The second wave of criminalising homosexuality in Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda

Abstract

This thesis is a critical evaluation of the second wave of criminalising homosexuality in Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda against the backdrop of the Separability thesis, secularism, and international human rights law. During the second wave of criminalising homosexuality in the aforementioned countries, attempts have been made to expand the scope of anti-homosexuality offences and prescribe harsher penal sanctions for the offences. The new wave is sufficiently methodical to ensure not only the proscription of homosexual acts but also the curtailment of crucial entitlements like the rights to life, equality, free speech, association, and assembly, access to healthcare, housing, property, employment, privacy, human dignity, and family. To support these stern measures, Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda have made four main arguments: a) the ‘cultural thesis’, which argues that homosexuality is unAfrican and foreign; b) the ‘morality thesis’, which posits that homosexuality is immoral, unnatural and abominable; c) the ‘religious thesis’, which contends that homosexuality contradicts the teachings of both the traditional African religion and the ‘received’ faiths - Christianity and Islam; and d) the ‘rights-based thesis’, which maintains, first, that homosexuals demand more rights than are enjoyed by their heterosexual counterparts, and, second, that the kind of entitlements championed by the pro-homosexuality movement are not covered by the existing human rights frameworks. This thesis evaluates all these arguments. The thesis further contributes to the body of knowledge by studying the history of regulating homosexuality in Africa with the view to discovering whether homosexuality is African or alien and tracing the crime of homosexuality to its cradle, the United Kingdom, with a view to analysing its original character and rationale(s).