Two days after the passing of the new, stringent anti-queer law in Senegal, 17-year-old Malick Ndiaye was killed. Ndiaye, a drummer, was approached by a group of teenagers between 13 and 15 years as he sat outside his home in Tivaouane-Peulh in the Thies region, east of the capital Dakar, who hurled homophobic insults at him. They told him that all traditional male drummers in Senegal were homosexuals. As they began to attack, Ndiaye tried to defend himself, and one of the teenagers stabbed him with a knife. He died later at the hospital.
Weeks before a famous TV host, Pape Cheikh Diallo, was arrested for suspected homosexuality, together with dozens of others, in a case that has seen public outrage as authorities intentionally conflated homosexuality and transmission of HIV. In the same period, a young man was almost lynched in Ouest Foire, a neighbourhood in Dakar, because he was accused of being feminine and wearing a bine bine (waistbead). To save his life, he ran into a house and asked for the police to be called. When they came, they arrested him for suspected homosexuality.
These cases are extremely heartbreaking and overwhelming, but in these times in Senegal, they are not surprising. This is exactly how state homophobia reinforces social homophobia and vice versa. By prioritising the homophobic discourse, the Senegalese government gives the citizens the social permission to police, harass, violate and kill anyone they suspect of being and living outside of the dictated gender norms.
Systemic Erasure of Queer Senegal
Today in Senegal, sexuality is something most people don’t talk about, even at an individual level, despite the history and great scholarship by Senegalese scholars on the issues. When LGBTQ identities come up in public, the conversation quickly turns to religion, morality, or politics. It rarely centres on the humanity of the people involved. For LGBTQ people in Senegal, daily life means hiding, staying quiet, and living in fear of being exposed, arrested, or killed.
In 2018, Senegalese author Mouhamed Mbougar Sarr, winner of the Goncourt prize for his novel that explores the taboo subject “De purs hommes” (Pure Men), wrote, “In short, a good homosexual in Senegal is either a homosexual who hides, or a public entertainer, or a dead homosexual”.
In October 2023, from Kaolack — a city three hours’ drive from Dakar — came an act of chilling violence: a posthumous execution, the desecration of a dead body as punishment. A community exhumed, paraded, and burned the body of a young man accused of being homosexual. Even in death, the mere suspicion of homosexuality was enough to strip him of the dignity that our cultures demand we afford the dead. We did not arrive at this moment yesterday. This cruelty has escalated steadily, each year more brazen than the last. People suspected of being gay have been attacked by mobs, publicly humiliated, and murdered — the violence growing bolder with impunity.
In February 2008, a gossip magazine published recognisable photos from a private 2006 gathering, labeling it a “gay marriage”—sparking religious condemnation, media frenzy, and police arrests without evidence of homosexual conduct. That December, days after Senegal hosted the 15th International Conference on AIDS and STIs in Africa (ICASA), police arrested HIV/AIDS outreach workers serving men who have sex with men. Each received an eight-year sentence, unsupported by evidence. Though released in April 2009, prominent religious leaders used the case to call publicly for the “destruction of homosexuals.”
On March 11, Senegal’s National Assembly voted to double the maximum prison sentence for same-sex relations — from five to ten years. Termed as “acts against nature” include homosexuality, bisexuality and “transsexuality”. The amended law additionally criminalises advocating for or funding such relationships. Another twist, the law also advances punishment for false accusations. It passed with near-unanimous support and awaits presidential approval.
The History of Queer Senegal They Cannot Burry
The Goor-Jigeen, loosely translated as “man-woman” in Wolof, once held a respected role in Senegalese society, encompassing men who loved men and those who embodied femininity, regardless of sexuality. Women valued them as companions and entertainers, and marriage to men was publicly accepted. Colonial and postcolonial shifts later marginalized this integrated identity.
In some literature, Dakar was known as a “gay” city in 1949, with acceptance reportedly growing into the 1970s. Research has shown that Leopold Sédar Senghor, the first president of Senegal, and Blaise Diagne, the first African deputy elected to the French parliament in 1916, used the words’ grandes dammes’ and goorjigéen in their election campaigns.
Senegalese Anthropologist Cheikh Ibrahima Niang has published extensively on how the meaning of Goor-Jigeen has narrowed since the 1980s, now used to refer only to the receptive partner in male homosexuality, reducing a once-fluid identity to a stigmatised category. This new meaning carries weight: Goor-Jigeens are seen as violating the culture of honor.
Senegalese scholar Babacar M’Baye in The Origins of Senegalese Homophobia: Discourses on Homosexuals and Transgender People in Colonial and Postcolonial Senegal notes that during the Islamic holiday of Tamkharit (Ashura), people cross-dress and adopt new gender roles, showing symbolic space for gender variance in Senegalese culture.
Subjugation of homosexual and gender nonconforming people in Senegal are shallow binary reactions to neocolonialism
M’Baye says that the current homophobic discourses that invoke patriotism, cultural difference, and morality to justify the subjugation of homosexual and gender nonconforming people in Senegal are very much binary reactions to neocolonialism. He emphasised that several depictions of homosexuals and transgender people in contemporary Senegal are similar to representations in European writings of the colonial period. Today, a quick social media search of Goor-Jigeen takes you into the world of the worst dehumanisation and violence against queer people.
Renewed Anti-queer Mobilisations
In August 2025, the media reported that a judicial investigation in France revealed an international pedocriminal network. Pierre Robert, 72, a wealthy French businessman, was arrested for organising the sexual abuse of up to 150 children, including around 20 victims in Senegal. One particularly grave feature emerged: the voluntary transmission of HIV. In February 2026, 12 people, including Pape Cheikh Diallo, were arrested for alleged homosexuality.
While these two cases were unrelated, the discourse that followed sought to draw a link between them, allowing the narrative to shift accordingly. The public quickly accused Diallo of being the puppet of a white man to transmit HIV to young boys. Again, the Diallo and Robert Pierre cases are different. The latter is a pedophilia ring, while the Diallo case is one of adults consenting to do whatever they want with their bodies. Queerness is not a form of abuse, as the state of Senegal has tried to imply in the law and in these cases. Queer people, like anyone in society, can be abusers, but the narrative that being queer means one is an abuser is a clear weaponisation tactic by the state and society to harass and violate.
On the floor of the National Assembly, one of the deputies, Diaraye Bah, said, “ Les homosexuels ne vont plus respirer dans ce pays ; les homosexuels n’auront plus la liberté d’expression dans ce pays…” (homosexuals will no longer be able to breathe freely in this country; homosexuals will no longer have freedom of expression in this country).
All human beings deserve to breathe, even in Senegal. Young Malick Ndiaye should be breathing. Just a teenager trying to make ends meet as a drummer living in biting economic distress was killed by children in his own poor community, denied breath and life because of politically driven homophobia that encourages vigilantism. Ndiaye’s young life was cut short because of the political homophobia that permits social policing of who can breathe and who won’t in Senegal.
About two weeks ago, there were reports of a 14-year-old girl gang raped by a group of teenagers aged 12 to 15 years old. Between harassing, torturing, killing people they suspect of being homosexuals and raping young girls, the youth has found its coping mechanism to escape the misery of the country. Unfortunately, women, girls and queer people are their punching bags.
As of March, 41 people accused of homosexuality have been arrested in connection with the TV host Diallo’s case, and the number grows by the day, with many still without legal representation amid the environment of fear. While most headlines have been about the men’s arrests, emerging reports are claiming a “lesbian network” is being targeted by police investigations. While most of the literature records the existence of gay men and trans expressions, experiences of queer women in Senegal remain obscured, and so is the violence against them.
Hostility has been amplified, the legal changes and the hateful rhetoric allow anyone in society to harass, abuse and kill.
Queer Senegalese have been made a target, suspect and an enemy of the state whose leaders ride the populism wave, deploying erotic nationalism. Erotic nationalism is the process by which political actors mobilise sexual desires, behaviours, and identities to define the boundaries of the imagined community, effectively weaponising these intimate facets of life to determine who qualifies for legitimate citizenship and who is excluded from the national collective. Religious leaders, politicians, and media figures regularly regurgitate the lies that homosexuality is a foreign thing, a “Western concept” brought in from outside Africa, in this competition of who injures or exiles the homosexual out of society.
Who Gains from Political Homophobia?
President Bassirou Diomaye Faye and Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko made an election campaign promise to criminalise queer lives, and the issue was very much the low-hanging fruit they could reach for amidst frustration at their two years in power. The President and Prime Minister are locked in a visible power struggle as the country faces cascading debt-related crises, and households face food insecurity and economic hardships. Anti-queer legislation is what they could deliver together, given high social approval, as they struggle with the long list of failed radical campaign promises.
Yet, with all the projection and attempted erasure of queer Senegalese existence, this wasn’t without outside help. A Reuters investigation has shown that a U.S.-based group, MassResistance, collaborated with a Senegalese activist network And Samm Jikko Yi on a campaign ahead of the law’s passage – a true reflection of enduring Western influence in Senegalese life. Political leadership and conservative religious leaders are cashing in as they set our communities up for dangerous self-surveillance and further violence against ‘suspected’ queer people.
The dehumanisation and massive mobilisation of community emotions mask the government’s own failures, its inability to feed, educate, and care for its people.
This failure of the government can be measured in the speed at which its political homophobia is being socially reproduced, with the youth now carrying out everyday acts of hate and heinous violence that the state has normalised.
The two leaders and their supporters want to erase queer people from our history, from our language, and from Senegalese life. This shifts the conversation away from real people, with real families, real dreams, and contributions to society, toward political performances of righteousness and scapegoating in the community. The hateful rhetoric diminishes human dignity and grants power to determine who can receive it, who bestows or denies a person’s sexuality. Why is it so hard to accept that someone can love a person of the same sex without outside influence? The blame placed on the West is a way of avoiding reality! Not even the West can create us. The West found us here and tried to erase us! We have been here for generations. We are here to tell them: we exist in this society, as God’s children, just like everyone else.
The Master’s Tools still Wielded Against Us
Senegalese society has marked us, put a target on us, baying for our blood and demanding our death as gays, lesbians, trans and queer people. The social and political agitation against us, queer Senegalese, is so charged that one would be mistaken to think we robbed something from our own community by simply existing.
But the politics of social marginalisation and the condemnation that seek to beat people into normative conformity have a long history in Senegal as much as in other parts of Africa. That process was initiated by the colonial logic of ‘civilizing’ Africa. Colonial attempts to rid Africans of their Africanness were deeply a gendered cultural process; the ways we knew gender as diverse, lived, loved, expressed and transmitted knowledge across time and space were themselves upended. The attempts to erase African ways of being included the criminalisation and social reconfiguration of what was seen as ‘accepted sexuality’.
Dismantling our diverse ways of existing and the social bargains of coexistence were a primary means of unsettling Africa’s social cohesion, a complementary project to the economic and political destruction. The master’s tools are still being wielded against us beyond Senegal, with over 30 African countries criminalising queer existence. The coloniser taught Africans that heterosexuality was the only ‘natural’ way of being and loving.
Despite what diverse African cultures had practised earlier and what our spirituality told us, newly colonially constructed African states institutionalised this erasure of gender diverse people and continue to punish both people and every way of knowing anything different, refusing to decolonise. Hence, the punishment of “promotion of homosexuality” should be seen for what it is – a colonial continuation of an exercise of epistemic injustice and attempts to criminalise different approaches to public knowledge and awareness. It’s as much a demand for death for queer lives as it is about the death of African ways of knowing and being.
Fragility of Violent Cultures
Supporters of anti-homosexuality laws say it protects Senegalese culture, tradition, and religion by assuming queer people didn’t exist and that their existence threatens culture. Yet any culture that crumbles at the mere recognition of its own people was never a culture but a culture of hate. The new law pushes us further into hiding, but also targets activists, lawyers, journalists and other professionals who come up to defend queer people or those accused under the law. It advances the culture of repressing diverse voices.
The current rallying of religion, culture, and tradition to shape people’s imaginaries of who is to be loved and who is not has far deeper repercussions for us as a country. Forcing non-cisheterosexual people into marriages is an enactment on queer lives as it is on society itself. This pretend culture makes way for sham heterosexual romantic relationships and marriages when the alternative is death.
When queer people find each other and build safe spaces away from a society that judges them, they thrive. With the renewed mobilisations, we have seen the outing of communities and labelling them as criminal groups. The same society that has pushed people to the margins punishes them for building a life there. In this environment of renewed socially sanctioned violence, the cost of living hidden gets heavier. Queer people have to watch themselves constantly, every word, every gesture, every expression, just to stay slightly safe – this just got a lot harder. Also, getting health care is almost impossible as the law targets the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality. This doesn’t leave our communities any safer.
For some, leaving Senegal is the only option, but even that is a luxury few can afford. Not everyone can leave, and we should not have to flee our own land. LGBTQ Senegalese people in the diaspora often describe a painful kind of relief: finally able to breathe, but cut off from family, from language, culture and from home.
LGBTQ Senegalese people are not symbols or talking points. We are your children, friends, cousins, students, workers, neighbours, doctors and yes, your favourite celebrities. We exist inside Senegalese society, even when that society pretends we don’t. What all of this comes down to is simple: we want to live with dignity in our country. No law can stop us from loving each other and living our truth.
By a Queer Senegalese voice — anonymous for safety, defiant against erasure.