How pinkwashing is used to slander anti-colonial revolutions from Palestine to Burkina Faso

Oct. 15 marks the 38th anniversary of the assassination of Thomas Sankara, a Pan-Africanist and Marxist revolutionary, who seized state power in a 1983 popular coup. Sankara was president of Burkina Faso until his killing in 1987 by Western-backed forces. Sankara’s staunch anti-imperialist leadership radically transformed the nation, which threw off the shackles of French domination during that period. For more, see Thomas Sankara, “Africa’s Che Guevara.”

Additionally, October is the celebration of LGBTQ+ History Month, a history long defined by the blood and solidarity of all working-class LGBTQ+ people worldwide in their liberation struggle against capitalist, imperialist and neo-colonialist oppression in the forms of homophobia and transphobia.

On Sept. 1, 2025, Burkina Faso’s Legislative Assembly passed an updated family amendment code that included declaring “homosexual behavior as a criminal offense, punishable by two to five years in prison, fines, and possibly deportation for foreign nationals.” Almost immediately after this announcement, major Western capitalist media outlets used this to further justify their imperialist propaganda against Burkina Faso and President Ibrahim Traoré, whom they have already demonized as an “anti-gay dictator.” 

The audacity of the West to pretend like they care about LGBTQ+ rights in Burkina Faso, while actively committing and supporting multiple live-streamed genocides in Palestine, Sudan, the Congo and elsewhere, is nothing short of baffling. 

Western nations posture as the “safest places in the world for LGBTQ+ people.” But in the United States, the ruling class is backing a fascist political movement aimed at denying gender-affirming health care to trans and non-binary people, nullifying passports and other documents that affirm one’s gender, and allowing for the escalation of anti-trans and anti-queer violence to continue unchecked, and perhaps worst of all, falsely accusing “mentally ill” trans people as the primary cause of mass shootings. 

Pinkwashing: a tool in imperialism’s belt

Historically, pinkwashing has been nothing more than a means of manufacturing consent for pushing illegal sanctions and regime change in countries that either have overthrown Western imperialist influence or are in the process of doing so. The imperialists’ goal is to prevent them from achieving sovereignty and self-determination. The tactics to achieve this have always been the same:

• Dehumanize the people, culture and society through capitalist media propaganda.
• Destabilize the economic, social, and political climate through sanctions and military control.
• Implement regime change by any means necessary to strengthen Western hegemony.

Burkina Faso now falls into that same category of nations that have Washington terrified.

Why does Washington hate Traore?

In a 2022 popular coup, Captain Ibrahim Traore seized governance from the French-installed puppet leader, Paul-Henri Damiba. He has since expelled all French and U.S. colonizers from the land and has re-nationalized its natural resources for the benefit of the Burkinabe people, rather than the predatory World Bank and IMF. 

Alongside the leaders of Mali and Niger, Traoré has joined the Alliance of Sahel States, a critical step towards achieving sovereignty and self-determination. Its formation and continued cooperation are reason enough for Washington to be unfriendly. 

Some have referred to Traoré as the “second coming of Sankara,” and for many reasons. He has already survived numerous Western-backed assassination attempts, as well as defended the nation against Western-backed ISIS and Al Qaeda terrorists. 

For more on the revolutionary government’s accomplishments, see “From Sankara to Traore: Burkina Faso’s anti-imperialist legacy.”

Colonial Europe plants the seeds of gender oppression and bigotry

This particular anti-LBGTQ+ policy didn’t just appear out of thin air.  

France, the colonial power in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Senegal, directly imposed its legal and cultural systems across West Africa, exporting the Napoleonic Code that criminalized “acts against nature.” This colonial legislation actively supplanted often more fluid pre-colonial social norms and planted the deep-seated seeds of institutionalized homophobia. The profound irony, therefore, is that the very anti-LGBTQ+ laws now used by Western powers to pinkwash and slander anti-imperialist governments like Traoré’s were themselves a Western colonial import.

International precedent

The pinkwashing campaign against Burkina Faso is reminiscent of the slanderous anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda the Zionist entity has used against Palestine to justify its illegal occupation. “Israel” has boasted for decades that it is the “bastion of democracy and LGBTQ+ rights in the Middle East,” while it has perpetuated ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people, and also has treated its own LGBTQ+ population miserably.

Or take the example of Cuba. Even 10 years after overthrowing the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship in 1959, the Cuban Revolution had to contend with patriarchal values. In 1971, a congress on education in Havana called for the removal of homosexuals from the field of education.

Western capitalist media used this policy in Cuba to try to discredit the revolution. Some anti-imperialist activists denounced Cuba, thinking that Cuba’s seizing state power should result in an instantaneous social transformation. 

At that time, the U.S. had widespread discriminatory policies against homosexuals in the workplace, including schools. In 1953, President Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which banned homosexuals from working for the federal government or any of its private contractors. In 1978, Oklahoma and Arkansas passed laws banning gay and lesbian teachers from working in public schools.

Fast forward to 2022, when the Cuban Revolution, through a massive grassroots organizing and mobilization effort, achieved the Code of Families —the world’s most inclusive revolutionary code. Among its many leaps forward, the Code guarantees the right of all people to form a family without discrimination, legalizes same-sex marriage, and allows such couples to adopt children.

It is the duty and responsibility of queer anti-imperialist revolutionaries in the belly of the beast to defend all movements that are actively breaking the chains of Western imperialism when they are branded as homophobic by the same countries that scapegoat trans people at the first chance they get. 

To paraphrase what revolutionary trans communist Leslie Feinberg asserted regarding Cuba, the current problems that exist in Burkina Faso do not invalidate the anti-colonial revolution.

May we see a Burkina Faso that continues to build upon the revolution first undertaken by Thomas Sankara, and that lives to struggle internally on the principles of gender and sexual liberation, the same way that Cuban workers of all sexual and gender orientations have struggled against these contradictions post-Revolution, as they continue to build socialism.