In Uganda and Senegal, neighbours and legislators compete to build the machinery of persecution.
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You can simply scroll past — but please don’t overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
Time is now or never.
Queer voices disappear without independent journalism to amplify them.
We document what others won't touch.
We hold power to account when it threatens our communities.
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Donate over €25/month and receive our limited-edition tote bag — a badge of resistance, a statement that you stand for fearless journalism.
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The room was a single rented space in Alengo cell, Pokea ward, in the Ayivu West Division of Arua City—a settlement roughly 450 kilometres northwest of Kampala, closer to the borders of South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo than to any place that might conceivably be described as a metropolis. Two young women had been living there since 12 February. One was 22, a dancer. The other was 21, unemployed. They shared the room. They shared, apparently, rather more than that. On 18 February 2026, neighbours telephoned the police.
What the neighbours reported was a kiss.
That is the detail one returns to. Not the legal citation that followed — Section 2(1) and (2) of the Anti-Homosexuality Act 2023, which criminalises consensual same-sex relations and provides for imprisonment up to and including life — but the act itself, the witnessed tenderness that set the machinery in motion. The West Nile regional police spokesperson, Josephine Angucia, confirmed the arrest to Agence France-Presse on 24 February, noting that community members had observed the women engaged in “queer and unusual acts believed to be sexual in nature, besides being allegedly seen openly kissing each other in broad daylight.” Neighbours had taken photographs. Neighbours had also noted, with the precision of those who understand the transactional currency of suspicion, that other women “normally congregate to stay at the suspects’ residence.”
The women have been held in detention without legal representation since the day of their arrest. Their case has been referred to the state prosecutor. If convicted, they face life imprisonment — for the offence, to state it plainly, of having been seen.
Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act, signed into law by President Yoweri Museveni on 26 May 2023, is routinely described as one of the harshest such statutes in the world, and the description is accurate. It prescribes life imprisonment for consensual same-sex intercourse and the death penalty for what the legislation terms “aggravated homosexuality” — a category encompassing acts involving minors, persons with disabilities, serial offenders, or the alleged transmission of HIV. The law prompted immediate international condemnation. The United Nations. Western governments. The World Bank suspended new lending, though funding was quietly restored by mid-2025. Uganda’s Constitutional Court, in April 2024, upheld most of the Act’s provisions, striking down only clauses that criminalised the rental of premises for homosexual purposes and the obligation to report suspected same-sex activity to police. The architecture remained.
And the architecture is being used. Frank Mugisha, the Ugandan human rights advocate and winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, responded to the arrest on X with the exhausted clarity of a man accustomed to cataloguing harms: “This underscores the grim reality we are facing on the ground under the Anti-Homosexuality Act. We have seen a surge in a targeted crackdown that goes beyond just arrests; it has fuelled a dangerous cycle of blackmail and extortion.” Since the Act’s passage, Human Rights Watch has documented hundreds of violations targeting LGBTIQ+ individuals: arbitrary arrests, evictions, forced anal examinations, torture. Mugisha’s particular observation — that criminals now deploy the law as a weapon, confident that their victims are too terrified to seek police protection — describes a system in which the state has effectively deputised persecution to anyone willing to pick up a telephone.
Which is precisely what the neighbours in Arua did.
Some 4,500 kilometres to the west, on the same day the women were arrested in Arua, a different kind of instrument was being sharpened. On 18 February 2026, the government of Senegal announced it had submitted to the National Assembly a bill that would significantly increase penalties for what the country’s penal code persists in calling “unnatural acts.”
Senegal has never needed a new law to persecute its queer citizens. Article 319.3 of the Penal Code already criminalises any “improper or unnatural act with an individual of the same sex,” carrying a sentence of one to five years’ imprisonment and fines of between 100,000 and 1,500,000 CFA francs—approximately $180 to $3,000. What was insufficient, evidently, was the scale of the punishment. Under the proposed legislation, same-sex relations would carry five to ten years in prison. Fines would rise to 10 million CFA francs. The bill would also introduce a new offence: the “promotion” of homosexuality, punishable by three to seven years’ imprisonment, defined broadly enough that a journalist publishing an article deemed sympathetic to LGBTQ+ rights could find themselves in violation.
Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko, the former opposition firebrand who was appointed to the premiership in 2024 under the ruling Pastef party, presented the bill to parliament on 24 February. He had promised this. As far back as 2022, while still in opposition, Sonko had declared the repression of homosexuality his central political preoccupation. “Anyone committing an act against nature will be punished by five to ten years’ imprisonment,” he told lawmakers, adding that where the act is committed with a minor, the maximum sentence would be mandatory and the judge could neither suspend the sentence nor reduce it below the minimum term. He called on deputies across party lines to support the measure. The president of the National Assembly, El Malick Ndiaye, had already indicated that he would not obstruct its passage.
But the legislative process in Senegal is only the most visible surface of a campaign already well advanced on the ground. Since early February, the Senegalese gendarmerie has conducted a series of raids that amount to a systematic purge. The first wave struck on 4 February, when officers from the Keur Massar gendarmerie in the suburbs of Dakar arrested twelve men and brought them before the courts. The group included two local celebrities and a well-known journalist. Subsequent rounds of searches, detentions and remand orders followed on 12, 14, 18 and 20 February, in what appears to be a concerted attempt to dismantle what the charges describe as networks of “criminal association.” Approximately thirty people are reported to remain in custody.
What distinguishes the Senegalese crackdown from the Ugandan one is not its cruelty — both are cruel — but its coupling of law enforcement with public health betrayal. The Senegalese press has reported that those detained have been subjected to systematic HIV screening, the results of which have been disclosed to the media, accusing the suspects of spreading the virus among the general population. To arrest a man for whom he loves, to test him for a disease that disproportionately affects those the state has rendered most vulnerable, and then to publish his medical status as evidence of moral contamination — this is not mere persecution. It is the weaponisation of public health infrastructure against the very communities that infrastructure was built to serve.
It is also, as Professor Gilbert Faye of the Faculty of Legal and Political Sciences at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar has observed, potentially unconstitutional. Article 7 of the Senegalese Constitution guarantees every individual the right to bodily integrity. The forced anal examinations that Senegalese authorities have employed to “verify” sexual orientation — a practice documented by the investigative outlet 76 Crimes as recently as December 2025 — represent a clear violation of that guarantee. Faye has further warned that blanket criminalisation could conflict with the constitutional principle of non-discrimination and with Senegal’s international treaty obligations.
Neither Uganda nor Senegal operates in isolation. The proposed Senegalese legislation arrives in a regional context of accelerating criminalisation across the Sahel. Mali adopted a new penal code in late 2024, signed into law on 13 December, which defines consensual same-sex intimacy as “unnatural acts” punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment. Burkina Faso followed on 1 September 2025, when the Transitional Legislative Assembly—seventy-one unelected members of a military junta that seized power in 2022—unanimously passed legislation criminalising same-sex relations for the first time in the country’s history, imposing sentences of two to five years and fines of up to ten million CFA francs. All three Sahelian states are members of the Confederation of Sahel States, all are governed by military juntas that have frozen relations with France and the broader West, and all have deployed anti-LGBTQ+ legislation as both a populist instrument and a signal of ideological alignment away from what their governments characterise as Western moral imperialism.
The pattern is instructive. Legislative campaigns that explicitly target sexual minorities do not arise from legal vacuum. They are preceded by, and inseparable from, the social mechanisms that produce the neighbour with the camera phone in Arua, the gendarme in Keur Massar, the editor who publishes a suspect’s HIV status. Mame Mactar Gueye, who represents the conservative Senegalese NGO Jamra, has been advancing proposals to harden anti-homosexuality penalties since at least 2016. In 2024, the lawmaker Cheikh Abdou Bara Dolly Mbacké introduced a bill proposing ten to fifteen years’ imprisonment for a category of offences the draft defined as “bisexuality, transsexuality, necrophilia, and zoophilia” — a taxonomy whose deliberate conflation of consensual identity with necrophilia tells you everything you need to know about the legislative imagination at work. That bill did not pass. This one, backed by the prime minister and unopposed by the National Assembly president, almost certainly will.
In Arua, the room in Alengo cell stands empty. The women remain in detention. MambaOnline, the South African LGBTQ+ publication, has chosen not to publish their names, though Ugandan media have done so — a disclosure that, in a country where the law functions as a licence for vigilante violence, constitutes its own form of sentencing. In Dakar, the raids continue. The bill moves through the National Assembly. The detained await their HIV results, which will be printed in the newspapers.
There is a particular cruelty in the way these two stories converge. In Uganda, the state arrests after the neighbours report. In Senegal, the state raids and the press amplifies. Both models depend on the same foundational transaction: the conversion of private intimacy into public accusation, the transformation of a kiss, a shared room, a body, into evidence. What is being constructed, across these very different nations with their very different legal traditions and colonial inheritances, is not merely a set of statutes. It is an architecture of accusation. — a system in which the informant, the legislator, the gendarme and the journalist each perform a discrete function in the machinery of persecution, and in which the accused, stripped of legal representation, medical confidentiality and the basic right not to be named, has no standing at all.
Mugisha called it a weapon. He was being precise. A weapon requires a manufacturer, a distributor and a user. The Anti-Homosexuality Act and the Senegalese amendments are the manufacture. The police and the gendarmerie are the distribution. The neighbours in Arua, with their photographs and their telephone call, are the use. The system is complete. It does not require malice from every participant; it requires only compliance, which is cheaper and more abundant. The neighbour does not need to hate. The neighbour needs only to observe, to record, to report. The state will do the rest.
Two women kissed in a room in northwest Uganda. The room was small, and rented, and known to the neighbours. It was February. The light in the West Nile at that time of year is flat and white, the kind that conceals nothing.
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