AIDS and Culture: An ambivalent correlation?

Birungi Charles

Diocesan HIV/AIDS Focal Point

Hoima Catholic Diocese

Uganda

Although Uganda is one of the earliest AIDS success stories and is widely recognized for lowering HIV incidence, traditional cultural practices such as widow inheritance, polygamy, wife sharing and wife replacement, blood brotherhood, treatment for barrenness and circumcision rituals create and environment conducive for the spread of HIV. Other cultural factors that perpetuate HIV infection include inadequate family life education and life skills training and communication, because parents and other adults often avoid talking to young people about sex

However, to date communities have begun to recognize the reality of HIV/AIDS and have revised some of their cultural practices that increase the chance of infection. Never the less, criminalisation and stigmatization of certain sexual practices like commercial sex work, can contribute to person’s vulnerability to HIV and their inability to access services and information. A number of cultural practices such as widow inheritance, wife sharing, and spontaneous sex during rituals has slowly faded away. For instance, the widow inheritance practice is changing so that widows are inherited with no sexual obligations and female genital mutilation cutting are changing to the use of knives provided by those undergoing the procedure.

Finally, highly held cultural values such as abstinence (primary and secondary), faithfulness, virginity and the sacredness of life, among others, are at play to prevent further spread of the HIV/AIDS epidemic while at the same time mitigating the effects of the epidemic.