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4 w Slim Disease and the Science of Silence I have so far emphasized how scholarship that claimed to be scienti fic was in many cases scarcely more than self-serving prejudice. Bad or sloppy science in colonial and apartheid Africa thus often amply merited popular mistrust , particularly when the results were deployed for invidious ends. Anthropology and psychology, notably, were commonly used to argue for maintaining or expanding privileges for whites within colonial systems, while biomedical science was used to justify the racial segregation of neighborhoods and cities, leaving a lasting imprint on Africa’s urban infrastructure. Biomedical research involving human subjects, to be generous, was not always conducted ethically under the prevailing conditions.1 This history is highly pertinent to understanding popular responses to HIV/AIDS in the present. Indeed, a striking aspect of the HIV/AIDS pandemic is the ability of people to deny scientific evidence of its existence and to rationalize not changing behavior in the face of what objectively looks like a dire threat. This ability existed from the onset of the disease among highly educated gay men in big urban centers in the West, and remains a persistent problem worldwide. However, the denial of AIDS in various forms has emerged as a particularly disturbing theme in the recent history of Africa south of the Sahara , where the sheer numbers and rippling calamitous impacts of illness are so huge. A proliferation of folk explanations and “cures,” and of charlatans , pseudoscientists, faith healers, witch finders, conspiracists, and other opportunists , has arisen, offering to fill in the explanatory gaps left by science. Notwithstanding that science has made huge strides in the decades of research since the outbreak began, that biomedical interventions such as antiretro100 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. viral therapy now have directly and almost immediately observable health benefits, and that rigorous biomedical research and guidance are now universally accepted by African governments as crucial to fighting the disease, often profound misunderstandings, ignorance, distrust, and cynicism toward science continue. Such attitudes are not confined to the poorly educated fringes but have been displayed at the highest levels of state. A case in point was when the deputy president and former head of the National AIDS Council in one of the most heavily infected counties in the world testified under oath in April 2006 that he had knowingly had unprotected sex with an HIV-positive woman. Jacob Zuma of South Africa went on to explain how he took a shower afterward to mitigate the risk. His minister of health’s first public response to this admission was to castigate not Zuma but the media for its coverage of the issue.2 Ignorance or obtuseness on such a scale is a real threat to efforts to contain HIV/AIDS, and indeed, Zuma subsequently apologized for the harm he may have done to public education. But Zuma’s and others’ startling views nonetheless raise the question of whether prejudices and blind spots inherited from colonial-era science have percolated into scientific enquiry and public discourse in the postcolonial period. We can pursue that question by interrogating the early scientific literature on the transmission of HIV among Africans. It is a literature that has been closely scrutinized before and challenged for insidious racist assumptions. Gisselquist and colleagues (2003), notably, found scientists to have been overhasty in ruling out unhygienic needles as significant in the African epidemic, in part due to strong prior assumptions about African promiscuity. Tellingly, however, they did not consider whether that same rush to orthodoxy happened in the case of msm or “hidden bisexuality.” Yet even a casual eye must note how rapidly orthodoxy was established and how cursory was the research in this regard. Less than two years and a handful of questionable empirical studies passed between the first tentative acknowledgment that an AIDS-like disease was present in Africa to definitive statements that homosexual transmission did not merit investigation in any of the forty plus countries in question. The literature clearly warrants another closer look. sexuality and health in colonial africa The sexual health of Africans was a major concern to colonial regimes and Christian missionaries across Africa from the late nineteenth century. The unchecked spread of sexually transmitted infections, above all syphilis, was a humanitarian...

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