In our own pages, Fr. Michael Czerny, S.J., director of the African Jesuits AIDS Network, has spoken in similar terms about the crisis of AIDS in Africa.
We learn as we go along that AIDS is very complex. H.I.V. is a virus that reduces and destroys the immune system. But it’s also a cultural, familial, communal and spiritual reality. The fight against AIDS has to be carried forward on all those fronts....
Westerners feel very strongly that the condom is the minimal responsible thing to do. But this is to make sexuality into a very individual choice: the exercise of sexuality is not embedded in marriage, much less in the larger cultural context. It comes instead from the idea that I am the sovereign of my behavior and I can do what I want, with whom I want, when I want, as long as I don’t involve children or use violence. Within that range of choices, which is practically infinite, I am also responsible for using a condom....
In Africa, sexual expression is rarely consensual and often coerced. Also—this is very important and why I feel the condom is not the answer—much of the propagation of H.I.V. is older men giving it to younger girls. It’s not boys and girls who “can’t keep their pants on,” though today people like to project that image. It’s what we call sugar daddies, and to a certain extent sugar mommies, adults who are “buying” sex with younger people and spreading H.I.V. When you’re a very poor girl and an older man is horny, and he’ll give you a blouse or money for your cellphone, which you desperately need, what are you going to do?....
AIDS is part and parcel of a whole syndrome of injustices. Let Africa find its rightful place in the world economy, and AIDS will go away. Make international agricultural policy favorable to Africa, for example, and Africa will blossom. AIDS will fade away because people will be able to earn their living and feed themselves properly...[AIDS is] a disease of poverty and of hopelessness, of conflict, of suffering, of all the things that happen because we are countries that cannot produce, cannot export, cannot run ourselves well, are often at war and full of refugees, full of corruption. Africa’s woes are complicating factors when it comes to AIDS....
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