An interesting article describing how abstinence and a one-partner sex emphasis has curtailed AIDS in Uganda. Other African countries using the western emphasis on condoms have not been as successful. The African value system relates to abstinence according to the writer. An evangelical Christian moral ethos seems to work better.
The vast majority of Africans hold a worldview of causation very different from our own. Most Africans believe that any major occurrence, good or bad, has two causes. The first might be called physical: for instance, that a retrovirus causes AIDS by destroying the cells of the immune system. The second is a spiritual, less tangible cause, but is perceived to be no less real.
A natural corollary of viewing the spirit-world as the source of human suffering is the belief that man is (or thinks he is) under the thumb of God. If a person genuinely believes this, he will work to please the spirit-world through his actions. Morality has a practical emanation in this sense, because the goodness of a man's actions is tied to perceived material benefits. Evangelical Christianity encourages Africans to view their problems in this spiritual-moral frame of reference. The rhetorical pattern that emerges from African churches today is a lamentation, but not self-pitying, asking, "How can we change to better please God?"
The public health lobby answers this question by saying, essentially, "Start using condoms." This is the narrow-minded response, much more so than the call for behavioral change. As long as this attitude persists, Western policy will remain discordant with the realm of cause and effect within which Africans are operating. Christianity, as well as Islam, is a huge force whose day-to-day impact on African lives cannot be ignored. Any successful HIV/AIDS strategy will have to enlist churches, their moral authority and their enormous memberships.
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