Gay rights going backwards in Burkino Faso, by Shokti
As the tide of cruel laws against LGBTQ+ people in Africa continues to rise why is nobody talking about the real (pre-Christian) African teachings about the spiritual nature of gay and trans people?
On September 1st, 2025, the 71 members of the unelected transitional legislative assembly of Burkino Faso, which was set up by the military junta who seized power in a coup three years ago, unanimously voted to criminalise homosexual and transexual behaviour.
Back in August 2023, Burkina Faso’s media regulator banned television stations from broadcasting content deemed to promote homosexuality and authorities say the new code will be rolled out through a public awareness campaign. Neighbouring country Mali, also ruled by a military junta, adopted a similar law in 2024 and Burkino Faso now joins more than 30 African countries where homosexuality is banned.
“According to Reuters, the amended Persons and Family Code now stipulates prison, fines, and even deportation for gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals. Anyone convicted of engaging in “homosexual or similar practices” faces 2–5 years in prison. Justice Minister Edasso Rodrigue Bayala announced on state TV that offenders “will go before the judge,” and could be fined. He added that repeat offenders who are foreign nationals would be deported.
“Bayala described homosexual acts as “bizarre behaviour,” saying the new law was meant to defend Burkina’s traditional “marriage and family values,” African News reports. Prior to this vote, Burkina Faso had no laws banning homosexuality — one of roughly 22 African countries where same-sex relations had remained legal.” From Tolerance to Threat: Burkina Faso Bans Homosexuality
You can see their guilty, shameful faces near the start of this video from France24
African LGBTs exploited for clout, activist says as Burkina Faso bans homosexuality - France 24
IN FACT, NOT ONLY WERE THERE NO ANTI-GAY LAWS, THE DAGARA PEOPLE OF BURKINO FASO LONG HELD ON TO THE MEMORY OF PRE-COLONIAL AFRICAN SPIRITUAL UNDERSTANDING AROUND GENDER FLUIDITY AND SAME SEX ATTRACTION – AND THEY SENT WISDOM TEACHERS TO THE WEST TO SHARE THEIR KNOWLEDGE.
Tragically, not one news post about the vicious new law makes any reference to the powerful and profound African teachings about homosexual and trans people that were brought to the West by Dagara wisdom teachers, Malidoma Some and Sobonfu Some.
I met Sobonfu just over a decade ago. When I asked her about her tribal attitude to gay people she smiled with delight and said 'oh they are the special ones, without them nothing would happen.' This was at a presentation in north London where she told that at that time the Burkino Faso government were already considering an anti gay law - she told how a government minister had called her about it and she had explained to him that gay people have a spiritual purpose as gatekeepers, long respected in pre-colonial Africa, and the law was dropped. In her book Spirit of Intimacy, Sobonfu says a lot more about that spiritual purpose, as did her husband Malidoma Some back in an interview with MenWeb back in the 1990s. Both Sobonfu and Malidoma have passed on to spirit now and it sadly seems there's no more wise voices coming forth from the Dagara, holding back the tide of ignorance. Christianity you have a lot to answer for.
From The Spirit of Intimacy, Chapter 13 Homosexuality: The Gatekeepers, by Sobonfu Some.
The words gay and lesbian do not exist in the village, but there is the word gatekeeper. Gatekeepers are people who live a life at the edge between the worlds - the world of the village and the world of spirit. Though they do not marry in this world, they say they have partners in other dimensions.
What they do, they don't life to communicate to anyone. It is their right to keep it to themselves. Everybody in the village respects that because without gatekeepers, there is no access to other worlds. Most people in the West define themselves and others by sexual orientation. This way of looking at gatekeepers will kill the spirit of the gatekeeper. Gatekeepers in the village are able to do their job simply because of strong spiritual connection, and also their ability to direct their sexual energy not to other people but to spirit.
The gatekeepers stand on the threshold of the gender line. They are mediators between the two genders. They make sure there is peace and balance between women and men. If the two genders are in conflict and the whole village is caught in it, the gatekeepers are the ones to bring peace. Gatekeepers do not take sides. They simply act as "the sword of truth and integrity."
There are many gates that link a village to other worlds. The only people who have access to all these gates are the gatekeepers. I should mention here that there are two different kinds of gatekeeper.
The first group has the ability to guard a limited number of gates to the other world, specifically,those that correspond to the Dagara cosmology - water, earth, fire, minerals, and nature - because they vibrate the energies of those gates.
The second group of gatekeepers... has the responsibility of overseeing all the gates. They are in contact not only with the elemental gates but also with many others. They have one foot in all the other worlds and other foot here. This is why the vibration of their body is totally different from others...
... Now, as to their sexual orientation, nobody cares about this questions: they care only about their performance as gatekeepers. I figure if they want people in the village to know about their sexuality, they will share it with them. I once heard that one of the reasons why gatekeepers are able to open gates to other dimensions is in the way they use their sexual energy. Their ability to focus their sexual energy is a particular way allows them to open and close different gates.
The life of gay people in the West is in many ways a reaction to pressure from a society that rejects them. This is partly because a culture that has forgotten so much about itself will displace certain groups of people, such as the gay community, from their true roles.
In the village they are not seen as the other. They are not forced to create a separate community in order to survive. People do not put a negative label on them, they are regarded no differently than any other child of the village. They are born gatekeepers, with specific purposes, and are encouraged to fulfil the role they're born to in the interests of the community.
In the village, gatekeepers have an eye of both genders. They can help the genders to understand each other better than usual in their daily life. That's why a group of women, for example, might gather and bring a male gatekeeper to help them understand certain village issues. The same things happens on the other side, with a female gatekeeper coming into the middle of the men's circle...
Gays and lesbians in the West are often very spiritual, but they have been taken away from their connection with spirit. My feeling is that without that outlet or that role in the culture, they have to find other ways of defining themselves. This could be one of the reasons why they would want to get married or make themselves look as though they do not have a unique purpose.
From Malidoma Some's MenWeb interview:
Among the Dagara people, gender has very little to do with anatomy. It is purely energetic. In that context, a male who is physically male can vibrate female energy, and vice versa. That is where the real gender is
The Earth is looked at, from my tribal perspective, as a very, very delicate machine or consciousness, with high vibrational points, which certain people must be guardians of in order for the tribe to keep its continuity with the gods and with the spirits that dwell there. Spirits of this world and spirits of the other worlds. Any person who is at this link between this world and the other world experiences a state of vibrational consciousness which is far higher, and far different, from the one that a normal person would experience. This is what makes a gay person gay. This kind of function is not one that society votes for certain people to fulfil. It is one that people are said to decide on prior to being born.
So to then limit gay people to simple sexual orientation is really the worst harm that can be done to a person. That all he or she is is a sexual person. And, personally, because of the fact that my knowledge of indigenous medicine, ritual, comes from gatekeepers, it’s hard for me to take this position that gay people are the negative breed of a society. No! In a society that is profoundly dysfunctional, what happens is that peoples’ life purposes are taken away, and what is left is this kind of sexual orientation which, in turn, is disturbing to the very society that created it.
I think this is again victimisation by a Christian establishment that is looking at a gay person as a disempowered person, a person who has lost his job from birth onward, and now society just wants to fire him out of life. This is not justice. It’s not justice. It is a terrible harm done to an energy that could save the world, that could save us. If, today, we are suffering from a gradual ecological waste, this is simply because the gatekeepers have been fired from their job. They have been fired! They have nothing to do! And because they have been fired, we accuse them for not doing anything. This is not fair!
Why is it that, everywhere else in the world, gay people are a blessing, and in the modern world they are a curse? It is self-evident. The modern world was built by Christianity. They have taken the gods out of the earth sent them to heaven, wherever that is. And everyone who aspires to the gods must then negotiate with Christianity, so that the real priests and priestesses are out of a job. This is the worst thing that can happen to a culture that calls itself modern.
…the thing about it is that humans are going to be begetting gatekeepers, no matter what. This is the chance that we’ve got. So maybe that means that sooner or later we’re going to wake up to the horror of our own errors, and we’re going to reconsecrate our chosen people so that they can do their priestly work as they should. Otherwise, I just don’t understand. I just don’t understand. My position about it is not so much that gays be just forgiven. That’s just tokenism. But that they serve as an example of the wrong, or the illness, that modernity has brought to us, and that we use that to begin working at healing ourselves and our society from the bottom up. That way, by the time we reach a certain level, all the gatekeepers are going to find their positions again. We cannot tell them where the gates are. They know. If we start to heal ourselves, they will remember. It will kick in. But as long as we continue in arrogance, in egotism, in God-knows-what form of violence on ourselves, no, there’s that veil of confusion that’s going to continue to prevail, and as a result it’s going to prevent great things from happening. That’s all I can say about that.
