Botswana Just Erased Its Sodomy Law. Now a Couple Is Asking the Court for the Right to Marry

In a year when so much LGBTQ+ news has been about rights being taken away, Botswana keeps quietly moving the other direction — and this summer it could move further.

In March 2026, the government of Botswana published a notice formally amending the Penal Code to delete the provisions on “unnatural offences,” the colonial-era language under which same-sex intimacy had carried sentences of up to seven years’ imprisonment. The repeal landed more than six years after the country’s High Court first struck the ban down as unconstitutional in June 2019, a ruling unanimously upheld by the Court of Appeal in 2021. The 2026 step was, in legal terms, housekeeping — bringing the statute book into line with what the courts had already decided — but housekeeping of a meaningful kind. The discriminatory text is no longer in the law at all. UNAIDS publicly applauded the move.

Decriminalization, though, is a floor, not a ceiling. And a couple in Gaborone is now asking the courts to build higher.

The case

Bonolo Selelo and Tsholofelo Kumile, a couple since 2023, tried to register their marriage with Botswana’s Department of Civil and National Registration in April 2025. Officials turned them away, citing the Marriage Act, which does not permit two people of the same sex to marry. Rather than accept that as the end of the matter, Selelo and Kumile took the Marriage Act itself to the High Court, arguing that it is unconstitutional.

Their argument is grounded less in symbolism than in the practical machinery of a shared life. As they have framed it through the proceedings, the law denies them equal protection and locks them out of the rights and responsibilities that marriage carries with it — economic security, inheritance, and the ability to make medical decisions for one another in an emergency. These are not abstractions. They are the specific, ordinary protections that a state extends to married couples and withholds from couples it refuses to recognize.

The case has been set down for July 14 and 15, 2026, before a full bench of the High Court. A full bench — multiple judges rather than one — signals that the court regards the constitutional question as serious and consequential.

The opposition

The challenge will not go unanswered. A coalition of conservative religious organizations — including the Dingwetsi Association of Botswana, the Evangelical Fellowship of Botswana, and the Botswana House of Prayer and Transformation — has filed a joint application to oppose the couple in court. Their involvement is a reminder that the path Botswana is on is contested at home, and that decriminalization has not produced a national consensus on what comes next.

That contest is worth naming honestly. The 2019 and 2021 court victories did not arrive on a wave of popular enthusiasm; they arrived because judges read the constitution’s equality and dignity guarantees and followed them where they led. The Marriage Act case asks the courts to do the same thing again, on a harder question, in the face of organized religious opposition. Courts have been willing to be ahead of public opinion in Botswana before. Whether they will be again is genuinely an open question — which is exactly why July matters.

The regional picture

Botswana’s trajectory stands out in a region where the news has mostly run the other way. Across West Africa, the past two years have brought a wave of new criminalization: Burkina Faso criminalized same-sex intimacy in 2025, and Senegal moved to sharply increase penalties. Against that backdrop, a southern African country not only striking a sodomy law but clearing it off the books entirely — and then seeing its courts asked to consider marriage — is a counter-current worth paying attention to.

It is also a useful corrective to a flat story about “Africa and LGBTQ+ rights.” The continent is not one place, and it is not moving in one direction. South Africa has had constitutional marriage equality since 2006. Botswana, its neighbor, decriminalized through its courts and is now being asked to go further. Namibia’s courts have been weighing recognition questions of their own. The picture is uneven, locally driven, and — in the southern African cases especially — frequently led by litigants and judges rather than legislatures.

What to watch

Nothing is decided. Selelo and Kumile could lose; the High Court could decline to read the Marriage Act as broadly as they ask. But the case is significant regardless of outcome, because it reframes what the Botswana conversation is about. The question on the table in July is no longer whether queer people can exist without being criminals. That fight is, formally, over. The question now is whether the state owes same-sex couples the same recognition it owes everyone else.

That is the question marriage-equality movements everywhere eventually arrive at. Botswana is arriving at it on its own terms, through its own courts, on its own timeline. We will be watching on July 14.