Abstract
Jenny Trinitapoli and Alexander Weinreb,
Religion and AIDS in Africa
, Oxford University Press: New York, 2012; 272 pp.: 9780195335941, £18.99/$29.95 (hbk)
‘It ain’t necessarily so’, sang George and Ira Gershwin. The phrase could also be the surprising sub-title for Trinitapoli and Weinreb’s book Religion and AIDS in Africa. This locks horns with a range of shibboleths held by the developed world about the causes and reality of HIV infection on the African continent: that work to prevent and mitigate AIDS is impeded by the dark forces of religious conservatism; that Africans are the helpless victims of their plight; that if only Africa could access the progressive resources of scientific rationalism, its problems could more readily be solved. The work challenges such mantras through the refreshing strategy of an extensive piece of empirical research. Through face-to-face interviews, use of ethnographic interviews and engagement with respected national demographic surveys, the authors make a strong case that the story of religion and AIDS in Africa is considerably more subtle than many headline writers and development professionals would allow. As with any such study, its findings would certainly be capable of generating bare-knuckle fighting among a room full of epidemiologists. But as a case for a different perspective, the work is impressive.
The book argues that AIDS in Africa is less a medical than a religious issue. It proposes that while this is hard to accept for minds schooled in enlightenment thought, the reality of religious commitment changes everything about how AIDS is interpreted and experienced by people in Africa. While Western minds are likely to see AIDS as a primarily medical issue, for Africans it engenders a range of discourses including lament, meaning, human responsiveness and comfort. Similarly, for Westerners who have been schooled that only a religious extremist would advocate a lifestyle built around abstinence or being faithful, condoms are the obvious response to the infection. In contrast, for most Africans, condoms are unenthusiastically accepted as a pragmatic response to human fallibility. In Africa, the transmission of information about HIV and the interpretation of the epidemic and personal illness have occurred within a specific theological and cultural framework.
The book engages with a host of other issues, finding that differences of denomination or creed affect infection less than personal religiosity, the setting in which people live, and the characteristics of their congregations. Similarly, the stance of local faith leaders is of far more importance to attitudes and practice than denominational pronouncements. The book reviews too how faith has driven the development of local prevention strategies (such as the avoidance of alcohol), perspectives on stigma and care of those affected by the disease. It examines also how the experience of AIDS has changed the landscape of religious belief in Africa itself.
Trinitapoli and Weinreb challenge much that is holy writ for modern, Western, secular minds. For those with an interest in development or medicine, it is fascinating, and perhaps infuriating. For the theologian, the challenge of the work is to ask, ‘If so much of what we think we know of a virus is so culturally driven, what else might be too?’