http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17963Shortly after I arrived, I paid a visit to Martin Ssempa, the pastor who burned the condoms at Makerere. He is an authority on abstinence education in Africa and has given presentations at USAID and led the prayer at Mrs. Museveni's March of Virgins. Ssempa runs a church and sponsors a Billy Graham–style sex- and alcohol-free abstinence rally every Saturday night on Makerere's campus. In his sermons, he condemns homosexuality, pornography, condoms, Islam, Catholics, certain kinds of rock music, and women's rights activists, who he says promote lesbianism, abortion, and the worship of female goddesses.<7> He told me that Satan worshipers hold meetings under Lake Victoria, where they are promised riches in exchange for human blood, which they collect by staging car accidents and kidnappings. In his headquarters, just down the hill from Makerere, there is a special room for exorcisms.
Ssempa is stocky and bald, with a broad avuncular smile. He wears colorful Hawaiian-style shirts and wire glasses. Although born in Uganda, he spent years in the US and his Ugandan accent has a warm American twang. We talked about Satan, homosexuals, pornography, and other sins, and he asked me whether I had any idea where he could obtain $4 million to buy land for his church. Our meeting was interrupted by numerous phone calls. As I listened and took notes, he shouted in English and Luganda. There had been some sort of crisis. Population Services International—or PSI—a secular organization that had been distributing condoms in Uganda for years, had recently received US government funding to carry out an abstinence program. PSI had used the money to produce a new comic book in which the main characters, a teenage boy and girl, flirt with each other, make out on a couch at her house, and then decide to abstain from sex. In one of the frames, they walk by a condom billboard on the street.
"Look at this!" Ssempa yelled, pointing at the drawing of the condom billboard. "It's horrible. You can't promote condoms and abstinence at the same time!" It would only confuse young people, he said, and send the message that it was really OK to be promiscuous.
"They won't get away with it. I have spoken to the First Lady's office. We need to ensure that George W. Bush's money gets into the right hands," he told me, "Those who are doing abstinence-ONLY, as determined by the legislation."
Last fall, Ssempa and his congregation prayed fervently for a Bush victory in the US presidential elec-tion. He reminded me of the African bureaucrats who played the US and the Soviet Union off each other during the cold war. This time, it was a battle over moral rather than political ideology, but just as in the cold war, a rich country was using foreign aid to fight its battles in developing countries. Now that there is finally a huge amount of money for AIDS programs in Africa, a scramble for it now appears to be underway in Uganda, and faith-based groups like Ssempa's are going to considerable lengths to get rid of the organiza-tions that have been receiving US government contracts for years, especially those that promote condoms.<8> This could have serious consequences, because condoms have helped to control Uganda's epidemic. HIV infection rates fell most rapidly during the early 1990s, mainly because people had fewer casual partners.<9> However, since 1995, the proportion of men with multiple partners has increased sharply. Condom use increased at the same time, and this must be why HIV infection rates have remained low.
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