‘If You Cannot Control Yourself’

In Malawi, as elsewhere in southern Africa, faith-based organisations (FBOs) have been integrated in the official response to HIV/AIDS. This new role, and the funding that accompanies it, has professionalised their traditional care activities around AIDS patients, widows and orphans, and it has also put them in charge of HIV prevention. As HIV preventers, they are asked to bridge epistemic differences between conflicting notions of sexuality and morality by reconciling public health messages, Christian teachings and local cosmologies. This becomes challenging when it comes to the question of sexuality education, specifically the promotion of abstinence, and condom use. Many FBO leaders’ response to this challenge is nuanced and defies stereotypes, as they try to balance their concern for young people, the demands of donors and the moral imperatives of their faith.

Global Moralities, Local Responses

Kampala is just one place where the AIDS pandemic has generated a plethora of contradictory codes for the sexual behaviour of young people, influenced by a range of transnational actors. Yet amidst the discursive complexities and possibilities, it remains a considerable concern for many to present as a ‘good’, ‘respectable’ person, signalling recourse to local, enduring notions of what constitutes honourable behaviour in Ganda society. Drawing on ethnographic data from a group of Pentecostal university students, this chapter explores the implications of the reification of moral character for the sexual behaviour of young born-again Christians. The critical importance of secrecy and discretion around sexual behaviour is revealed. Based on this evidence, I argue against the analytical dangers of assuming a direct relationship between what Pentecostal Christians might say about their sexual behaviour and their actual sexual behaviour. Please suggest 5–10 keywords which can be used for describing the content of the chapter. The keywords should appear in the abstract if possible. They should not be too generalised. Single words are preferred, but two- or three-word specialist phrases are acceptable. Keywords may be taken from the chapter title as long as they also appear in the abstract.

Introduction

The AIDS pandemic has given rise to transnational connections through which ideas and resources in relation to HIV/AIDS flow between Western and African organisations, as well as between organisations on the African continent. This book argues that religious and faith-based organisations in Africa engage in these transnational connections, which have underlying, scripted, hidden, or rather explicit moral codes. In other words, there are strings attached. The Introduction outlines key strands of transnational theory and interrelations between religion, sexuality, and AIDS in Africa. It shows how matters of sexual morality have been at the centre of conservative political agendas and a central concern in religious and transnational public health interventions. It argues that this linkage between conservatism and a dominant trajectory in the flows of transnational resources, ideas, attitudes and expertise is deeply problematic, since it corroborates stereotyped ideas of what religion is doing in the context of AIDS and sexuality, while ignoring counter-movements among both Christian and Muslim organisations aiming to find other ways of approaching the moral dilemmas posed by HIV/AIDS. Moreover, this linkage raises the question of what exactly conservatism is in an African context.

The Mode of Transmission That Dare Not Speak Its Name: Islam, AIDS and the Public Secret of Homosexuality in Northern Nigeria

This chapter addresses the secrecy surrounding homosexuality in Northern Nigeria and its implications for HIV transmission and prevention. Masu harka (‘men who have sex with men’) enjoy considerable latitude to pursue same-sex relationships given male privilege and Islamic norms of gender segregation. However they nearly always marry women and keep knowledge of their homosexuality hidden. Rights-based responses to AIDS, predicated on public admissions of risk-specific identity, have failed to yield initiatives that address the sexual health of masu harka in this context. Institutional inaction, sexual secrecy, and heightened bio-behavioural risks have resulted in HIV burden among masu harka that is much greater than among the general population. Because masu harka are sexually well integrated into the broader society, they contribute disproportionately, if unwittingly, to Northern Nigeria’s AIDS epidemic. This underscores the need for HIV interventions that specifically address male-to-male sexual transmission while recognising the difficulties such initiatives would face.

Let’s Talk About Sex

The chapter constitutes a critical analysis of how the theme of sexuality is addressed within the framework of a ‘theology of compassion’ put forward by the South African organisation Positive Muslims. The organisation’s explicit aim with this theology is to provide an ideological underpinning to HIV/AIDS activism in order to combat both the spread of the disease and the stigmatisation of those affected. The chapter argues that the specific features of the ‘theology of compassion’, and the manner in which sexuality is approached, cannot be fully understood if it is seen merely as a local African ‘faith-based’ response to HIV/AIDS. A set of factors of a transnational character, outlined and discussed in the text, influence and shape it. Of particular relevance are the connections between Positive Muslims and the contemporary hermeneutical transnational network of Progressive Islam.

‘I Don’t Want to Hear’

In recent years confessional technologies have become an important means of confronting the HIV/AIDS pandemic. These include ‘coming out’ with HIV positivity, and providing public testimony about sickness and the transformative effects of antiretroviral medication. In South Africa, the urban-based Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) has effectively deployed speech as a means of overcoming pathos. Drawing upon ongoing fieldwork in Bushbuckridge, I point to various forms of resistance against the imported cosmopolitan practice of confession, and show how silence is frequently a more prominent response to the pandemic. Residents of Bushbuckridge have refrained from undergoing testing for HIV antibodies and hardly ever speak about their condition in public domains. I argue that silence was not merely a means of avoiding stigma, but also reflected a fear of hearing potentially dangerous and deadly words. In local knowledge, pronouncements that one is ‘HIV-positive’ could crystallise sickness, invoke negative emotions associated with pending death, and thereby worsen suffering.

Condoms, Pills and Professional Identity

Ethnographic research with different Catholic HIV/AIDS projects in Uganda revealed a remarkable contrast between HIV prevention and HIV counselling with regard to the condom question. Whereas HIV prevention facilitators usually followed the official Catholic policy and discouraged condom use, HIV counsellors most often encouraged their clients to use condoms. Taking this contrast as a starting point, this chapter analyses the position and practices of HIV counsellors in Catholic HIV/AIDS projects in Uganda. It focuses on the way counsellors negotiate and transform counselling techniques and notions of appropriate sexuality in the context of ARV treatment, and how these negotiations are connected to both transnational dynamics and local moral discourses. The chapter illustrates how the local professional identity of HIV counsellors and the transnational relations of the ART scale-up project appear to structure the counsellors’ approach to condom use much more than the official policy of the Catholic Church.

Sponsored Sexuality, Aids and Tough Choices

ABC (Abstinence, Faithfulness and (perhaps) Condom) is the brand paradigm and practice on HIV risk avoidance being macro-managed by foreign funding agencies. The solution to the African AIDS epidemic is the ‘fidelity fix’ imperatives promoting pre-marriage sexual abstinence and marital monogamy. The anti-sex-condom crusade ignores gender inequality, poverty and power – the structural drives of the epidemic – and discusses abstinence, fidelity and sexual networks without historical and cultural context. Condom marginalisation downplays the public health responsibility of protecting self and others from infection. The social, political and economic hardships exacerbated by the intractable problems of ignorance, poverty and disease make people vulnerable to the dictates of the rescuers promoting solutions. Negotiating ways around foreign-imposed sexual virtue has happened since colonial contact. Ugandans demanding the reinstating of pre-2003 safer sex education and the condom option are silenced, while the support of local Christian fundamentalist advocates is buttressed with economic incentives.

Epilogue

The chapters in this book demonstrate how transnational connections in Africa often appear as a source of ambiguity in formations that otherwise are ideologically perceived as bounded, autonomous entities. The experience of the transnational is often fraught with sentiments, ranging from fear to fascination, from anxiety to hope and aspiration. Given this dynamic of both anxiety about and eagerness for engaging in transnational relations, the Epilogue argues that there is a socially felt need among religious groups in many African societies for developing a transnational competence, especially in the sensitive field of HIV/AIDS, in order to successfully manage engagement with transnational relations and connections. This is grounded in the experience that, on the one hand, transnational connections have indeed allowed local people, organisations and institutions to make big steps forward in using religious linkages in the fight against AIDS and in changing notions of sexuality. Yet, on the other hand, while these connections are often being celebrated locally, the Epilogue argues that the enormous strains transnational relations can create for the local communities and organisations to live up to the expectations of external partners, donors and policies, should not be overlooked.

Contested Sexualities and Shared Concerns

This chapter analyses how contested understandings of sexuality and sex education for young people are put into practice in the transnational social field of development. It does so by focusing on the Educaids network, a transnational network of Dutch and East African faith-based organisations (FBOs) focused on the prevention of AIDS through education. This case study shows that the contestations over sexuality, and the strategies employed to overcome these contestations, are based on conflicting power claims as well as shared concerns. It is argued that a narrow focus on the colliding liberal and conservative views on sexuality in the field of development fails to contribute to a better understanding of the complex nature of transnational linkages between FBOs, in particular when it concerns sexuality and the prevention of AIDS.