Racist Myths About African Sexuality Persist in AIDS Prevention Efforts

Conventional wisdom insists that habits die hard. Stereotypes die even harder. Ever since journalist/adventurer Henry Stanley Morton's account of Lord Napier's 1868 Ethiopian campaign was published by The New York Herald, Africa has remained, in the minds of Americans, an ungovernable jungle where half-naked pygmies, polygamists and pagans roam around, negotiating their existence in the midst of exotic primitive chaos.

And if you think these are tales of bygone years, the Homo ancestralis thesis, which was propounded as recently as 1987 by John and Pat Caldwell, states that Africans are so distinct and different from Eurasians that they need a separate species classification apart from Homo sapiens, which would be Homo ancestralis -- the ancestral man for whom life is about ancestors, lineage organization, descent, procreation and, by extension, sex.

The notion of Homo ancestralis spun the African sexuality thesis (Caldwell et al., 1989), which treats African culture as a homogenous whole and states that because Africa is fertility-oriented, morality and religion are secondary to sexual relations on the continent. Characterized by a general lack of guilt or moral codes, therefore, sex in Africa, according to these authors, is an activity like working, eating or drinking and is transacted in very much the same matter-of-fact manner as these other activities.

Africa's case has not been helped by the emergence of AIDS, and the insistence of the HIV/AIDS orthodoxy that its primary mode of transmission among Africans is heterosexual sex. To compound an already complex situation, the African green monkey hypothesis also traces the origin of AIDS to Africa. Many spirited efforts have been made to debunk the green monkey theory, but it continues to hang around like a bad smell.

It was therefore inevitable that the historically touted myth of the oversexed Africans would resurface to explain Africa's heterosexual AIDS transmission rate. It was also inevitable that practices such as polygamy, concubinage, widow-inheritance, widow-cleansing, and female circumcision would be taken out of cultural context, held up for new scrutiny and used as a standard for confirming the world's worst fears about Africa.

Against this background, it's no major surprise that AIDS in Africa has been understood and fought along "behavior and behavioral change" lines. Sound bites from HIV/AIDS strategists and commentators confirm this.

"If you ask me why is there more AIDS in Africa and I say because Africans f--- more, what's your reaction?" -- Elizabeth Pisani, epidemiologist, quoted in "Why we are losing the war on AIDS," The Sunday Herald. May 4, 2008.

"AIDS would be brought under control only if Africans restrain their sexual cravings." -- Dr. Yuichi Shiokawa, speaking at the 10th International AIDS Conference, Yokohama. August 1994.

"Let me be very blunt: the heterosexual transmission of AIDS is, in Africa, a function of truly pathological promiscuity. So this is really a violence issue -- not the same violence we deal with in Boston, where teenagers stab and shoot each other, but the violence of African men who are killing themselves, and killing African women and children, with pathological promiscuity." -- The Rev. Eugene Rivers, quoted in "Silence is death," The Boston Review. April/May 1999.

"Sex, love, and disease do not mean the same thing to Africans as they do to West Europeans [because] the notion of guilt doesn't exist in the same way as it does in the Judeo Christian culture of the West." -- Professor Nathan Clumeck of the Universite Libre in Brussels, quoted in Le Monde section of The Manchester Guardian Weekly. Dec. 14, 1993.

"Many men in Africa take their women in a brutal way, so that some heterosexual activity regarded as normal by them would be closer to rape by our standards and therefore be likely to cause vaginal lacerations through which the AIDS virus could gain entry into the bloodstream." -- "Reassuring News About AIDS: A Doctor Tells Why You May Not Be at Risk." Cosmopolitan magazine. January 1988.