Promiscuity in Africa
Is Sexual Indiscrimination the Reason for the AIDS Pandemic?
The stereotype of promiscuous Africans continues to rear its head and undermine constructive solutions to the AIDS pandemic.
In Children of AIDS, author Emma Guest touches on the role of sexual behavior in the spread of AIDS in Africa:
“The epidemic spreads rapidly in a population when lots of heterosexual people have lots of risky sex. This is what happened in Africa. It’s a sensitive subject. People are defensive about sex and morality. Do Africans have more partners than people from other parts of the world?”
Although Guest does move on to discuss the social and economic milieu which shapes certain sexual patterns in Africa (e.g. civil unrest, families separated through economic necessity, gender inequality, and extreme poverty), her hint that Africans may be more promiscuous than others needs to be explored and put to rest.
Africans, although a culturally and ethnically diverse group of people, have long been painted with the same brush by Westerners. The charge of being hypersexual has dogged the African continent and is now used to covertly blame Africa for the AIDS pandemic it struggles against. But when compared to North Americans, are Africans really the more promiscuous group? Guest, herself, cites a UNAIDS report which reports that in rural Kenya, women on average have three premarital partners and men, nine partners before marriage. Three and nine? Sounds like an average Sex and the City episode.
A study by Dr. Finer, indicates that the vast majority of Americans have had premarital sex. By age 20, 75% of those surveyed had engaged in premarital sex and for those 44 years of age, the statistic jumps to 95%.With the average age of marriage increasing in Americans, these statistics could indicate that the number of partners before marriage is also on the rise. Another researcher, Dr. Glass, looked at twenty-five studies and estimated that 25% of married American women and 44% of married American men have had extramarital intercourse. With marriage no longer the last bastion of monogamy for Americans and premarital sex all but a given, should not the scourge that is AIDS be decimating North American society, much like is happening in Africa? The fact that it is not, should tell us something.
Americans, for the most part, are not being economically or socially coerced into their sexual behaviors. The majority of American women do not have sex, because they have children at home to feed. American men, do not have sex with random women, because economic necessity or civil strife are separating them from their wives and families for the better part of the year. Most American women do not have to face violence or social rejection if they ask their husbands to use condoms. And for most Americans, condoms are a drugstore away. Not a clinic only reachable by miles on foot.
AIDS has not hit Africa, because its people are more promiscuous. The death grip that AIDS has on Africa is due to poverty, violence, and inequality, much of it remnants from a history of colonial oppression and apartheid. It is much more palatable for the rest of the world to blame Africa for its current state, but the responsibility, both ethically and causally, is global.
