Burkina Faso’s military government issued a law criminalizing homosexuality on July 10. “Henceforth homosexuality and associated practices will be punished by the law,” said Justice Minister Edasso Rodrigue Bayalawas.
As CBS News notes, this “makes the West African nation the latest of the continent’s 54 countries to follow a trend in banning same-sex relations. There are now only 21 African nations that do not explicitly prohibit same-sex relations. Uganda imposed the continent’s most severe laws in May.”
On the other hand, the high court in Namibia, a country in southwest Africa, recently struck down laws against gay sex. Gay sex was legalized in several African countries in recent years, such as Angola in 2021, Gabon in 2020, and in Mozambique and the Seychelles. In 2019, Botswana’s High Court struck down the criminalization of gay sex. In southeast Asia, Thailand recently recognized same-sex marriage.
Burkina Faso is a poor, landlocked country in Africa’s Sahel region, where rainfall is often barely enough to support agriculture. Many of its people migrate to less impoverished countries like Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) to find employment. Terrorist groups with ties to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara control up to 40 percent of Burkina Faso’s territory. Thousands of villagers have been slaughtered by these terrorists.
Yet, Burkina Faso somehow manages to be the largest producer of cotton in Africa, as well as producing much of the region’s strawberry crop:
In the suburbs of Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou, lucrative strawberry farming is supplanting traditional crops like cabbage and lettuce and has become a top export to neighboring countries….In their January to April season, strawberries “take the place of other crops,” Yiwendenda Tiemtore, a farmer in the working-class Boulmiougou district on the city outskirts, told AFP.
Tiemtore has been busy harvesting the red fruit since dawn, before temperatures rise to 40 degrees Celsius.
He harvests about 25 to 30 kilograms of Burkina’s popular strawberry varieties, “selva” and “camarosa,” every three days, watering his plots from wells.
Cultivating strawberries, which thrive on ample sunlight and water, might come as a surprise in this semi-arid West African country.
But Burkina Faso leads the region’s strawberry production, growing about 2,000 tons a year.
