes in Dakar and Ouagadougou, and thereby whip up a collective cry of “Haro sur le baudet!”—“Get the donkey!”—gay people have been turned into figures of scandal and menace. This has been particularly true in Senegal, where the tabloids, which make up the bulk of the country’s print press, know they can sell vast numbers of copies by running stories on the subject that are half moral outrage, half salacious titillation, often illustrated with photographs taken without the subjects’ knowledge.

There are some particularly disheartening aspects to all this.

In the late 2000s, while working on my doctoral thesis in Niger, I interviewed a female member of parliament about the obstacles to ratifying the African Union’s additional protocol on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women. She told me she was hesitant to support it. When I expressed surprise, she explained why. One of her colleagues, the late Sanoussi Jackou—something of a Laurent Badot of Niger, who had described the protocol as a Western “weapon of civilisational warfare” against Africa—had convinced her and the handful of other women MPs that, if the protocol passed, gay marriage would be next on the agenda. And that was certainly not something she wanted.

So much, then, for solidarity among the scapegoats.

The West is a problem in Africa, but not in the way African intellectual circles imagine. It is the primum mobile, the prime mover, the force that sets everything in motion. Africa cannot act; it can only react. And when it does act, it must define its actions in relation to the West—which is to say, in opposition to it. By a strange paradox, anti-imperialism ends up reproducing imperialism, while the quest for independence puts the West back at the centre of things, since the quest itself would make no sense without it. African intellectuals therefore see these attitudes as part of the seemingly endless process of decolonisation. But objectively, this keeps them in the position of the colonised, since to believe oneself engaged in a war of liberation—as supporters of the AES [5] in the central Sahel countries are so fixated on doing, for example—one must first believe oneself to be colonised. One must believe that one is still, and always, living through colonial history. And this merely reinforces the notion that Africa has no history of its own, no historical autonomy.

There is probably some general law at work here, and the phenomenon is hardly unique to Africa. In the United States, the MAGA movement is so obsessed with preventing America from becoming a “Third World country” that it has ended up giving it a fully-fledged Third World government, with all the economic consequences that will inevitably follow.

Still, we should be wary of generalising too much. Many Africans have moved beyond the colonial past. Some may never even have entered it, and are only now discovering it. The sense of being colonised is essentially a product of European-language education: it is something one learns at school. Indeed, I came across the same feeling among Arabic-educated Africans during research I conducted on madrasas in Niger and Mali some years ago. But in their case, the resentment was directed against the Arab world, not the West—which, by contrast with the Arab world, these Arabic-educated Africans actually regarded in a very favourable light.

Naturally, none of this stops the religious reactionaries, who would like to see Africa become more Arab-Islamic, from enthusiastically jumping aboard the “decolonisation” bandwagon. But that is simply opportunism.

A few months ago, there was a curious standoff between Niger’s dictator and the country’s younger judges over a “case” of lesbianism. A group of lesbians had been “reported” to the authorities and hauled before a court—but the judge acquitted them, since there was no law under which he could convict them. Under pressure from the religious reactionaries, the dictator overturned the ruling and barred the judge from office, triggering a revolt within the judiciary (surprising as it may seem, traces of the rule of law still survive here and there in Niger). The replacement judge once again acquitted the women, only to be removed and replaced in turn, and so it went on—until the senior figures in the judiciary finally managed to calm things down.

Throughout this affair, Salafist preachers close to the regime spread the poisonous claim in their sermons that the judges were being paid by the European Union to acquit lesbians. The whole story is as real as it is absurd, from beginning to end. But it neatly illustrates the stultifying effect that the category of “the West” can have on the African mind when it remains trapped in the colonial past—or at least, as in this particular case, when it seeks to exploit that past for its own ends.

Africans who are described as “illiterate” do not naturally have this sense of being colonised either, unless it has been passed on to them by the European-educated. A young “illiterate” Burkinabè I met in Abidjan in January professed his admiration for IB and his delight that the AES had freed Burkina Faso from ECOWAS. Although IB (who is European-educated, that is, French-speaking) also rails against the West and France, and in much more anguished terms (in one speech, he spoke of rooting out Western influence from “our very genes”), these two entities meant far less to the young man than Côte d’Ivoire, with which working-class Burkinabè often have a rather schizophrenic relationship. He was making a life for himself in Côte d’Ivoire, yet rejoiced at having been liberated from it—a contradiction that seemed entirely lost on him. On the other hand, whenever he dressed smartly, he would exclaim, “I’m French!” And he loved the “chogbi” accent, meaning French spoken with a French accent. Not, as one might suppose, because he was colonised, but because he was so little colonised that France appeared to him as something foreign and exotic, capable of inspiring the sort of fascination with the foreign for which Africans have a certain gift.

For these Afrophone Africans—Afrophone even when they speak French or English, since they have creolised or pidginised those languages—who make up the majority, colonial rule belongs to a distant, largely forgotten past, especially today. In my youth, there were still people who had lived through it, but they simply referred to it as “the time of the Whites”, without a trace of resentment. Indeed, some compared it favourably, in many respects, with the “present day”.

The Europhones, however, have a more painful relationship with that past—one that is, in a very real historical sense, “genetic”. When the gentleman I spoke to in Burkina Faso brought up Mudimbe, my mind immediately turned to Edward Said and his book Orientalism, which anticipated Mudimbe’s arguments. One could write a book called Occidentalism: a study of how the intellectual elites of the Global South have constructed an image of the West that keeps them trapped in the colonial past. Like Orientalism, Occidentalism would be grounded in obvious and well-established realities, but realities transformed, through the excessive theorising that is the besetting sin of intellectuals and certain scholars, into a system that generates seemingly insurmountable distortions of knowledge.

With real-world political consequences, and even—as in the case of gay people in Senegal—consequences for people’s most intimate lives.

Editor’s notes

[1] The quotations from Wikipedia, Paul Denis and Voltaire are translated from the French as the author gives them; they are not taken from published English versions.

[2] “Les Animaux malades de la peste” (“The Animals Sick of the Plague”). In the fable the powerful animals confess grave crimes and are absolved, while the donkey, who admits to having grazed a little grass in a monk’s meadow, is condemned. “Haro” is an old French cry of outrage or pursuit, and “Haro sur le baudet!” has become a proverbial expression for collective scapegoating (rendered here as “Get the donkey!”). This is the source of the essay’s title.

[3] Terence, Heauton Timorumenos (“The Self-Tormentor”).

[4] The French “juments de Troie” plays on “chevaux de Troie” (Trojan horses): the women are cast as the West’s mares.

[5] The Alliance of Sahel States (Alliance des États du Sahel, AES), formed by the military-led governments of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, all three of which have left ECOWAS.

Rahmane Idrissa teaches at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He is the author of ‘The Politics of Islam in the Sahel: Between Persuasion and Violence’ and ‘Historical Dictionary of Niger’, and is finishing a book about the Songhay empire.

The French original of this article first appeared on La Gazette Perpendiculaire and is republished here with permission. English translation by the author.

Down with the Donkey, by Rahmane Idrissa – 4 March 2026

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