Sugary excerpt from Steven Epstein’s review of Helen Epstein’s book on Aids and Africa, The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight against Aids:
Perhaps the most frightening stories that Epstein tells about the impact of outsiders concern the practices of the current administration in the US. President George W. Bush has expanded the funding for AIDS prevention in Africa, while promoting abstinence and fidelity. Yet this emphasis has little basis in scientific data. In Uganda, for example, Epstein reports that during the years when the national HIV rate fell by about 70 per cent, the teen pregnancy rate remained essentially unchanged – suggesting that abstinence had little to do with the remarkable reduction in new infections. What such programmes do support, however, is the promotion of God’s work, as understood by Bush’s conservative Christian backers. “AIDS has created an evangelism opportunity for the body of Christ unlike any in history”, according to Ken Isaacs, a spokesperson for the Christian charity Samaritan’s Purse. And while US law supposedly stands in the way of using Federal funds for evangelizing, Epstein reports that “every abstinence event I attended involved much praying and discussion of Jesus”. Sadly, it is precisely in Uganda, Epstein’s success story, where the tide appears to have turned in recent years, and where Epstein now encounters condom burnings in the name of Jesus. Reversing this alarming trend is now among the most crucial steps in supporting the work of Africans who struggle to solve the wrenching problem of AIDS.
I may have an anti-religious bias, but I believe that religion, insofar as it reinforces local beliefs about sex, women, and marriage is lethal in Africa. It encourages people who are suffering and who have no chance to get cured and who are the most exposed to Aids to believe in the unseen and that Aids is solely about sin and evil. In African countries, religion is truly the opiate of the masses because it keeps the people from revolting by pacifying them with the belief that paradise isn’t on earth and that all of the ills that are plaguing them are happening because they are unable to keep themselves pure and to follow God’s sacred rules. The most disturbing thing is that the West that is evangelizing Africa and thus, encouraging dangerous beliefs because it is a fertile terrain. Africans are easy targets, as the poor in the West because they are looking for anything that will make them believe that what is stupidly considered intrinsically African, such as poverty and naivety, is closer to Godliness. Abstinence is dangerous and kills in the African context because it demonizes Aids and its victims who are ostracized and because it encourages the dangerous notion that sex and especially female virginity (for after all a man can profess to be a virgin while a woman’s virginity can be proven with a certain part of her body) are sacred.
