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According to Africa’s leaders and many average Africans on the streets (sorry”€”dirt roads), all this gay-rights agitating represents yet another wave of condescending cultural imperialism from meddlesome Western busybodies who don’t know when to quit and leave Africans the hell alone. They claim that anti-homosexuality is a grand, noble, ancient African tradition and that if they want to hate homos, goddamnit, those pink-skinned Western imperialist pigs ain’t gonna stop ‘em!

This presents a worrisome quandary for the earnest white Western progressive who is congenitally incapable of blaming Africans for anything”€”especially a mortal sin such as homophobia”€”and must therefore find a way to blame every white person throughout history for the fact that modern Africans are exceptionally mean toward and intolerant of rump-wranglers and pearl-divers.

Many from this camp claim that “homophobia” didn’t exist in Africa until whitey touched his gnarled, hairy toes onto the continent. They say that ancient cave paintings depict man-on-man anal sex in what is now Zimbabwe, that male African warriors would sodomize teenage boys to celebrate a battle victory, that Namibians have a special word for anally receptive male homosexuals that translates to “he who is approached from behind,” and that the Watusi are world-famous for swinging both ways.

They claim that there is almost no evidence of written laws forbidding homosexuality in sub-Saharan Africa until Europeans conquered the continent. What they fail to note is that there is also almost no evidence of written languages or of law books there until Europeans conquered sub-Saharan Africa, either. It’s a minor point, but still…

Directly contradicting Africa’s leaders”€”because obviously white Western progressives know more about African history and Africa’s problems than Africa’s leaders do”€”they claim that the West did not import homosexuality to Africa, it imported homophobia. They blame this latest continent-wide wave of gay-bashing on “European colonialism” and “western colonization” and “the Christian stigmatization of homosexuality” and the idea that Africans are “still battling the demons of imperialism.”

These are the same jokers who blamed colonialism for the fact that African nations seemed to get much worse the minute the colonists vamoosed. Don’t you understand that not only is colonialism bad”€”it’s so bad that it gets worse once it stops? By the same nutty reasoning, once Africans booted out the colonists and reasserted themselves, they grew even more anti-gay than they were when they were under the white man’s thumb”€”because the evacuated invisible nonexistent homophobic banished white man still wielded unbearable power over them. For them, the default setting is the white man’s fault. And they’re not even dimly aware that to blame whites for everything is about the purest expression of white supremacist thinking possible.

But it seems like the Africans, God bless ‘em, are tired of being lectured by white Western progressives who seek not to truly help them, but only to ensnare them in their own neurotic web of guilt-laden psychodrama. Your average African peasant living on a diet of five peanuts and two dried lentils a week simply doesn’t have time for such trifles. When you’re frantically searching for a sip of water so you don’t dry up into human jerky and then get eaten by fellow villagers, gay rights suddenly don’t seem so urgent.