Missionary Positions and Other Cultural Hazards
When it comes to reporting about Africa, and particularly AIDS in Africa, there seem to be only a handful of stories in the repertoire. One of them is that they're all savages over there, "tribal," brutal and backward. A variation of this is the one about discrimination against homosexuals. This one would be easy to debunk except that it is, for the most part and unfortunately, true.
A set of characters, about AIDS in Africa and elsewhere, is recycled often: conservative Christians, criminally slow on the uptake. The whole world is supposedly being eaten alive by a virus, and a bunch of ignorant Bible-thumpers are pronouncing eternal judgment on the victims, making the world unsafe for sex, and generally getting in the way of prevention efforts. Not a week goes by without the Pope disrupting the market for condoms, or some repressed Pentecostal trying to "cure" homosexuals of their "disease."
Not that I ever had any sympathy for such piousness; I agree with my father's renaming of Oral Roberts as "Anal" Roberts. Nonetheless, when The New York Times reported this week that the terrible Ugandan legislation proposing the death penalty for all homosexuals had something to do with a recent visit by evangelical Christians from the U.S., I had to wonder if we've been a little unfair to people whose main crime is low intelligence. Apparently, the ultimate criminal penalty was indirectly our idea, as Americans — but Americans both liberal and conservative.
Conservatives will soon be decrying those pointy-headed liberals at the Times for distorting the story, and I, for once, won't be defending the pointy-headed liberals. Because liberals may have been the first ones giving the Ugandans the thumbs-up for the idea that a little selective human sacrifice is good for a society's morale. Death by HIV testing and AZT is just as ceremonial and certain as death by stoning, after all.
Coincidentally, I was looking for a certain Ugandan fashion model the same day the Times article came out. Instead of finding the Ugandan model, I found the "Ugandan model" of sexual abstinence to prevent AIDS. Is the idea that AIDS is sexually transmitted is only a conservative one? It's about the same as Larry Kramer's pious and hysterical warning, minus the consumer product being sold:
A set of characters, about AIDS in Africa and elsewhere, is recycled often: conservative Christians, criminally slow on the uptake. The whole world is supposedly being eaten alive by a virus, and a bunch of ignorant Bible-thumpers are pronouncing eternal judgment on the victims, making the world unsafe for sex, and generally getting in the way of prevention efforts. Not a week goes by without the Pope disrupting the market for condoms, or some repressed Pentecostal trying to "cure" homosexuals of their "disease."
Not that I ever had any sympathy for such piousness; I agree with my father's renaming of Oral Roberts as "Anal" Roberts. Nonetheless, when The New York Times reported this week that the terrible Ugandan legislation proposing the death penalty for all homosexuals had something to do with a recent visit by evangelical Christians from the U.S., I had to wonder if we've been a little unfair to people whose main crime is low intelligence. Apparently, the ultimate criminal penalty was indirectly our idea, as Americans — but Americans both liberal and conservative.
Conservatives will soon be decrying those pointy-headed liberals at the Times for distorting the story, and I, for once, won't be defending the pointy-headed liberals. Because liberals may have been the first ones giving the Ugandans the thumbs-up for the idea that a little selective human sacrifice is good for a society's morale. Death by HIV testing and AZT is just as ceremonial and certain as death by stoning, after all.
Coincidentally, I was looking for a certain Ugandan fashion model the same day the Times article came out. Instead of finding the Ugandan model, I found the "Ugandan model" of sexual abstinence to prevent AIDS. Is the idea that AIDS is sexually transmitted is only a conservative one? It's about the same as Larry Kramer's pious and hysterical warning, minus the consumer product being sold:
And by the way, when are you going to realize that for the rest of your lives, probably for the rest of life on earth, you are never going to be able to have sex with another person without a condom! Never! Every time you even so much as consider this I want you to hear my voice screaming like crazy in your ears. STOP! DON’T! NEVER! NO WAY, JOSE! Canadian scientists now warn that even partners who are both un-infected should practice safe sex. As I understand it, more and more new viruses and mutant viruses and partial viruses that are not understood are floating around. Are you ready for that one?
If the evangelicals can be nailed on anything, it's a rather shallow understanding of their own traditions. They read the Old Testament like a modern morality play. It takes a lot of effort to explain away how women are bought and sold like cattle in this story, or why one character was seriously preparing to sacrifice his own son. Nor does it bother them that Leviticus, which warns about lying down with one's own kind — knowing another guy or gal "in the Biblical sense" — also includes direct orders to keep a Kosher kitchen. Armed with a Biblical concordance, they just connect that story to another story and yet another. All is explained, in a sophistry surprisingly relevant to the moral dilemmas of people living in trailer parks in rural America.
Like people who carry rabbits' feet for good luck without knowing where the idea came from, that is, in what context it once-upon-a-time seemed to work and for what, they seem to have forgotten the context in which these traditions actually make sense.
Biblical stories make sense in the context of an admitted, conscious, intentionally sacrificial, society. People in the Holy Land sacrificed things and animals and people and even, you guessed it, Jesus. This, by the way, was supposed to be the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. Evangelicals shout this loudly, but they don't seem to practice it. They're always "carrying the cross" and asking for "sacrifice" from their flock of, well, sheep. It turns out that moving past sacrificial rites doesn't suit a lot of people who still have childhood traumas to process. Children who were forced to sit in dark closets until they repent, then read ten Bible verses about war and pestilence aloud and memorize them as punishment, and who are later given big guilt trips about engaging the most-fun parts of their own bodies, don't usually become well-adjusted adults. They tend to process things through primitive means, among them, sacrifice. Victims include gays and other people not in the mainstream.
Now, honestly, the folks down at Westboro Baptist aren't sacrificing lambs and goats or their own children at the altar. Instead, they keep talking the sacrificial talk, disconnected from its origins and infused with Jesus-loves-yous.
What the gay-bashing missionaries to Africa didn't realize was that the people they were talking to weren't quite so disconnected. Kampala is a modern city with plumbing and Internet access, but the countryside has some seriously impoverished, rural areas living very, might we say, "close to the land." And, dare we say, practiced in the art of primitive morality. When somebody threatens the cohesiveness of the group or breaks out of common distinctions such as traditional gender behavior, this is no small matter to them. Rene Girard pointed out in his 1972 classic, Violence and the Sacred, that total, random, chaotic violence could break out. It's nothing personal, but homosexuals are a sign of that horrible possibility and must be exiled or sacrificed. For a gay man in a Ugandan village, it's get out or die. This is not to excuse the practice, but to say that ending homophobia in primitive societies is more complicated than showing up with some "tolerance" literature.
Nothing personal. The Times story even quotes a Muslim cab driver as saying he wishes he could save Ugandan homosexuals from this hysteria. The reporter seems not to understand the point he has just made. Homophobia is predominantly a group problem there, not a prejudice of individuals as it is in America.
It's touching to hear three dumbfounded churchy Americans protest that they meant no harm and that "some of the nicest people I have ever met are gay people." "I feel duped," said one who just didn't know the Ugandans were contemplating the death penalty for being gay. They seem to have been wandering Uganda with a cultural map of Tennessee. "Curing" homosexuality in this country is a fairly harmless and exercise compared to what it looks like in Uganda. In Indiana, the patient can change his or her mind and move back to San Francisco. In Uganda, said a Zambian doing research there, the missionaries "underestimated" the vengeance of Africans when someone talks about a group "trying to destroy their children and their families." It's looking more and more like the Ugandan conversion process for homosexuals will be compulsory education and treatment with a terminal end if you fail the final exam, or simply a quick death, forgoing the "education" part.
No matter how bad the Americans look, though, the story always tells us that Africans are ignorant and Americans are right, or at least well meaning. Because the American evangelicals profess themselves horrified by the Ugandan legislation. Even the minister who met with the legislators themselves said he didn't know what they were up to. Honestly. And I believe him. He's really that blind.
This story is so often told about right-wing Christians that you could snooze through the whole play and still know how it ends and what the moral of it is. Right-wing Christianity, bad; liberal Christianity and atheism, good. Sexual rules, bad; any-which-way-with-condoms, good.
Are we done beating up on Christian evangelicals yet? Cue the liberal "human rights activists." Just as blindly, they swoop in and help everybody make nice — cultural taboos and hazards be damned. Their cousins the AIDS missionaries will be right behind them, handing out the condoms and the speeches about "safe sex." They are not to be confused with the evangelicals who were just there, doing just that, of course.
Did anyone even think to ask, Why does anyone need to educate people about abstinence in villages that cure homosexuality with rape and murder? Doesn't it follow that such a population is just as eager to rein in its heterosexuals? Is Uganda really having too much fun sexually, or is it just a general romp in the minds of Americans both liberal and conservative?
Aren't we just projecting our own stuff here?
The stories we tell about Africa are really stories about ourselves. Is it Uganda or the United States that indulges in weird sexual practices, lets its heterosexuals run wild, oppresses women sexually, and entertains strange taboos about sex and disease? Which continent, Africa or North America, puts its faith in mysterious substances called pharmaceuticals to cure just about every known ailment?
Just look at our story about South Africa, about 1,800 miles away from Uganda — about the distance between New York and Havana. Yet all of Africa is one country to us, with a handful of tribes acting in fairly similar ways. It's a large continent with a diversity of cultures probably seen nowhere else in the world. But Americans tell the same boring, black-and-white story about both places.
To hear Americans talk about South Africa, its history must be an epic TV miniseries starring Nelson Mandela as Frederic Douglass, Bishop Desmond Tutu as Martin Luther King Jr., and Stephen Biko as Malcolm X. Never mind that it bears more resemblance to the American genocide against its native "Indians" -- that is, if our native tribes were good at disemboweling white settlers in war and dismembering arms and legs in tribal ceremonies. Or that the white Afrikaners have acted as much like a "tribe" as any people in the world. An acknowledgement of the country's multicultural mix is taboo in the primary-colors telling of the story. No Indians, Malaysians or Chinese need audition for parts. And British South Africans are given a free pass for being generally "against" apartheid, even though they have practiced their own kind of brutal segregation against the unfortunate Afrikaners and others.
The story is shaped by the tellers of it. Americans tell this tale, and the rest of the world must listen. The rumor lately is that that's about to change, with countries including South Africa and China positioned to replace the United States as superpowers. While I love my country, I have to admit it's a change I welcome if these nations are inclined to tell the truth about Africa and sex and AIDS. Maybe someday, stripped of our neocolonial hubris, we Americans will even tell the truth about ourselves.
