Human rights in many parts of Africa are sadly stuck in the savage stage.

Uganda’s parliament has passed a bill to toughen the punishment for homosexual acts to include life imprisonment in some cases.

the backlash is in the most primitive countries in the world, a side effect of global media.

Yet there are still parts of the world where it is not safe to be homosexual. Extra-judicial beatings and murders are depressingly common in much of Africa and in some Muslim countries. African gangs subject lesbians to “corrective rape”. In some countries persecution has intensified. Chad is poised to ban gay sex. Nigeria and Uganda have passed draconian anti-gay laws (though a court recently struck Uganda’s down). Russia and a few other countries have barred the “promotion” of homosexuality.

This is partly a reaction to the spread of gay rights in the West. Thanks to globalisation, people who live in places where everyone agrees that homosexuality is an abomination can now see pictures of gay-pride parades in Sydney or men marrying men in Massachusetts. They find this shocking.

This is why you can’t have nice things, africa. What is it with Africa and this sort of stuff? It is hard to see how the continent can go anywhere with the medieval times still going strong in the 21th century.

A Zimbabwean senator named Morgan Femai from the opposition Movement for Democratic Change has given a bizarre, misogynist speech at an African HIV/AIDS conference in which he proposes that his county’s AIDS health emergency can be solved by mandating that women must be ugly and unbathed, and be subject to genital mutilation.

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