EDITORIAL: Why Human Rights Should Trump Sexual Preferences in Africa

In the last millennium, Africa has been the site of some of the most egregious atrocities against humanity and the dignity that is supposed, at least in our time, to attach to it. First, there was the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, the remnants of which are evincing a resurgence at the present time that ought to exercise our conscience in the extreme.

Then, there was the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the victims of which were treated like chaff by their own people who sold them, sometimes, for trinkets, to slavers who sought to turn them into chattel in the Americas.

The Black Lives Matter Movement is a sordid reminder to a forgetful world that Africa needs to take seriously, that the descendants of that chapter in human history that the UN once tried to characterise as a crime against humanity still don’t have their humanity recognised, much less valued in what is now the country of their birth.

Following in the footsteps of those events was colonialism that had absolutely…