LILONGWE, MALAWI — Nine days after President Obama announced his support for marriage equality, the new president of the Republic of Malawi called for an end to the persecution of gays and lesbians in her country and the other nations of Africa.

“Indecency and unnatural acts laws shall be repealed,” Joyce Banda said during her first State-of-the-Nation address on May 22. Banda, 62, became the first female president of the southeast African country on April 7 following the sudden death of President Bingu wa Mutharika. She told lawmakers that the nation of 15 million must normalize its international relations with “our traditional development partners who were uncomfortable with our bad laws.”

In 2010, courts in Malawi convicted two gay men of “unnatural acts” and “gross indecency”—crimes under Malawi law—and sentenced them each to 14 years of hard labor in prison. The late President Bingu wa Mutharika, said that the men had “committed a crime against our culture, against our religion, and against our laws.”

British Prime Minister David Cameron has threatened to reduce or eliminate foreign aid money to nations that violate the civil rights of their LGBT citizens. President John Atta Mills of Ghana denounced Cameron and perceived western interference in the morality of a sovereign African state. “I, as president, will never initiate or support any attempt to legalize homosexuality in Ghana,” said Mills last summer.

Banda, who is finishing Mutharika’s term, which ends in 2014, has been joined in her call for an end to injustice by former President of Botswana Festus Mogae, who supported universal HIV medication for Africans in need of it, and Kenneth Kaunda, a former President of Zambia.

Kaunda, who led Zambia from 1964 to 1991, said, “We are not only condemning African leaders who are criminalizing same-sex marriage, but we are urging them to start recognizing these people, for the sake of HIV and AIDS.”