REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Another African Epidemic
The continent's despots declare war on homosexuals.
Add another item to the list of Africa's woes: state-sanctioned gay bashing. Last week, Namibian President Sam Nujoma ordered his police to "arrest, deport and imprison" homosexuals. This follows on recent comments by other African leaders that homosexuals are a "scourge" (Kenya's Daniel arap Moi), and "lower than pigs and dogs" (Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe). Similar vitriol from Zambia and especially Uganda. "I have told the [police] to look for homosexuals, lock them up and charge them," said Yoweri Museveni, the newly re-elected leader of that country.
The subtext of these attacks is sub-Saharan Africa's skyrocketing HIV-infection rates. In South Africa, an estimated one in eight adults is HIV-positive; in Namibia, Zimbabwe and Zambia the figure is closer to one in five. By contrast, the HIV infection rate among adults in the U.S. was never more than about 0.3%, and most of the infected now have access to life-prolonging medication. For Africa's failed leaders, blaming a national catastrophe on a minority is certainly convenient.
It is also totally misleading. While HIV infection in the West is in fact a largely homosexual phenomenon (notwithstanding politically correct scaremongering that heterosexuals were equally at risk), in Africa the reverse holds. Why? First, because the prevalence of other venereal diseases in the population tends to increase the risk of HIV infection. And second, because prostitution, through which the disease is quickly disseminated, remains disturbingly commonplace in Africa.
In other words, AIDS in Africa is not a "gay disease," and targeting homosexuals for attack, aside from being odious in itself, only distracts attention from the real sources of the problem. These are manifold, but perhaps chief among them is the frightful poverty into which African leaders have led their people through decades of corruption and incompetence.
Mr. Mugabe--recently welcomed by Europe's ever-cynical heads of state--is perhaps the worst offender, having gone to war against Zimbabwe's law-abiding and productive white farmers. But Mr. Nujoma isn't far behind; among other things, he maintains a force of 2,000 soldiers at war in the Congo, despite a declining economy at home. Recently, too, the government of this erstwhile national liberator has been making threatening noises against independent media and other nongovernmental organizations.
One would wish that some day African leaders will eschew the politics of scapegoating, be it against their former colonizers, multinational corporations, nonblack minorities, and so on. Alas, this latest attack on homosexuals--along with the current demonization of pharmaceutical corporations--gives little reason to hope.
Meanwhile, perhaps this latest episode of African gay bashing will serve as notice to campus "multiculturalists" and other fashionable purveyors of anti-Western cliches that the enemy, after all, is not us.
