Death in Africa

WHEN the history of the global AIDS pandemic is written, Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, who acted boldly and succes-sfully early on to fight the virus in his nation, will go down as one of its heroes. Uganda’s HIV-infection rate has declined more dramatically than that of any other country in Africa, or elsewhere. It does not demean Museveni’s achievement to point out that he benefited from one critical stroke of luck: He did not have Western experts on hand to tell him what to do.

Left to his own devices, Museveni used common sense. Realizing that sexual behavior had everything to do with the spread of HIV, he invited Christian and Muslim clergymen to be part of his prevention campaign. He saw that Ugandan communities, at the local level, had already figured out the disease’s basic epidemiology (that it was spread via sexual behavior), and were responding accordingly. The president mobilized community gr0oups—the most important of which were religious—behind a national AIDS-prevention effort, and exhorted them to preach even more forthrightly to Ugandans about the need to abstain from premarital sex and be faithful to their partners.

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Rod Dreher

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WHEN the history of the global AIDS pandemic is written, Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, who acted boldly and succes-sfully early on to fight the virus in his nation, will go down as one of its heroes. Uganda’s HIV-infection rate has declined more dramatically than that of any other country in Africa, or elsewhere. It does not demean Museveni’s achievement to point out that he benefited from one critical stroke of luck: He did not have Western experts on hand to tell him what to do.

Left to his own devices, Museveni used common sense. Realizing that sexual behavior had everything to do with the spread of HIV, he invited Christian and Muslim clergymen to be part of his prevention campaign. He saw that Ugandan communities, at the local level, had already figured out the disease’s basic epidemiology (that it was spread via sexual behavior), and were responding accordingly. The president mobilized community gr0oups—the most important of which were religious—behind a national AIDS-prevention effort, and exhorted them to preach even more forthrightly to Ugandans about the need to abstain from premarital sex and be faithful to their partners.