Africa Business

Every time Abdou’s mother hears of a homophobic attack in the streets of Senegal’s capital Dakar, she locks him in her bedroom.

Abdou — who, like other LGBTQ people AFP interviewed, asked not to be identified by his real name — is used to hiding. He has been concealing his sexuality most of his life. 

But lately the 20-year-old has felt even more in danger. 

“The situation is becoming more and more serious,” said the soft-spoken unemployed tailor. 

“Before they would say you were gay, but they didn’t hit you. Today you are beaten and it’s posted on social media.”

Homosexuality has never been widely accepted in Senegal, a deeply conservative nation. But tensions have risen to new heights in recent months.

In May, Senegalese football star Idrissa Gana Gueye was criticised in France for missing a Paris Saint-Germain match for “personal reasons” in which players wore rainbow jerseys to support LGBTQ rights.

The reports prompted an outpouring of support for Gueye back home with social media deluged with homophobic memes.

Days later, a mob hurling homophobic slurs beat up an American artist who was in Dakar for an international festival.

Abdou’s nightmare began when a cousin discovered his sexuality and outed him, forcing him to flee from Senegal for months after being banished from his house, sacked from his job and bombarded with threats.

Now he is back and said he is trying to convince his family he has “become” straight.

“I tried several times to say, ‘Tomorrow, I’m not going to be gay anymore, tomorrow I’m going to try to find a girlfriend,’ [but] I can’t.”

Abou cut contact with his gay friends to protect them and spends most of his time in isolation, trawling social media for information about Senegal’s growing anti-gay movement.

“I can’t find the words to describe how much it hurts deep down to be hated,” he said.

He once even tried to kill himself by drinking a poison for cockroaches.

– The gay ‘lobby’ –

Activists say anti-gay rhetoric has been ramped up since a May 2021 demonstration in the capital calling for gay sex — currently punishable by up to five years in prison –- to be made a serious crime.

France, the former colonial power, has removed Senegal from its list of safe countries of origin because of the risks gays face there.

Last year the majority of the 1,300 Senegalese asylum applications in France cited persecution over sexual orientation, according to official figures.

But many in Muslim-majority Senegal believe homosexuality is a Western lifestyle being imposed on their society.

“I don’t see how Senegal should change its position to give more space to these homosexuals,” said Abdoulaye Guisse, a 28-year-old student, adding that LGBTQ people should remain “discreet”.

“Socially it is not allowed — religion is so strong in Senegal that it conditions our social practices.”

Powerful Sufi brotherhoods hold considerable social and political clout in Senegal.

There is also growing anti-French sentiment.

Ababacar Mboup, who runs And Samm Jikko Yi, a group that helped organise last year’s march, accused France of forcing its customs on Senegal when it does not accept Muslim practices such as polygamy within its borders.

He said he wants to stop the gay “lobby” from dominating mainstream Senegalese culture.

“If two homosexuals, holed up in their home, engage in their activities, that does not concern us — but we really want to preserve Senegalese public space,” he said, insisting his organisation is peaceful and does not condone mob violence.

“Holding Gay Pride… that we will not accept.”

Senegal is not the only sub-Saharan state with laws against gay sex — some two dozen others have them as well. 

While some nonetheless have small but visible LGBTQ communities, in Senegal — a country known for its hospitality, with a reputation for stability and the rule of law — that is not the case.

– ‘You just want to leave’ –

Khalifa, a bisexual, claims groups have been tracking down LGBTQ people and rights groups that help them and publicly denouncing them. 

The 34-year-old, who was recently outed to his family and forced into hiding outside Dakar, said some homophobes have his personal information and he is worried they will publish it.

“In Senegal, there is no place for gays,” he said. “When you hear the imams preach you just want to get on a plane and leave immediately.”

Even though he is proud to be Senegalese and a practising Muslim, he hopes to get asylum abroad.

“For me there is only one nationality on Earth and that is Senegalese,” he said.

Married with a child, Khalifa was able to hide his bisexuality most of his life, until being outed by a friend after a falling-out.

“When I walk outside, you can’t tell I’m bisexual — on the contrary, you think it’s a homophobe walking,” he said. “That’s part of the tactics.”

Abdou, on the other hand, was effeminate from a young age and his mother forced him to see a religious leader known as a marabout for “treatments” including midnight “spiritual” baths and conversion therapy.

As he got older, gay men would stop him in the streets and ask for his phone number.

That can be dangerous. LGBTQ people can be lured into meetings where they are attacked.

Dakar has never had gay bars, LGBTQ community members say, but there were previously venues where they would meet and mingle alongside straight people without others knowing. 

All that has stopped since the anti-gay march. 

“It is riskier today to publicly display one’s LGBTQI identity in Senegal compared to a few years ago,” said Ousmane Diallo, an Amnesty International researcher.

Gay activists claim politicians are jumping on the anti-gay bandwagon to rally support for parliamentary elections Sunday and a presidential vote in 2024.

– Father swore he’d shoot son –

Mame Mactar Gueye, the leader of the Jamra NGO that has been pushing for harsher punishments for gay sex, argued that tougher laws would in fact be “dissuasive” and protect LGBTQ people from mob violence. 

After parliament rejected them in January, Jamra organised a second march in February, and Gueye met President Macky Sall in May.

Gueye said that historically there was a place in Senegalese society for effeminate men or transvestites known as “goor-jigeens” — meaning “man-woman” in Wolof — but that LGBTQ people have gone too far with sacrilegious “provocations” over the last decade.

“They started to be a problem when they organised themselves into associations and started to invade the public space,” he said.

“Many countries have given in,” Gueye said, claiming Gabon had “fallen into the hands of the LGBT lobby” by relaxing laws on gay sex.

“You Westerners are used to teaching us in your university lecture halls that democracy is the law of the majority, but please, the overwhelming majority of Senegalese don’t want it,” he said.

For Senegalese gays, leaving may seem the best option, but it comes with its own challenges.

Daouda, 32, fled to a neighbouring country in 2016 and sometimes struggles to make ends meet.

“In Senegal living with homosexuality means being in danger from morning to night,” he said.

He misses his family and would like to go home but believes he cannot so long as his father is alive.

“He took out a gun and wanted to shoot me — if there weren’t people in the house right then I would have died,” he said. “He swore that he’d kill me if it’s the last thing he does.”

A US judge Friday ordered the military chief of eastern Libya, Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, to compensate Libyan plaintiffs who allege he ordered the torture and extrajudicial killings of their family members.

The federal judge in the state of Virginia, where Haftar lived before returning to Libya, ruled that he had not cooperated with the court and that by “default” was ordered to pay damages to the families.

Haftar, a dual US-Libyan citizen whose name is spelled “Hifter” in American legal documents, can still appeal the decision, and future hearings will need to be held to determine the level of compensation.

Nonetheless, Friday’s ruling represents a major setback for the military leader.

“Justice has prevailed. Hifter will be held responsible for his war crimes,” said Faisal Gill, one of the lawyers spearheading the cases, in a statement shared with AFP.

Filed in 2019 and 2020, the civil lawsuits argue that Haftar, as head of the eastern-based Libyan National Army, authorized the indiscriminate bombings of civilians during his unsuccessful 2019 campaign to take Tripoli, resulting in the death of the plaintiff’s family members.

They are suing Haftar under a 1991 US law, the Torture Victim Protection Act, which allows for civil lawsuits against anyone who, acting in an official capacity for a foreign nation, commits acts of torture and/or extrajudicial killings.

The court had paused the case ahead of Libyan elections in December 2021 — but restarted it after the vote was once again delayed.

Haftar has also unsuccessfully attempted to dismiss the suit, claiming immunity as a head of state.

Oil-rich Libya has been mired in a bitter power struggle since the fall of dictator Moamer Kadhafi’s regime in 2011, with a major division between the north African country’s east and west.

Two governments are vying for power: one based in Tripoli and another supported by Haftar’s army, which controls portions of the east and south.

Haftar, 78, is a Soviet-trained soldier who assisted in the 1969 coup that brought Kadhafi to power. After taking on a senior military position in Libya’s war with Chad, Haftar was taken as a prisoner of war, and subsequently disavowed by Kadhafi.

He was ultimately offered political asylum in the United States, where he lived for 20 years and gained American citizenship as well as, according to the Wall Street Journal, several properties worth millions of dollars.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel next month to South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, the State Department announced Friday, as Washington ramps up diplomacy in Africa to counter a Russian charm offensive.

The US ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, will also go in August to Ghana and Uganda and the US aid chief, Samantha Power, recently completed a trip to longtime US ally Kenya, as well as troubled Somalia, where she highlighted the rise in malnutrition aggravated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The diplomacy comes as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov undertakes his own extensive tour of Africa, where he has sought to cast spiraling global food prices as a consequence of Western sanctions — an idea rejected by Washington, which points to Moscow’s blockade of Ukrainian ports.

Blinken will send a message that “African countries are geostrategic players and critical partners on the most pressing issues of our day, from promoting an open and stable international system, to tackling the effects of climate change, food insecurity and global pandemics to shaping our technological and economic futures,” a State Department statement said.

South Africa, a leader in the developing world, has emerged as a key diplomatic battleground as it has remained studiously neutral on the Ukraine war, refusing to join Western calls to condemn Moscow, which still enjoys affection over its opposition to apartheid.

Blinken will visit Johannesburg and the capital Pretoria from August 7-9. He will then head to the Democratic Republic of Congo’s capital Kinshasa in a bid to show support for sub-Saharan Africa’s vastest country as it tries to turn the page on decades of conflict.

He will complete his trip in Rwanda, which has seen a flare-up in tensions with DR Congo after it accused its neighbor to the east of backing M23 rebels, a charge Kigali denies.

The State Department said Blinken will press for the release of Paul Rusesabagina, who is credited with saving hundreds of lives during the 1994 genocide and inspired the movie “Hotel Rwanda.”

A US permanent resident, Rusesabagina is a critic of Rwandan President Paul Kagame and was sentenced to a 25-year prison term for “terrorism” after a plane he believed was bound for Burundi landed in Kigali in 2020.

Blinken will be paying his second trip to sub-Saharan Africa since he took office last year with President Joe Biden’s administration. 

Late last year, he traveled to Kenya, Nigeria and Senegal as he sought to highlight democracies.

Before Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine, US efforts in Africa had a heavy subtext on competition with China, which has poured money into infrastructure building on the continent and contrasts itself with the United States by making no demands on democracy or human rights.

– Rejecting Russian narrative –

While the Biden administration identifies China as the primary long-term competitor of the United States, it has focused in the short-term on countering Russia. 

Western nations have overwhelmingly voiced outrage and sought to punish Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine but developing nations, especially in Africa and South Asia, have been more hesitant.

Yoweri Museveni, the veteran leader of Uganda where Thomas-Greenfield is heading, met Tuesday with Lavrov and said, “How can we be against somebody who has never harmed us?”

Lavrov, speaking the next day in Ethiopia, urged Africa to resist a world “totally subordinated to the United States” and warned that other nations risked punishment if they run afoul of Western interests.

Blinken on Wednesday described Lavrov’s trip as “a desperate game of defense to justify to the world the actions that Russia has taken” including its “aggression” in Ukraine.

President Emmanuel Macron of France, which has a long history in Africa, on a visit to Benin on Wednesday called Russia “one of the last imperial colonial powers.”

Power, administrator of the US Agency for International Development, on her trip to the Horn of Africa unveiled more than $1 billion in emergency assistance to fight rising hunger and challenged other nations such as China and Russia to follow suit.

Kenya’s peace-building agency on Friday gave Facebook a seven-day deadline to clean up hate speech on its platform or risk suspension ahead of the country’s hotly contested election next month.

The National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC) said it had sent recommendations to Facebook’s parent company Meta following a report that it allowed more than a dozen hateful political advertisements. 

“If Facebook does not comply… we would recommend that Facebook utterly to be suspended from this country,” NCIC commissioner Danvas Makori told reporters. 

The NCIC is an independent ethnic cohesion watchdog set up after the 2007-8 post-election violence that left more than 1,000 people dead.

Its recommendations followed a report by advocacy group Global Witness and UK-based legal activist firm Foxglove that Facebook had accepted and broadcast at least 19 ads calling for rape, slaughter and beheadings in both English and Swahili languages. 

“Our position is very clear, this country is bigger than a social media company or an entity,” Makori said. 

“We will not allow Facebook or any other social media company to jeopardise national security.”

AFP has reached out to Facebook for comment.

The NCIC does not have the powers to suspend Facebook but can make recommendations to the government’s Communication Authority. 

Kenyans will on August 9 elect not only a new president but also several hundred members of parliament and about 1,500 county officials.

With its diverse population and large ethnic voting blocs, the East African powerhouse has long suffered politically motivated communal violence around election time, often blamed on hate speech. 

Tech behemoths, including Facebook, have faced accusations of doing little to clamp down on a long list of banned content, from hate speech to disinformation and child sexual abuse images.

An undercover expose by UK media revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a British consulting firm, used the personal data of millions of Facebook users to target political ads and spread misinformation during Kenya’s 2013 and 2017 presidential campaigns. 

AFP is a partner of Meta, providing fact-checking services in Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa.

The new US envoy for the Horn of Africa arrived in Ethiopia on Friday on a mission to advance peace efforts between the government and Tigrayan rebels.

Mike Hammer is in the country “to support efforts towards achieving a lasting peace for the benefit of all Ethiopians”, the US embassy said on Twitter.

It said he would meet government officials, political parties and civil society.

Both the Ethiopian government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) who went to war in November 2020 have raised the possibility of peace talks.

But major obstacles remain.

Abiy wants the African Union, which is based in Addis Ababa, to broker any talks, a stance rejected by the rebels who instead want neighbouring Kenya to lead the mediation.

Hammer “will be having discussions with the parties to see what we can do to move forward on those talks”, Molly Phee, the top US diplomat for Africa, said on Wednesday.

Abiy’s national security adviser Redwan Hussein said on Twitter on Thursday that the government was ready to talk “anytime anywhere” and that negotiations should begin “without preconditions”.

Fighting has eased in northern Ethiopia since a humanitarian truce was declared at the end of March.

But more than 13 million people are in need of food aid across Tigray and the neighbouring regions of Afar and Amhara, with high levels of food insecurity and malnutrition, according to the United Nations.

Tigray itself is lacking in food, fuel and essential services such as electricity, communications and banking, with hundreds of thousands living in dire conditions.

Earlier this week, TPLF-linked Tigrai TV quoted the rebels’ leader Debretsion Gebremichael warning that basic services would have to be restored in the region before negotiations could begin.

The US State Department said in a statement Saturday announcing his visit that Hammer would “review progress on delivery of humanitarian assistance, and accountability for human rights violations and abuses”.

Hammer is also due to help forge a diplomatic resolution to the regional dispute over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), a mega-project on the Blue Nile, it said.

He held talks on the dam during a visit to Egypt on Monday.

“We are actively engaged in supporting a diplomatic way forward under the African Union’s auspices that arrives at an agreement that provides for the long-term needs of every citizen along the Nile.”

Addis Ababa deems the project essential for the electrification and development of Africa’s second most populous country, but Cairo and Khartoum fear it could threaten their access to vital Nile waters. 

South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa said Friday that his ruling African National Congress party was at its “weakest”, after a historic loss in municipal polls last year.

The party leader spoke as the continent’s most advanced economy faces a raft of socio-economic crises.

Critics charge that the government lacks a national plan to tackle poverty, inequality and 34.5-percent unemployment worsened by the coronavirus pandemic, or even provide basic services such as electricity and water.

Support for the ANC dipped below 50 percent for the first time in local polls last November, amid growing disappointment with the party that has ruled the country for nearly three decades since the end of apartheid.

“The ANC today is at its weakest and most vulnerable since the advent of democracy,” Ramaphosa told delegates at talks to map out the party’s new direction in Johannesburg.

The weaknesses, Ramaphosa said, “are evident in the distrust, the disillusionment, the frustration that is expressed by many people towards our movement and our government”.

He said the party of late anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela was now a “divided movement”, with rifts “driven by competition for positions and access to public resources, and patronage as well”.

The cracks were resulting in “weakened governance”, he said, urging delegates to come up with “clear policies”, “coherent ideas” and “practical solutions”.

“This is a defining moment for the ANC… but more importantly for our country,” he said.

The talks are a prelude to the ANC national elective conference in December, when the party is to hold internal polls to pick a candidate for the next presidential election.

Ramaphosa is expected to seek a second five-year term, but could face a challenge from a faction of the party that is loyal to former president Jacob Zuma, who has been accused of corruption.

The three-day talks, to run until Sunday, are also expected to address graft allegations against ANC members.

A state corruption inquiry report published earlier this year named more than 200 of its members, including some senior officials.

The party is also buckling under financial woes, having struggled to pay salaries in recent months.

Dozens of party workers picketed outside the conference venue, protesting over their unpaid wages.

Ramaphosa himself is also mired in a scandal following a break-in at his game and cattle farm.

France has charged five more children of former Gabonese president Omar Bongo in a long-running inquiry over ill-gotten wealth, a judicial source said Friday.

Omar Bongo, a close French ally, ruled the oil-rich state from 1967 until his death in 2009, when he was succeeded by his son Ali Bongo Ondimba. 

He had 54 children.

French investigators suspect several members of the late president’s family to have knowingly benefitted from a fraudulently acquired real-estate empire worth at least 85 million euros ($87 million).

They have already charged four other adult children, as well as a former Miss France, over receiving Parisian apartments from the late president.

This means at least nine half-sisters and half-brothers of Gabon’s current president have now been indicted in the 15-year-old case.

The siblings most recently charged, in June and July, include Pascaline Bongo, 66, his eldest daughter and former director of his cabinet, Omar Denis Jr Bongo, 28, who is also the grandson of Congolese President Denis Sassou Nguesso, Jeanne Matoua, 38, and Joseph Matoua, 40, the judicial source said, confirming a report by Africa Intelligence.

It was not immediately clear who the fifth child charged since June was.

They were charged with receiving misappropriated public funds, “active and passive corruption”, money laundering and “misuse of social assets”.

Pascaline Bongo’s lawyer, Corinne Dreyfus-Schmidt, said the charges involved “legal and factual anachronism”.

According to information obtained by AFP, her client told investigators in January 2020 that she owned several flats in chic Parisian neighbourhoods, which her father had bought at some point between the 1970s and the 1990s.

Pascaline Bongo, also a former foreign minister, was very close to her father.

Omar Denis Jr Bongo’s attorney, Jean-Marie Viala, rejected the allegations against his client.

– ‘Undue commissions’ –

The Bongo property empire includes apartments and buildings in Paris and the Mediterranean city of Nice as well as luxury cars, several of which have been seized by French authorities.

In findings released in February, an investigating judge determined that much of the money for the purchases came from “undue commissions” paid by French energy firm Elf, now a part of TotalEnergies, to exploit Gabon’s vast oil reserves.

French financial investigators between March 25 and April 5 charged Grace, Betty, Arthur and Hermine Bongo with concealing embezzlement of public funds, corruption and misuse of assets, documents seen by AFP showed.

All denied any knowledge of the allegedly fraudulent origins of the assets, a judicial source said at the time.

They told investigators they had received the properties — apartments in the 15th and 16th districts of Paris — as gifts from their father between 1995 and 2004.

Prosecutors in early June said a former Miss France, Sonia Rolland, had also been charged.

She was accused of receipt of embezzled public funds for accepting from Bongo in 2003 a Parisian apartment worth 800,000 euros ($817,000).

Rolland, who was 22 at the time, recognised that she was naive but contested any wrongdoing, her lawyer told AFP.

Contacted by AFP, Gabonese presidential spokesman Jessye Ella Ekogha declined to comment as the affair concerned “neither the president… nor any other member of the presidency”.

As a sitting head of state, President Ali Bongo Ondimba has immunity.

Nigeria’s military command has ordered a major reshuffle of senior officers, an army statement said on Friday, as the government faces pressure over the country’s growing insecurity.

Nigeria’s security forces are overstretched on several fronts, battling a grinding 13-year jihadist war in the northeast, bandit militias in the northwest and separatist agitation in the southeast.

A sophisticated attack on a prison outside the capital this month claimed by the Islamic State group was a major embarrassment for the armed forces, as jihadists struck just 40 km (25 miles) from President Muhammadu Buhari’s villa and near the international airport.

A convoy of presidential security and protocol staff preparing for Buhari’s visit to his home state of northwest Katsina was ambushed just days before.

Soldiers from the presidential guard were also ambushed by gunmen again this week just outside the capital.

Chief of Army Staff Lieutenant General Faruk Yahaya ordered the restructuring “in an effort to reposition the Nigerian Army (NA) for operational efficiency and proficiency,” the statement said.

Security will be a major theme in 2023 presidential elections to replace Buhari, who steps down after two terms allowed under the constitution.

Among the army changes were commanding officers, brigade commanders, commanders of training institutes and staff at the army headquarters.

New general commanding officers were appointed to Division 81 in Lagos, Division 82 in southeast Enugu, as well as Division 1 in northeast Kaduna State and division 2 in southwest Oyo State.

Buhari, a former army commander and military ruler during Nigeria’s dictatorship, was first elected partly on his image as a strongman who could tackle Boko Haram jihadists.

But critics say his government has failed to bring insecurity under control.

“We are in a very difficult situation… Mr. President understands people’s concerns about the growing insecurity,” national security adviser Babagana Monguno said on Wednesday after a security council meeting.

“But I can assure you that there’s no straight cut and dried method of dealing with this thing unless all of us embrace each other.”

Opposition lawmakers this week threatened to impeach Buhari over insecurity, though they have little chance of success with his ruling APC party holding a majority.

The jihadist conflict has shifted, with militants no longer controlling the large swathes of territory they once held in the northeast, but the Kuje prison attack highlighted their threat to other parts of the country.

Hundreds of thousands of people have also been displaced in rural areas of the northwest, where bandit militias raid villages to loot and kidnap scores of residents to hold them for ransom in forest hideouts.

Every time Abdou’s mother hears of a homophobic attack in the streets of Senegal’s capital Dakar, she locks him in her bedroom.

Abdou — who, like other LGBTQ people AFP interviewed, asked not to be identified by his real name — is used to hiding. He has been concealing his sexuality most of his life. 

But lately the 20-year-old has felt even more in danger. 

“The situation is becoming more and more serious,” said the soft-spoken unemployed tailor. 

“Before they would say you were gay, but they didn’t hit you. Today you are beaten and it’s posted on social media.”

Homosexuality has never been widely accepted in Senegal, a deeply conservative nation. But tensions have risen to new heights in recent months.

In May, Senegalese football star Idrissa Gana Gueye was criticised in France for missing a Paris Saint-Germain match for “personal reasons” in which players wore rainbow jerseys to support LGBTQ rights.

The reports prompted an outpouring of support for Gueye back home with social media deluged with homophobic memes.

Days later, a mob hurling homophobic slurs beat up an American artist who was in Dakar for an international festival.

Abdou’s nightmare began when a cousin discovered his sexuality and outed him, forcing him to flee from Senegal for months after being banished from his house, sacked from his job and bombarded with threats.

Now he is back and said he is trying to convince his family he has “become” straight.

“I tried several times to say, ‘Tomorrow, I’m not going to be gay anymore, tomorrow I’m going to try to find a girlfriend,’ [but] I can’t.”

Abou cut contact with his gay friends to protect them and spends most of his time in isolation, trawling social media for information about Senegal’s growing anti-gay movement.

“I can’t find the words to describe how much it hurts deep down to be hated,” he said.

He once even tried to kill himself by drinking a poison for cockroaches.

– The gay ‘lobby’ –

Activists say anti-gay rhetoric has been ramped up since a May 2021 demonstration in the capital calling for gay sex — currently punishable by up to five years in prison –- to be made a serious crime.

France, the former colonial power, has removed Senegal from its list of safe countries of origin because of the risks gays face there.

Last year the majority of the 1,300 Senegalese asylum applications in France cited persecution over sexual orientation, according to official figures.

But many in Muslim-majority Senegal believe homosexuality is a Western lifestyle being imposed on their society.

“I don’t see how Senegal should change its position to give more space to these homosexuals,” said Abdoulaye Guisse, a 28-year-old student, adding that LGBTQ people should remain “discreet”.

“Socially it is not allowed — religion is so strong in Senegal that it conditions our social practices.”

Powerful Sufi brotherhoods hold considerable social and political clout in Senegal.

There is also growing anti-French sentiment.

Ababacar Mboup, who runs And Samm Jikko Yi, a group that helped organise last year’s march, accused France of forcing its customs on Senegal when it does not accept Muslim practices such as polygamy within its borders.

He said he wants to stop the gay “lobby” from dominating mainstream Senegalese culture.

“If two homosexuals, holed up in their home, engage in their activities, that does not concern us — but we really want to preserve Senegalese public space,” he said, insisting his organisation is peaceful and does not condone mob violence.

“Holding Gay Pride… that we will not accept.”

Senegal is not the only sub-Saharan state with laws against gay sex — some two dozen others have them as well. 

While some nonetheless have small but visible LGBTQ communities, in Senegal — a country known for its hospitality, with a reputation for stability and the rule of law — that is not the case.

– ‘You just want to leave’ –

Khalifa, a bisexual, claims groups have been tracking down LGBTQ people and rights groups that help them and publicly denouncing them. 

The 34-year-old, who was recently outed to his family and forced into hiding outside Dakar, said some homophobes have his personal information and he is worried they will publish it.

“In Senegal, there is no place for gays,” he said. “When you hear the imams preach you just want to get on a plane and leave immediately.”

Even though he is proud to be Senegalese and a practising Muslim, he hopes to get asylum abroad.

“For me there is only one nationality on Earth and that is Senegalese,” he said.

Married with a child, Khalifa was able to hide his bisexuality most of his life, until being outed by a friend after a falling-out.

“When I walk outside, you can’t tell I’m bisexual — on the contrary, you think it’s a homophobe walking,” he said. “That’s part of the tactics.”

Abdou, on the other hand, was effeminate from a young age and his mother forced him to see a religious leader known as a marabout for “treatments” including midnight “spiritual” baths and conversion therapy.

As he got older, gay men would stop him in the streets and ask for his phone number.

That can be dangerous. LGBTQ people can be lured into meetings where they are attacked.

Dakar has never had gay bars, LGBTQ community members say, but there were previously venues where they would meet and mingle alongside straight people without others knowing. 

All that has stopped since the anti-gay march. 

“It is riskier today to publicly display one’s LGBTQI identity in Senegal compared to a few years ago,” said Ousmane Diallo, an Amnesty International researcher.

Gay activists claim politicians are jumping on the anti-gay bandwagon to rally support for parliamentary elections Sunday and a presidential vote in 2024.

– Father swore he’d shoot son –

Mame Mactar Gueye, the leader of the Jamra NGO that has been pushing for harsher punishments for gay sex, argued that tougher laws would in fact be “dissuasive” and protect LGBTQ people from mob violence. 

After parliament rejected them in January, Jamra organised a second march in February, and Gueye met President Macky Sall in May.

Gueye said that historically there was a place in Senegalese society for effeminate men or transvestites known as “goor-jigeens” — meaning “man-woman” in Wolof — but that LGBTQ people have gone too far with sacrilegious “provocations” over the last decade.

“They started to be a problem when they organised themselves into associations and started to invade the public space,” he said.

“Many countries have given in,” Gueye said, claiming Gabon had “fallen into the hands of the LGBT lobby” by relaxing laws on gay sex.

“You Westerners are used to teaching us in your university lecture halls that democracy is the law of the majority, but please, the overwhelming majority of Senegalese don’t want it,” he said.

For Senegalese gays, leaving may seem the best option, but it comes with its own challenges.

Daouda, 32, fled to a neighbouring country in 2016 and sometimes struggles to make ends meet. 

“In Senegal living with homosexuality means being in danger from morning to night,” he said.

He misses his family and would like to go home but believes he cannot so long as his father is alive.

“He took out a gun and wanted to shoot me — if there weren’t people in the house right then I would have died,” he said. “He swore that he’d kill me if it’s the last thing he does.”

It’s midnight. Luxury cars arrive outside Cocoon, a nightclub in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest and most vibrant city. In minutes, dozens of people surround the vehicles, hoping to make a buck.

In the wealthy Ikoyi neighbourhood, the flow of people chasing money never stops. All survive on informal jobs they find daily on the streets.

For a handful of dollars, they help people park in front of expensive restaurants, bars and clubs, and help manage traffic during the day. 

In the megacity of some 20 million people, for the poorest a good day is when you have enough to eat. A bad day is when you don’t — and those days are increasingly frequent as high fuel and food costs bite into earnings.

“In Nigeria, it’s simple. Either you hustle or you die. So even 100 naira (25 cents), we take it,” says Musa Omar, standing opposite the Cocoon nightclub.

Africa’s most populous country has some 80 million people living below the national poverty line, earning less than 1.90 dollars a day. 

And in rural Nigeria, millions live in areas where insecurity is rife, making living conditions even harsher. 

Many are now being pushed to a tipping point, after cost of living and food prices increased following the coronavirus pandemic and then again after Russia declared war in Ukraine.

Nigeria’s official year-on-year inflation is now 18 percent, with food inflation at 20 percent — a five-year high.

In Lagos, hustlers — people living and working by the day — can be seen at every corner. 

They embody one of the city’s mottos often seen painted in colourful letters on trucks: “No food for lazy man.” 

The street is like a river, and they hope desperately to catch a passing fish.

“I’m willing to work anywhere, to do anything, to make a decent living,” said Omar, 36.

“Before, it was not like this… prices have gone up, everything is expensive and everybody is suffering.”

– God, only ‘hope’ – 

Every day, thousands of people, mostly young, trickle into the cities and in particular Lagos, hoping to capture a small fraction of the immense wealth concentrated in the hands of a select few. 

It’s the case of Kasheem Sadiq who left Kaduna, in the north, after the death of his baby son, Yusuf, who “got sick”.

“I had to find 9,000 naira (about $20) to pay the treatment but I couldn’t because price of food is up. And there is no job anywhere,” said the 44-year-old, standing under the only functioning light of a dark street of Lagos.

Now working in Lagos, he says he earns about 2,500 naira ($6) a day — almost three times more than what half of the population earns — but, “every night, I’m crying, away from my family,” he said.

It’s now 2.20 am outside the Cocoon nightclub. Someone in a Porsche is trying to park while a group of hustlers guide the driver so that he doesn’t crash the luxury car in a ditch full of trash. 

“The rich are getting so rich and nobody cares about the poor,” says Abdul Musa, 35, who seems to be the hustlers’ informal chief. “Only God can help us.”

– Drugs, prostitution –

From Benue, in the east, Musa has been working the streets of Ikoyi for the past five years. He says he sleeps in a stable at night with donkeys.

“I don’t want to have children,” he says. In this country, “we are surviving in hell.”

Five a.m. Clubbers are streaming out, heading back to their cars.

It’s late, or early, but someone shouting the following three syllables is enough to arouse the crowd: “Bu-ha-ri”, in reference to President Muhammadu Buhari.

The 79-year-old former army general is stepping down next year after his two terms in office allowed by the constitution. 

For many including for those waiting outside Cocoon, the government is “corrupt” and “does nothing for the people”.

Anita Obasi, the only woman in the group of hustlers, is looking at the stream of cars driving away, smoking a joint.

In Nigeria, drugs are widely consumed among the street hustlers as a way to escape reality.

Wearing a black cap, the 24-year-old smiles. She says smoking “eases the pain away”. 

For the past two years, she has been working as a prostitute, charging the equivalent of $9 a client or $11 when she travels to them.

After two decades of growth, Nigeria entered a recession in 2016, after a fall in oil prices. The economy was just starting to recover in 2020 when the pandemic hit. And the war in Ukraine has made everything much worse. 

Obasi lives in constant anguish: will she be able to feed her daughter at the end of the day?

“I try thinking about the bright side of things, but everything around me is going down.”