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This book addresses two of the most important questions in modern African history: the causes of rapid population growth, and the origins of the AIDS pandemic. It examines three societies on the Uganda–Tanzania border whose distinctive histories shed new light on both of these phenomena. This was the region where HIV in Africa first became a mass rural epidemic, and also where HIV infection rates first began to decline significantly. The book argues that only by analysing the long history of changes in sexual behaviour and attitudes can the shape of Africa's regional epidemics be fully understood. It traces the emergence of the sexual culture which permitted HIV to spread so quickly during the late 1970s and 1980s back to the middle decades of the twentieth century, a period when new patterns of socialization and sexual networking became established. The case studies examined in this book also provide new insights into the relationship between economic and social development and trends in fertility and mortality during the twentieth century. These three societies experienced the onset of rapid demographic growth at different moments and for different reasons, but in each case study area the key mechanisms appear to have been a decline in child mortality, a shortening of birth intervals, and a marked decline in primary and secondary infertility.

Religious ideas about health, sexuality, and the body have had great influence on the perceptions of HIV/AIDS in the African continent. At the same time, AIDS as a disease and as a realm of international aid interventions is heavily impacting on socio-religious formations and developments in Africa. Religion and AIDS are transforming African public and private domains together. Yet, scant attention is paid to the ways in which this intertwined engagement between the domains of religion and the domains of AIDS prevention, care, and treatment in African societies becomes increasingly linked to an outside world. This book is unique in drawing attention to the transnationalisation of religion and AIDS in Africa and addresses the question why so much of the transnational religious engagement with the disease has seemed to serve conservative values, such as disapproval of sex before marriage and condemnation of homosexuals. Introducing concepts from the study of transnationalism into the study of religion and AIDS in Africa, the book offers a new set of conceptual tools for the analysis of how religious ideologies and moralities have been shaping the experience of AIDS in Africa. The disciplinary scope for studying this phenomenon is wide-ranging as it speaks to anthropological, sociological, developmental, historical, and religious studies, and global health perspectives on these issues. The book includes extensive examples from all over Africa. It shows how African public domains are being shaped by forces that are transnational, steered by forceful religious and moral agendas, and often with substantial international resources behind them. These are, so the book argues, the strings attached to the present-day transnational, religious involvement with AIDS in Africa.