http://www.nybooks.com/articles/179631.
In 2003, President George W. Bush asked Congress for $15 billion to fight AIDS in developing countries. During the 1990s, HIV spread rapidly, especially in Africa, where some 250 people were dying from AIDS every hour. The US had been accused of not doing enough to fight the epidemic, and when the bill passed, many conscience-stricken Americans, moved by images in the press of dying women and children, praised the administration. But some were not sure. Much of the money will go to church-affiliated charities or faith-based organizations, including some evangelical Christian groups that have very little experience with AIDS.
While Catholic and Protestant churches have been running AIDS programs since the 1980s, few evangelical Christian groups have done so. Indeed, as the deadly virus spread around the world, many evangelical Christians were silent or worse. Jerry Falwell called AIDS God's judgment on promiscuity, and former Senator Jesse Helms, a longtime congressional ally of the evangelicals, told The New York Times in 1995 that AIDS funding should be reduced because homosexuals contract the disease through their "deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct." When lawmakers moved to amend the Americans with Disabilities Act to protect people with HIV from discrimination, some evangelical Christians lobbied against them. In a 2001 poll, only 7 percent of American evangelicals said they would contribute to a Christian organization that helped AIDS orphans.<1>
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Uganda is in the throes of a born-again Christian revival. With the arrival of the first missionaries in the nineteenth century, nearly all Ugandans became either Catholic or Protestant, but during the past ten years, thousands—perhaps millions—of them have been swept out of their dusty, austere churches into bright new amphitheaters that even on weekdays are filled with music and prayer and swaying worshipers speaking in tongues. Born-again Christianity is catching on throughout sub-Saharan Africa, from the slums of South Africa to the windswept plains of Maasailand, but Uganda's Christian traditions, and its position bordering heavily Muslim Sudan, Kenya, and Tanzania, have made it a magnet for American evangelical missionaries, who have poured huge sums into the country during the past ten years. In the major towns, "crusades"—massive religious gatherings—are held nearly every week, often attended by thousands of people.
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Last fall, Ssempa and his congregation prayed fervently for a Bush victory in the US presidential elec-tion. He reminded me of the African bureaucrats who played the US and the Soviet Union off each other dur-ing the cold war. This time, it was a battle over moral rather than political ideology, but just as in the cold war, a rich country was using foreign aid to fight its battles in developing countries. Now that there is finally a huge amount of money for AIDS programs in Africa, a scramble for it now appears to be underway in Uganda, and faith-based groups like Ssempa's are going to considerable lengths to get rid of the organiza-tions that have been receiving US government contracts for years, especially those that promote condoms.<8> This could have serious consequences, because condoms have helped to control Uganda's epidemic. HIV infection rates fell most rapidly dur-ing the early 1990s, mainly because people had fewer casual partners.<9> However, since 1995, the proportion of men with multiple partners has increased sharply. Condom use increased at the same time, and this must be why HIV infection rates have remained low.
But condom programs in Uganda are now threatened. Under pressure from both the Ugandan and US governments, billboards advertising condoms, for years a common sight throughout the country, were taken down in December 2004. Radio ads with such slogans as "LifeGuard condoms! Ribbed for extra pleasure!" were to be replaced with messages from the cardinal of Uganda and the archbishop about the importance of abstinence and faithfulness within marriage. In November 2004, Engabu, a highly popular Ugandan condom brand, was pulled from the shelves because of alleged problems with its manufacture. At the same time, the government now insists that all condoms entering the country be subjected to additional quality control tests. However, Uganda does not have the equipment to carry out such tests, and this has resulted in a shortage of condoms.
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The South African anthropologist Suzanne Leclerc-Madlala attributes the revival of interest in virginity to an increasing sense among elders, especially men, that they are losing control of young people and women. All around they see worsening economic and social conditions and the horror of AIDS, and because they are only human, they blame this state of affairs on the loosening morals of increasingly educated, urbanized women and young people, rather than examining how their own behavior also contributes to these problems.<16>
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Sexuality truly does belong to the world of magic and unreason. It is impossible to plan and control it totally. We were made that way. If sex were an entirely rational process, the species would probably have died out long ago.<17> But the delirious, illogical nature of sex makes setting a realistic HIV prevention policy very difficult. Cheerful, sexy condom ads that fail to address the real dangers of AIDS may promote a fatal carelessness; but an exclusive emphasis on abstinence until marriage may well lead to an even more dangerous hysterical recidivism. The genius of the Zero Grazing campaign was that it recognized both the universal power of sexuality and the specific sexual culture of this part of Africa, and it gave people advice they could realistically follow.
—March 31, 2005
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