Read: Why Obama pushed for gay rights in Kenya

“The devil in the name of foreign agents comes and introduces an alternative sex,” one of the bill's supporters, Vincent Kidaha, told me in 2015. “Foreigners are the people who are nurturing our very locals to this act.” The belief that homosexuality is foreign is one reason why Kenyan LGBTQ-rights activists cringed when Barack Obama publicly chastised Kenya for its poor record on LGBTQ equality during a 2015 visit to the country. The West’s most powerful leader, a man of African heritage no less, defending homosexuality in Africa was seen by many as further proof of a global gay agenda. In the days following Obama’s visit, one of Kenya’s leading newspapers was rife with editorials denouncing the president’s attempt to interfere with African traditions.

The struggle to acknowledge and reject colonial-era edicts over things such as sexuality continues, the Kenyan writer Mukoma Wa Ngugi said last year while speaking at an African literature festival in Berlin. “The British empire in one sense ended, but its language is now the language of the world,” he said. That’s a sentiment I’ve heard LGBTQ-rights defenders echo and reframe to criticize not just colonial language, but the morals espoused through it. “We have to undo the notion of what culture is,” as well as “what it means to be African,” Kari Mugo, the operations manager at the National Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission of Kenya, told me.

Such calls to reexamine laws and traditions that were first imposed by the British have been accompanied by a new willingness on the part of Britain itself to acknowledge its part in criminalizing homosexuality around the world. In April, under pressure by U.K. LGBTQ-rights groups, British Prime Minister Theresa May apologized for Britain’s role in introducing anti-homosexuality laws to its former colonies and urged leaders to reform what she called the “outdated” laws. Some smaller former British territories such as Belize have done so, with South Africa going so far as to legalize gay marriage in 2006 and Malta following suit in 2017.

For many LGBTQ Africans I’ve met, the movement to decolonize African relationships carries an emotional weight at least as strong as the desire to reject English as a colonial language or to demand the return of African artifacts—looted during colonial times—from museums throughout the Western world. Akin to reclaiming their physical heritage, to strike down laws against homosexuality would be to reimagine what life for LGBTQ people in Kenya, Uganda, and other former British colonies might have been like without a century or more of British-imposed homophobia.

The argument is catching on: Prominent academics and human-rights advocates have begun drawing attention to the colonial history of these laws in recent months. Last year, the South African lawyer and human-rights professor Wendy Isaak cited the colonial origin of Ghana’s anti-homosexuality penal codes in a report for Human Rights Watch. And the professors of human rights Jill Cottrell Ghai and Yash Pal Ghai took the argument to the Kenyan public, writing in the Nairobi daily newspaper The Star that implementing the British colonial-era penal code involves “prying into the most private aspect of the person’s life: What they do in their own bedroom.”