The Final Cure for AIDS
Human ingenuity has no bounds. We have no lack of imagination, none at all. We clasp to our bosoms explanations which to the rational, the educated, those imbued with even a modicum of common sense is surpassed by a hysterical belief in the supernatural to overcome all our woes. We transgress the bounds of our own frail humanity in our search for solutions to events which overtake our core beliefs and settle on the expeditious in the faint hope our problems will thus be dissolved.In South Africa the belief prevails that sex with a child virgin - rape of a child - will "cure" AIDS. So that already-imperilled children are stalked and victimized, their lives ruined. There are educated people within the community, those who have assumed the mantle of political advisers to the people who advance their own opinions, that the AIDS epidemic results from a deadly virus circulated by white evil-doers who still seek ascendancy in that dark continent.
Those same countries who plead with the wealthy west, itself struggling to contain the HIV and AIDS epidemics cursing their own countries, will do nothing to help themselves. Social/cultural values - directly inimical to the health and well-being of women and children in these population - accustomed to looking aside as males stride here and there seeking ever more sexual conquests spread the virus and are not condemned.
A half-hearted effort to inform people of practical ways in which they can protect themselves, including the use of prophylactics is mounted, but ignorance prevails to the extent that a leading politician, a candidate for his country's highest position, is still voted into office enthusiastically despite his admission that he himself practised the same negligent sex and forced himself on a trusting and unwilling sex partner.
And now we have Papua New Guineau resorting to the horrendously expedient victimization of women as witches whose craft is responsible for a surge of AIDS cases there. Ancient beliefs in the cult of black magic, sorcery and the efficacy of evil curses have been resurrected with women and occasionally men and children being subjected to torture and death by hanging or by being thrown from great heights.
Villagers in remote mountain areas have returned to ancestral beliefs, turning away from faith in modern medicine as their health services attempt to cope with a growing AIDS crisis. The growing prevalence of AIDS is blamed on malign spirits invoked by witches; not on sexual promiscuity and a refusal to use condoms.
"We ran after them and we chopped their heads off with an axe and a bush knife", said a 27-year-old farmer in Eastern Highlands province. "I felt sorry for them but they were witches, they deserved to die. If they were still alive, they could hurt people with their magic. We buried the bodies, but then the police found out and started digging them up.""We're seeing a big rise in witchcraft cases. We hear of a killing almost every week," according to Herman Spingler, a German Lutheran pastor who heads the Melanesian Institute, a cultural study centre in Goroka. "They take the law into their own hands and torture people to make them 'confess'. They drag women on ropes behind vehicles, burn them with hot wire, chop off hands, fingers. People have been buried alive."
"The villagers believe they have to kill the 'witches', otherwise the whole clan is at risk from black magic," said Jack Urame, 38, a member of the Dom tribe who has researched sorcery killings for the Melanesian Institute. "What is disturbing is that children are witnessing these things - the belief in sorcery and witchcraft is being passed on to the next generation."
We'll find a cure for AIDS eventually. Unfortunately, there is no cure in sight for human stupidity.
Labels: Human Fallibility
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, February 10, 2007
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