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Help Africa's Gay Men;
You'll Save Their Women Too
19 Nov 2007- Uganda- Terrible, the
news that came out this week as we marked World Aids Day. Things are very bad in
Africa, and the poorer parts of the world. Some folks even declared that Africa,
where about 70 per cent of the 36 million people worldwide infected with
HIV/Aids live, is losing the war against the disease. Aids killed a record
number of people in the third world and Eastern Europe this year, but
Sub-Saharan Africa remains the worst affected region with about 3.2 million new
infections and 2.3 million deaths.
When one thinks of it, there is nothing new
in those grim numbers. Nearly everything has been tried to deal with Aids in
Africa, but it seems not to have the dramatic effect it should in order to
reverse the carnage. And the reasons for the failure are, again, not new - bad
and corrupt government, wars, lousy infrastructure, illiteracy, and
retrogressive cultural practices. It seems that until we rise above
concentrating on the conventional causes for the massive destruction by Aids in
Africa, people will continue to drop off like flies. One place to begin is a
study done by the global organisation, the Population Council. It has not been
talked about much because it is about a taboo subject in Africa - homosexuality.
Ask the liberal don, Dr Sylvia Tamale of
the Makerere University Faculty of Law. She has many ruffled feathers flying in
the air presently after she argued, sensibly, that prostitution should be
decriminalised. But the present storm she has caused with advocating a more
enlightened attitude toward sex workers is nothing compared to what happened
early this year when she said it was wrong to treat homosexuals like criminals.
The priests, sheikhs, politicians, and other "guardians of the people" threw
everything, including the kitchen sink, at Dr Tamale.
That in itself was not surprising. The
disturbing thing was that when the anti-gay camp really went into high and
shrill gear, even many champions of freedom of expression were too scared to
publicly defend Dr Tamale's right to hold her opinions - even if they disagreed
with them.
Against that background, it is easy to
appreciate why, perhaps, the Population Council study was not given attention
around Africa. The study found that Senegal, while being the only country in
Africa that has had better success than Uganda rolling back the march of Aids,
has no meaningful programmes to deal with gays.
In Uganda too, there has never been a
single Aids awareness message targeted at gay people. This is because most
people consider it an "ungodly" sexual orientation.
The Population Council study sought to find
out the effect of this. It discovered that there are far more men in Senegal who
are gay, than was publicly acknowledged. However, the killer finding was that
very many men who are gay, are otherwise "happily" married to women.
Because gay men meet discretely, their
wives would not know it and are therefore content that they are "safe" - because
we are conditioned to detect a man who is cheating with a woman, or a woman with
man, not a man who is cheating on his wife with another man.
Now, because gay men are a particularly
high HIV-risk group, and they are totally ignored by Aids education campaigns,
if we imagine that there are many such African men then the infections which we
are blind to and doing nothing to prevent, are wiping out the gains made in the
heterosexual sector. The point here is that if African societies and their
governments were bolder and more open-minded about homosexuality, and invested
resources in dealing with Aids among gays, then we would have made more
progress.
I share the view that, at the end of the
day, in sexual behaviour, just like in other social activity like drinking and
eating, Africa is not much different than the West. So while we are hysterically
hostile to gay people, the only thing that has achieved is to drive them
underground. In reality, we could have nearly as many gay people in Africa, as
in the West, who knows?
As someone who is familiar with the Senegal
study of gays and Aids told me: "The people who will benefit most from having
Aids awareness for gay men in Africa, could well be their wives and
girlfriends".
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