On Partington's "War on Kwani?"

Yesterday’s Nation features an article by Stephen Derwent Partington, “War on Kwani? marks the death of literary engagement and rise of spite.” The article spotlights Kenya’s ‘literary wars,’ and highlights the regular cycle of criticism that some Kenyan academics direct against the journal Kwani? and those associated with it. However, the article does more than that: It can also be read as commentary on inter-generational conflict in contemporary Kenya.

Like many, I have read a good amount of the literary criticism in Kenyan newspapers over the past few years. And, like them, I have noticed that a disproportionate number of the articles consist primarily of academics taking pot shots at people who dare to create, particularly those in the Kwani? camp. Little is constructive about much of this criticism. In fact, as far as I can tell, most of it goes along the lines of: "Unlike us, the younger generation has failed to create anything worth acknowledging."

This is noteworthy in a nation that has preserved political power in the hands of one generation in its 50 years of independence. In every walk of life, older Kenyans cast doubt on the ability of those younger than them to carry on old traditions or build functional new ones. Interestingly, they never seem to realize that, if the younger ones are really as mediocre as they claim, then that reflects on them as mentors: They can't have done a good job teaching and mentoring if, as they claim, there is no talent in the younger generation.

I think it is definitely worth our while to ask ourselves why our elites (cultural, political and otherwise) have such a hard time handing over the baton to those who come after them. Why are they reluctant to nurture and support budding talent? Fortunately for us, Stephen D. Partington has taken it upon himself to attempt to broach this subject.

My favorite excerpts from the article follow:

“How quickly we forget? How quickly we return to valorise the theories of the very colonisers whose culture worked to oppress us many decades ago? And how spitefully we do it, relishing our role as the New Imperialists? The lazy complaints are all the same: our Kwani?-types are ‘young’, they don’t consider literature’s ‘grand themes’, they are ‘urban-not-rural’ — yes, the right-winger, Leavis, loved his organicism — they do not write according to the classic Aristotelian structure of ‘beginning, middle and end’, they are ‘popular’, they fail to submit to the censoriousness of gate-keeping ‘university experts’, they care about ‘minorities’, they are ‘vulgar’, they don’t use ‘pure linguistic forms’, they do not promote ‘traditional morality’.”

“In short, our ‘new moral formalism’ is a new conservative cowardice, an anti-reform return to the snobberies of the past when and where we could as a middle-aged middle-class mix with our own and choose not to see the slums, the young, the poor, women, and all those others whose vulgarity offends us. And while we might, in the best of worlds, hope that our academics might rise above the simplistic, petty awfulness of elitism and go ‘public’ as intellectuals, it is clear that we cannot rely upon them — or, at least, we can no longer rely upon many of our so-called ‘literary intellectuals’ to show the solidarity with us that their forebears did. Instead, we can expect the silence, in effect a turning away, that we saw from them in 2007-2008. They have not only thrown us to the wolves; to them, we are the wolves, the disgusting young who would bite and rip at the mythical glory of the world they believe we should inhabit. But we do not inhabit that world. Yet. And the Kwani?-ites know it.”

Two things stand out to me here. First is the fact that our contemporary elites have adopted the language of our one-time colonial elites. Second is their silence when faced with harsh Kenyan realities that they have surely had a hand in creating or perpetuating. You know what all of this tells me? It tells me that our cultural, political and other elites have two favorite pastimes: criticizing those who came before them, and criticizing those who follow in their footsteps. But they will not even acknowledge their own part in creating the status quo; and it doesn’t seem to occur to them that they should put themselves under the microscope.

If somebody were to ask me what our biggest challenge as Kenyans was, I would say that this was it: the inability of those at the helm to subject themselves to the same level of scrutiny they subject others to. Predictably, most of us follow suit. It is no wonder that we continue to perpetuate the injustices and inequalities that were set in place during the colonial era.

This work is licensed to Rose Kahendi under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

The little things do matter.

Every time I hear the words “Kenya Vision 2030”, the cynic in me bursts into life. Kenya Vision 2030 is a development program envisioned to take the country to middle-income status by the year 2030. The details of the blueprint are lovely to read. Who wouldn’t want to see all the great projects come to fruition? But, the voice in the back of my mind keeps telling me to set the grand images aside and look at the little things.

THE LITTLE THINGS

I think it’s great to dream of being bigger and better, but to turn the dream into reality, one must address the little details. For instance, industrialization and an improved transportation sector (presumably including commuter trains) are highly dependent on a reliable electrical supply. But what reliable electrical supply is there to speak of if, every time it drizzles, neighborhoods experience power blackouts for hours? How can one even start to make improved overall health and healthcare a realistic goal when safe drinking water is not available in our taps? Mind you, many do not even have access to tap water. Instead, they are reliant on boreholes, springs, rivers, and other water sources which may very well be contaminated.

While we’re on the subject, what hope is there for a nation whose various branches of government are not able to coordinate with each other to make a decision as simple as choosing an election date that won’t set students, their parents, and teachers back in significant ways? It is this last point that I want to focus on in today’s blog entry.

An article in today’s edition of the Standard online makes the alarming announcement that the national elections, which are due to take place during the first term of the school year, will cost the Kenyan taxpayer at least KSh15 billion. Rather than holding the elections during the school holidays as has been the norm, the decision makers decided to hold them at the beginning of March. Because schools will be used as polling centers, students will have to pack their bags and return home before the term is through. They will miss hours of coursework, and may not be able to make up for this lost time over the subsequent years. Furthermore, according to Juma Kwayera, the author of the article, “the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) is expected to hire teachers, who will have to withdraw services to be trained in time to handle the polls as returning officers, presiding officers or clerks.”

Now, heed these words carefully: “whenever there is disruption in the education calendar, the country never appreciates the hidden costs that are never receipted such as bus-fare, pocket money and service delivery. According to the Ministry of Education, enrolment in secondary schools stands at 3.6 million students, out of which more than three-quarters are in boarding schools, hence will need contingency money, besides bus-fare to travel back to their homes during elections. Parents with children in primary boarding schools will have to cough up more funds as a result of the interruption by elections.”

The article goes into further detail: “A conservative estimate puts the minimum average each student in secondary school will require at Sh500 for a round-trip ticket. This translates to more than 2.7 million students in secondary school alone incurring over Sh1.5 billion in total while primary school pupils Sh2 billion, which cost is passed to parents.”

We are not a nation of tycoons. We’re talking about out-of-pocket expenses that are not going to be compensated for by any government program. Those most likely to be affected are students who attend public schools and their parents. In other words, Kenyans from most walks of life and at almost all income levels will be affected. Keep in mind that the cost to the nation quoted above does not take into account the loss of productivity/ man hours for parents, students, and teachers alike.

The same article points out that the teachers’ strike late last year, which disrupted the academic calendar, had a noticeable effect on student performance in the national KCPE performance. Primary school students at public schools did not perform as well as they should have in the national exam.  An expert cited in the article, Kenya Institute of Public Policy and Research Analysis CEO, Eric Aligula, asserts optimistically that the effect of the election dates on education is not likely to be major unless it “becomes persistent.” In my opinion, he is a tad too optimistic. Any disruption of this nature is bound to have unforeseen effects, and many of them will only become apparent in the long-term. A ‘little’ problem, such as two weeks of absence due to illness when foundational coursework is being covered, can change a child’s academic trajectory dramatically. How much more damage are the larger-scale disruptions due to the elections likely to cause?

All I can see is the tremendous amount of waste that is sure to result from some terrible decision making at the level of government. And I can’t help thinking that the same kinds of bad decisions are being replicated in different sectors nationwide. Surely, as long as such factors are in play, how likely are we to reach our long-term goals for development? We must first learn to crawl, walk, then run, before we can think of signing up for a marathon.

This work is licensed to Rose Kahendi under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

What way forward for Americans?

Today everybody seems to have an opinion on the Republican loss in the Presidential elections. So I’m going to jump onto the bandwagon: First of all, I don’t think the loss came as a surprise. The Obama campaign worked long and hard, and they had a long-term strategy. They were also largely consistent in maintaining that strategy, even when faced with criticism from pundits on the left. The result: they did their swing-state math just right and were able to get enough support to win the electoral votes in the most crucial states.

The team behind Obama plays politics like a game of chess. Almost every move they make fits into a larger strategy and anticipates the likely Republican responses. And they have studied their quarry pretty well: their predictions are usually right. The mistake that the folks on the Republican side make is to consistently ignore this fact. They have always portrayed Obama, a true centrist if there ever was one, as a liberal on the far left, acting to fulfill some ungodly agenda. So many of the attacks they have directed at his initiatives and positions have been strawman fallacies. In other words, the Republicans have often had to first distort his policies in order to oppose them.  

This strategy would have made sense in a world where the Republican and Democratic parties were drastically different. In the real world, however, all it does is make rubbish of the Republican’s own policies. You see, under Obama, the Democrats have adopted several ideas that were developed by conservative thinktanks or proposed by Republican politicians, and they have made them work. And if all that the Republican Party can do in response is to oppose these ideas, then they are effectively rejecting conservative principles.

As a consequence of their actions, the Republicans have maligned various conservative policies and initiatives and declared them communist or un-American (by virtue of their having been implemented by a Democratic president). So what conservative alternatives exist for them to promote or adopt? None, really: not pragmatic ones, anyway. Obviously, the Republicans can’t reach to the far left for alternatives. Doing so would require them to embrace socialism (which is apparently anathema to them). So in the end, they are left without a definite direction. In name, they are a conservative party with conservative values. In reality, they have somehow managed to separate themselves from compassionate and pragmatic conservatism. They can no longer claim the brand of politics that used to unite the disparate entities within the Republican Party. So a leadership vacuum has arisen within the party. In response, the different voices within the party are clamoring for dominance.

Within the Republican party, you have the Religious Right, the Tea Party, and the Libertarians, just to name a few of the more prominent tendencies. So the Republicans don’t have a unified political agenda. That is precisely why they ended up selecting Romney to represent them. He was really the only sane guy left standing when all was said and done. But, at the same time, they hated the things he stood for as a “Northeastern liberal.” The party had to perform some creative acrobatics in order to embrace him as their presidential candidate.

The phrase “only in America” comes to mind here: Where else in the world would a party go through the long, drawn-out process of selecting a presidential candidate then spend the entire campaign pushing back when he tried to speak positively of his own record (presumably the record that inspired them to select him)? Where else would that presidential candidate select an “authentically conservative” vice-presidential candidate and prevent him from talking about his actual record (the one for which he was chosen)? This was the problem throughout the campaign period. Whenever Romney tried to be honest, he was shot down by the more extremist voices in his party. Whenever he tried to toe the line and sing the accepted conservative tune, he ended up looking like he was willing to buy into whatever was expedient at any given moment. And then there was Ryan- the poor guy. He was supposed to be a conservative genius, a policy wonk, but he was reduced to repeating meaningless platitudes.

And what about the other folks in the party? Well, they worked day and night to recreate a platform around which their people could unite. That was why outrageous statements and legislation surrounding female reproductive health and rape kept on popping up all over the place. Race and religion were also deployed because, when there is nothing else to unite a group of people with opposing agendas, you can always rely on the ethnic clarion call to bring them together. The result of these efforts was to disenchant a large number of potential pro-Republican voters. The party was left with a predominantly older, white, Christian, male base. The funny thing is that many Republicans are walking around in the aftermath of the loss, holding on to the belief that they lost votes because 50% of Americans “want free things.” Honestly, that is the most intellectually lazy conclusion I have ever heard. I understand why the Bill O’Reillys of the world sing that tune. But I can’t help but marvel at the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who have taken it as the gospel truth. It is as if they were on an entirely different planet during the entire campaign process (one during which their party undermined its own candidate).

Of course, the result of all of this is that the Republicans cannot offer a true political critique of many of Obama’s policies. For a genuine critique of the Obama administration, one has to look beyond the dominant two-party system to some of the other parties: The Libertarian Party, the Green Party of the USA, the Socialist Party, and others. These are legitimate American political parties. Some of them even fielded presidential candidates, a number of whom were included on the ballots of various states. But these parties get next to zero mainstream media coverage. So it’s not a surprise that most Americans believe there are only two legitimate lenses through which to view American politics: the Democratic lens, and the Republican lens. This presents a bunch of problems: As the two mainstream parties have tended to shift rightwards over the decades, there has been no dominant party on the left proper to present a balance. So the overzealousness with which the Obama administration has used drones to perform so-called surgical strikes in other nations, for example, has been largely unremarked upon.

Americans have a tendency to live too much in the present moment. For instance, there’s not too much along the lines of long-term thinking going on where the national economy and the environment are concerned. It is widely recognized that the American deficit must be addressed, but the American public does not seem ready to scale down its largest expenditure: its overseas military efforts. I often ask myself when the American nation as a whole will finally realize that it is more important to ensure that its people can afford to meet their basic needs (food, clothing, shelter and healthcare) at home than to dominate brown folks in their own countries. In addition, there is little public dialogue on issues such as climate change and its impact on communities nationwide. The political parties that have actually put these issues on their agendas have been locked out by the media, presumably because they would “steal away” some of the Democratic or Republican votes. Ultimately, it is the American public that has lost from the exclusion of these voices.

I really don’t think the Republican loss is the most relevant news item of the day. The party was bound to lose. They set themselves up to lose by failing to develop a coherent agenda, and they essentially helped to energize voters on the other side by voicing support of misogynist and racist policies and actions. The most relevant issue of the day should be the question of what lies ahead in the long-term. When are we going to start addressing the concerns that have been raised by America’s marginalized parties?

 

This work is licensed to Rose Kahendi under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Entitlement and the presidency

During an interview on a North Carolina radio show yesterday, the interviewer asked Mitt Romney’s son, Tagg, how he felt when he heard “the president of the United States call your dad a liar.”

Tagg’s response was vivid: Jump out of your seat and you want to rush down to the stage and take a swing at him. But you know you can't do that because, well, first because there's a lot of Secret Service between you and him, but also because that's the nature of the process.

He was being honest. It must be unbelievably hard to watch someone you love on the stage taking the figurative punches. Presidential campaigns are brutal and thankless. And, for those who are fortunate enough to win the seat, the ultimate job involves more of the same. To be frank, I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone in their right mind would want to be president of a nation, let alone a powerful nation. I know for a fact that I would not have the capacity to run for such a seat, or to support a loved one through the process.

Power alienates. The poor fellow who becomes head of state is raised onto a pedestal so high that people either expect him or her to be godlike or they demonize him or her. And the demonization is relentless. I’m thinking about all the racist drivel I’ve seen being directed at President Obama, the First Lady, and their family. I’m also thinking about all the attacks that Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton have put up with from the likes of Rush Limbaugh.

So, I do understand when people like Ann Romney or Tagg Romney get frustrated and say something they really shouldn’t say to an interviewer. They’re being human, and their human actions give us a peek at the pain they experience behind the curtains. It is evident from what they tell us that running for president is not all glamor. In fact, if you don't have the right personality type, it can be the greatest punishment imaginable.

At the same time, their words reveal something else to me: “privilege” and “entitlement.” David Sirota has written a piece on the very subject, describing it as an instance of “White privilege.” It’s an interesting piece, but I’m not making quite the same argument he is. To me, the privilege lies in the apparent presumption on the part of the candidate’s family that he has already won the seat. I’m sure there is a case to be made about race playing a part in all of this. But I think other people, like Sirota, are better qualified to make that particular argument than I am.

The idea that a candidate deserves to win a seat and is doing the whole nation a service by running is something I’ve heard more times than I care to remember. Frankly speaking, I think it’s a self-serving statement. It’s the sort of thing I have always expected a politician to say. But I did not actually expect him or her to believe it. And I did not expect his or her family to buy into it either. So you can understand that I was surprised to learn that these people actually start to believe this stuff after a while. And when they start to believe it, they start identifying too much with the coveted seat and thinking that it is theirs. That, my friends, is where the sense of entitlement comes in.

In the real world, people do not run for president so that they can devote their life to service. They run because they are ambitious and very much like the idea of being in power. Their motivations are selfish. Objectively speaking, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just a fact of life. We need leaders, so we must have people self-centered and ambitious enough to want to step into that mantle. By contrast, nuns and monks devote their lives to serving others. Their efforts are directed at diminishing the ego and elevating the common good. This distinction is very important: We speak of winning the presidency, but I have never heard of anybody speak of winning the vow of poverty or the chance to serve in an orphanage or hospice. So we really need to stop pretending that presidential candidates are martyrs for the greatest cause.

Perhaps some presidential candidates and their families have to believe that they deserve the seat and that they are running for the sake of the country. Maybe convincing themselves that these are unshakeable truths helps to compensate for all the psychological trauma and exhaustion that they endure during the race.

Whatever the case, winning the seat is a privilege. It is not a foregone conclusion for any candidate. So it would probably be in the best interest of presidential campaigns to take their candidates and their families through counseling throughout the campaign and afterwards. Running for president takes too much out of the candidate and his or her family: it would be ideal if these people went into the experience with realistic expectations and with the understanding that they could lose, but that life would still go on. Party sycophants are unlikely to give this kind of guidance. So it falls on counselors to play this role.

This work is licensed to Rose Kahendi under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

On the controversy surrounding the image of Michelle Obama

Those of you who are following the news online will notice that there's an debate raging about a picture that depicts a semi-nude Michelle Obama on the cover of a Spanish magazine. You can read about it on the Huffington Post.

As you will notice, there are two issues being addressed. One is the decision of the magazine editors to feature the portrait on the magazine cover. The second is the decision of the original artist, Karine Percheron Daniels, to create the image in the first place.

With respect to the former, I have no idea what the motivation of the magazine editors was in the first place or how the image is related to the featured articles of the issue. So I can't speak authoritatively about it.

With respect to the latter, it is indicated that the picture of Michelle Obama is part of Daniels' "Famous Nudes" series. Other personalities depicted in the series include Queen Elizabeth II, Michael Jackson, Eva Peron, Prince William, his wife Catherine, Che Guevara, and Princess Diana. You can take a look at all of these images on Daniels' FineArt America portfolio.

The thing that strikes me is the fact that many are rushing to label Karine Percheron Daniels a racist for depicting Michelle Obama in the nude. Many of the articles written in this vein mention, as an aside, that the image is part of a larger series of famous personalities in the nude. However, they conveniently avoid further discussion of that series.

Well, I don't want to avoid that series. I think that any genuine discussion of the original artist's intentions should address at length the fact that other powerful men and women of our era are depicted in the nude in her other paintings: and these men and women are not all black. Some of them are Latino/a and some are white.

If creating the image of Michelle Obama makes Daniels a racist, then what does it mean that she portrays Queen Elizabeth in the nude? Is that also a racist act? Perhaps a misogynistic act? What about the depiction of Prince William? It seems to me that fitting the image of Michelle Obama into a larger story about white racism requires one to ignore the context in which that image was produced.

I don't think there's only one legitimate way to respond to art. It is perfectly fine for people to hate a piece of art if it violates their ideals. But, along the same lines, just because this particular image offends a particular group of people, it does not follow that their opinions are the only legitimate ones.

It's actually unusual that I'm writing this piece. I'm not a fan of nude paintings: I've never been interested enough in them to even remember their titles or the identities of the artists who created them. I can certainly see why Americans and particularly African Americans are offended at the depiction of Michelle Obama. From their perspective, it fits into a history of dehumanizing depictions of black people. I can also see why the choices made by the artist in creating that single picture could be interpreted as racist. If I didn't know that the artist had depicted other personalities in the nude, I would probably have thought it was a racist image too. But (and this is what I want to emphasize) I would want to know what the context was before rushing to condemn the artist.

The reason why I sat down to write this piece is because I think there's too much of a tendency to jump to the worst possible interpretation of events in this day and age, even when there is clear evidence challenging our assumptions. I've watched as one controversy or another has made it into the headlines and people have expressed outrage and brushed aside any nuances. I've also read strongly worded opinion pieces that suggest that there's only one way to interpret certain events, and that anyone who dares to suggest otherwise is racist/ sexist/ unpatriotic/ a self-hating member of some ethnicity or another. Frankly, I am tired.

There's a part of me that's wondering how many people realize that their perspectives are not universal perspectives. For instance, even the idea of what constitutes nudity is not set in stone. What people may consider to be evil in one context or sexual in another is simply a fact of every day life in a third. Think about this: in some cultures it is considered immodest to leave one's hair uncovered; in others, it is perfectly decent to wear little more than a wrap and to breastfeed in public. In some contexts, wearing knee-length skirts can almost precipitate a national crisis. In other contexts, for instance in art or in anatomy classes, the human body or form is natural: nothing to blush about. There is something to be said about that diversity of views, whether or not we agree with every single one of them.

This work is licensed to Rose Kahendi under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Turn the TV off

http://nutritionafrica.blogspot.com/2012/08/turn-tv-off.html

I’ve been thinking about the impact that the media has on our self-perception as women, minorities, etc, because it’s something that interests me. Much of what I’ve encountered is negative. For instance, the scarcity of positive black role models in the TV and print media leaves children feeling that there is not much for them to aspire to. As for black females, they take away from the media the idea that dark tones of skin and frizzy hair are to be detested, as are curvy figures.

This is heart-breaking, of course. But I also read something that got me wondering. It was an article about media consumption patterns among different racial and ethnic groups. According to the piece, black children spent significantly more time watching television programming than kids of any other ethnic group. That made me think about the roles we played as consumers, whether active or passive. And I did wonder whether there was something more we could be doing as individuals to make a difference in our children’s lives.

Are we all really as helpless as we make ourselves sound when we talk about the negative effects of the media on our kids? Do our kids have to be plugged in to Hollywood’s version of the world? What would it be like if we stopped being such avid consumers of empty, soulless programming and shallow magazine articles? What if we stopped feeding our children images of materialism, mediocrity and dysfunction?

I realize that many people turn to the TV and other forms of media to keep their kids occupied because they have limited options. Perhaps they’re working two or three jobs to put food on the table and can’t sit down to supervise their kids. Perhaps a sitter is beyond their budget. Perhaps having the kids go outside and play is not an option because the streets are unsafe. They likely recognize that plonking the kids in front of the TV is not the best option, but are trying to make do with what they have.

But is it really true that there are no options or alternatives? I would like to believe that people have some degree of agency, even in very difficult situations. Maybe they can’t reform the media, but they can certainly be more selective about their children’s consumption of it. Kids don’t have to watch or hear everything, even if it has been rated suitable for their age group. That applies to both TV and radio. Video games should also be included in this discussion. While some video games can be remarkably educational, others can be disturbingly realistic in their portrayal and glorification of violence and sexism.

Books are the most ideal form of information and entertainment that come to mind. When I was growing up, electronics and video games were out of reach. Our only consistent way to amuse ourselves, outside of playing or doing our chores, was to read. And that we did with gusto. All the kids I knew, whether poor, middle class, well-off, rural, or urban appreciated a good book. We made a habit of borrowing books from each other and buying second hand books. Brand new books would have been beyond our budgets, and functional libraries were like some rare species that you caught sight of once in a while.

That is why I wonder why it is easy for many Americans to identify books with elitism, and TV with the average guy’s experience. In my experience, books are actually cheaper to acquire in the first place, and to continue to use, while anything electrical or electronic is on the pricier side. Mind you, I’m not talking about heading to expensive bookstores or buying an e-reader. I’m talking about joining a local library, and getting access to thousands of books at no cost to yourself, or buying secondhand books. It amazes me that getting kids to appreciate books over cable TV, electronics, and video games can be a challenge in the American context. In an ideal world, books would be valued more highly, and literacy would have a higher priority than chest-thumping about being the greatest nation in the world.

It must be said, though, that even books have to be vetted. It’s not enough to grant one’s children access to books. One must also know what they are reading. Wherever possible, parents and guardians of impressionable kids have to play a more proactive role in determining what kinds of images they are being exposed to.

This work is licensed to Rose Kahendi under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

On HIV/AIDS, religion, and public health

http://nutritionafrica.blogspot.com/2012/08/on-hivaids-religion-and-public-health.html

Over the years I have lost many to HIV/AIDS: family and friends. I can’t tell you how many, though. I stopped counting a while back. However, I can tell you that, because of the impact of HIV/AIDS on my life, I know what stigma is. I know what it is like to watch people sink into depression, lose hope and die because those who matter most to them have rejected them. 

HIV/AIDS as we have experienced it in the East African context has struck the family as a whole: men and women in their prime and young children have been the typical victims. Our AIDS story has had much to do with heterosexuality. So one can’t simply label HIV/ AIDS a “gay disease” as has tended to happen in the US. Our governments have had to address AIDS as a national crisis because it has stricken the mainstream.

In nations such as the US, where the tendency has been to associate the disease with sexual and ethnic minorities, I get the distinct sense that little mainstream urgency has been attached to the fight against AIDS. There are certainly men, women, and youth who have devoted their lives to fighting this apathy. But, unfortunately, there are also others who tend to view HIV/AIDS as a form of punishment for “breaking God’s laws” on sex and sexuality. Of course, this is not a uniquely American view. I have also encountered it among some people of faith in the East African context.

My interactions with those who have expressed these troubling views have led me to think about just how limited this particular religious approach to human problems is. I’m talking about a specific interpretation of the Christian teachings on sex and sexuality. The idea is that, if everybody limits themselves to following these teachings and only engages in sex within the context of heterosexual marriage then sexually transmitted infections (STIs) such as HIV/AIDS will cease to be a problem. In other words, the only way to curb the spread of HIV/AIDS is to be a “true” Christian.

That is all well and good, except that never in the history of humankind have all members of a given community adhered strictly to its religious teachings: A “true” Christian can get infected with HIV/AIDS even if he or she is firmly heterosexual, married, and faithful. For one, there is such a thing as a cheating spouse. Secondly, infection can be transmitted through rape. Yet another situation that facilitates the spread of infection is transfusion with infected blood and blood products. Yet another is the use of unsterilized medical equipment. The list goes on and on.

Those who persist in seeing HIV/AIDS as a form of divine punishment conveniently forget how closely interconnected we all are. As a result of these interconnections, HIV/AIDS does not discriminate. When you are exposed to the HIV virus, it does not ask whether you are “saved,” pray regularly, give alms to the poor, fast, or obey God’s law. If your defenses are weak, it penetrates them and infects your body whether you are rich or poor, young or old, “innocent” or not, devout or otherwise.

Keeping all of this in mind, how useful is it that a significant number of religious leaders have a simplistic approach to dealing with HIV/AIDS? How useful is it that they condemn it as a sinners’ disease, oppose the use of condoms under all circumstances, and oppose most forms of sex education? Simply put, their actions are not useful. In fact, to the extent that they influence public policy, they end up endangering everybody in the community.

Knowing this, I think that those of us living and working in communities stricken by HIV/AIDS should persist in emphasizing that it is treated by government and health organizations as a public health issue, not a moral issue. From a public health standpoint, we can speak about HIV/AIDS in its complexity. We can also talk about risks, prevention, and treatment. Importantly, we can make an effort to protect everybody.

What is the place of religion in all of this? Well, I honestly think people are entitled to believe whatever their religions teach them. However, I also think their beliefs should be directed towards governing their personal lives and setting moral standards for their religious communities. They should not be imposed on the broader national population as public health policy.

Further reading
"Education, honest dialogue key to halting spread of AIDS," by Chris Carlin and Debra Stanley, 1/17/07, http://articles.southbendtribune.com/2007-01-17/news/26826941_1_hiv-prevention-hiv-testing-new-aids-cases
"HIV and AIDS stigma and discrimination," http://www.avert.org/hiv-aids-stigma.htm 
"Public health approach to combating HIV/AIDS," http://www.searo.who.int/LinkFiles/RC61_12-pa_Item-14.pdf
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